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The Real Guide to Colleges and Universities.What does it mean to be deferred? What the Waitlist or a Deferral Means for Your College AcceptanceBy Peterson's Staff on Tuesday, May 10, 2016Waitlisted. Application deferred. You put in your college application and that's the response you got! Even after you spent hours filling out forms and laboring over the perfect essay!What does a deferral mean, and is it a good thing or a bad thing?Deferral from college acceptanceThe first thing you should know is that there is a difference between a deferral and being placed on a waitlist. If your application gets deferred, it means that you haven't been accepted yet…but you might be…later. Hmmm…what are you supposed to do with that?!Well, if you applied as an Early Action or Early Decision applicant, your application has basically been converted to a regular application. You'll be reviewed again during the normal admission season with all the other applicants. However, you've also been freed from any obligation to attend their school if accepted, and you can go ahead and apply to other schools as you wish.If you applied during the regular admission cycle and have been deferred, then the school probably wants more information before they make a final admissions decision — such as senior year final grades or additional test scores. The sooner you can get it to them, the more likely you'll get a final answer sooner rather than later.The waitlist admission decisionIf you've been placed on a waitlist, it means that the admission folks are done reviewing your file and that you are on their radar, but not their first option. The other applicants that have been accepted received college admission letters of acceptance, but you have to wait and see whether or not they are going to accept you.In academic terms, you're a backup. Waitlists are a safety net for colleges, allowing them to ensure that they have enough students to fill all of their vacancies, but it puts you in a spot where you may need to make some tough decisions. Sending in additional information isn't likely to change the situation, although you should certainly keep your application updated with anything that will enhance your student profile.Waiting for a college acceptanceIf you applied for Early Action or Early Decision and received news that you've been waitlisted, then your application will be reviewed again with the regular pool of applicants — just as if you had applied normally. However, if you applied during the regular admission cycle and you're placed on a waitlist, then you're in limbo until a spot comes open and your name is at the top of the list when it does.It's important to know that schools rank you, and all the other applicants from the regular admission cycle, in order of priority. Those at the top of the list will receive college admission letters first if spots do open up.Roughly 34 percent of colleges maintain waitlists and not surprisingly, they tend to be either highly selective colleges, or those with low yield rates (low numbers of accepted applicants that actually choose to enroll). The percentage of people accepted from the waitlist varies at each school depending on the number of spots the school has left to fill. Your waitlist letter should include details about the school's waitlist history. If it doesn't, then ask! Give the admission office a call and find out:How many students have been on the waitlist in the pastHow many were offered admissionWhere you are ranked on the listDetails on any major obstacle to your being acceptedWhat types of housing and financial aid may be available if you get inYou may want to ask your guidance counselor for help with gathering this admissions decision information and deciding what to do once you've gotten all the details. Even if you are granted admittance later, you may find that the best deals on aid and housing are gone. Holding your breath and hoping for the best probably won't work to your advantage so make sure you find out everything you can about that school's policies.Making your own admission decisionWhether you've been waitlisted or deferred, it's wise to assume that your chances of getting in are not great. Schools have to notify you of your admittance by August 1, but don't hold out that long to find out.You should do everything you can to get that college admission letter you want. Let the school know that you will definitely enroll if they accept you by writing a letter to the head honcho in the Admission Office. Also make sure you've submitted everything you were supposed to, including your financial aid paperwork. You don't want to give the school any reason to pass you over in case it comes down to drawing straws for that last coveted spot.Last but not least, if you didn't already do it when you originally applied, submit applications to your second-choice schools. If you're accepted at another school, make plans to go there — send in your enrollment forms and put down your deposit. If you find out later that you've gotten into your first choice, you can change your plans, but don't put yourself in the position of having nowhere to go at all.EXTRAS (UI)WAIT-LIST FAQBecause Illinois receives more applications from highly qualified students than there are available positions in the entering class, some students will receive an offer to join the wait list. Once we know how many students have accepted our initial offer of admission, we’ll use this list to fill the remaining spots in the class.The wait list isn’t ranked; our selection is based on a variety of factors and remaining needs for the class. Our commitment to holistic review will continue as we select students from the wait list in order to balance and complete our freshman class.How many people are on the wait list?Each year, around 1,500 students are placed on the wait list. Depending on space availability, we may offer wait-listed students admission. Some years we’re able to admit hundreds of students from the wait list, while some years we can’t admit any.Can I improve my chances if I send additional information to support my application or come to campus for an interview?No, additional materials such as letters of recommendation and senior year grades won’t be considered. Only the application materials that were reviewed initially will be used in any wait-list decisions. Interviews aren’t part of our admissions process.If I put my name on the wait list, when will I hear a final admission decision?If you wish to be on our wait list, you need to accept your wait-list offer within myIllini by May 1. We’ll notify you of your admission decision by early June. If you’re admitted, you’ll then be sent a complete admissions packet.What’s the process for selecting applicants from the wait list?If any openings become available for the college to which you applied, the admissions review committee will review your application. Applicants aren’t ranked within the wait list.Will housing still be available?Illinois values the residential college experience, and housing is guaranteed for all freshman students, including those selected for admission from the wait list. You’ll have a place to live in University Housing.Will I still be eligible for financial aid?You should go ahead and file financial aid paperwork for the school you expect to attend. If you’re selected for admission and didn’t initially list Illinois as one of the schools to receive your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) report, you can then have it transferred to Illinois.If I'm offered admission, will I be able to complete placement testing and attend Summer Registration?Yes, information about Summer Registration will be sent with your admissions packet, and information on placement testing will be available online.Should I accept admission at another school? What if I have to submit an enrollment deposit?Yes, you should accept admission to another institution by May 1, as we can’t guarantee that any students from the wait list will be offered admission. If this institution requires an enrollment deposit, you’ll also need to send it. If you’re offered admission and choose to attend Illinois, you may lose this enrollment deposit. Check with the other institution about its refund policy.If I’m not offered admission, can I apply again as a transfer student?Yes, applicants who aren’t offered admission are eligible to apply as transfer students in a future year. When reviewing applicants with only 1 year of college work, we focus primarily on high school grades, test scores, and activities. When you’ve attended college full-time for 2 years, the strength of the college program and your academic achievement at the college level are given primary consideration. Learn more about our transfer review process.What should I do now?First, focus on choosing the best fit for you of the universities that have offered you admission. Wait lists are uncertain, so it’s best to ensure your happiness no matter the outcome. If you’re on our wait list, that means we really like you and you don’t need to improve your application. You should, however, continue to get good grades your senior year. If you’re still interested in attending Illinois, be patient. It may take some time, but you’ll receive wait-list news after May 1.SearchSearch http://Admissions.eduUtility MenuContactFAQPolicies & ProceduresCounselorsRecord number of UI applicants will get admission news todayFri, 02/05/2016 - 7:00am | Julie WurthPhoto by: The News-GazetteA record number of students have applied to the University of Illinois for the fall semester.Other Related ContentApplication breakdownURBANA — More than 37,000 students applied to the University of Illinois' flagship campus this year — a new record — and about 22,000 of them will be very happy later today.Today is Decision Day, when applicants learn whether they've been admitted to the Urbana-Champaign campus.Students can check their status starting at 4 p.m. on the UI's admissions website, from their laptops, tablets or phones. Or not."There'll be kids who come to school on Monday without knowing, because they don't want to know," said Urbana High School admissions Counselor Sam Furrer.It can be a stressful thing."Decisions are coming Friday," the UI's admission's website proclaimed Thursday, advising students to relax in the meantime: "Take a walk, turn off your phone, play some music, hang with friends — whatever helps you unwind!"State financial woes and athletic scandals didn't deter this year's applicants, with 10 percent more students applying to the UI than in 2015.The numbers were up in every college, for in-state and out-of-state applicants and all ethnic groups, according to data requested by The News-Gazette. The number of Illinois applicants rose 9 percent, from 16,688 to 18,203.The highly ranked College of Engineering hit a new record of 12,900 applicants, though about 1,900 of those were redirected to other programs because they wouldn't meet the college's criteria. The average ACT of students accepted into engineering is 32, placing them in the top 2 percent nationally."The trend over the last six or so years has been just explosive growth overall in all science, math and engineering fields," not only at the UI but all universities, said Kevin Pitts, associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Engineering.The UI benefits more than many of its competitors because of its reputation, and because the state has a large population with lots of potential students and just one public Big Ten institution, he said.The college is also "very excited" about an uptick in applications from female students, he said.The number of applications to the campus overall has grown for many years, though it dipped last year, said Chuck Tucker, vice provost for undergraduate education and innovation.That was when the UI switched to a single application deadline (Dec. 1) and notification date for students. The campus eliminated its "priority notification" option to relieve some of the angst for high school seniors and to stem a decline in the number of Illinois applicants choosing the UI.Previously, students who applied by Nov. 1 were notified in December whether they were accepted or deferred for further consideration. Typically, several thousand were deferred and thrown in the pool with students who applied by the second deadline in early January. Students were then notified of their acceptance or denial in mid-February. High school guidance counselors complained that the system was confusing and prompted some students to choose other schools.Tucker said it may have taken a year for students, parents and counselors to get used to the new system.Counselors "like the simplicity," he said, "but when you've admitted people on one kind of calendar for a lot of years ... and you change it, it takes a little while for that knowledge to soak in."It seems pretty clear that the word has filtered out, especially to high schools in Illinois. So we're back on the upward slope," he said.'We're an instant society'The UI made a slight change in the schedule this year, moving up its Decision Day by a week or so to the first Friday in February. Last year, it was Feb. 13 — Friday the 13th.Tucker said UI deans had requested the change after getting feedback from unhappy parents. In some cases, they were UI alums distressed because their children ended up choosing other schools that notified applicants sooner.Furrer likes the change, as students hear from the UI ahead of some other schools, and it eases their anxiety."If they could find out 10 minutes after they submit (their application), they'd be happy with that. We're an instant society. These are kids who are not used to waiting for anything," Furrer said.The campus is studying other potential remedies for future years, such as an early notification for students with very strong academic credentials who are obviously qualified for admittance, Tucker said.Tucker wasn't sure how many students will be admitted today, but said it will likely be roughly the same as last year, or about 22,000. Today's count is not the last word. The UI has a late application appeal process and accepts some students later in the year, such as student-athletes.The size of next fall's freshman class won't be known until students let the UI know whether they're coming. They have to reply by May 1.Tucker said the goal is to have about the same number of freshmen as last fall — the second largest class in UI history, at 7,566.State budget problems have made the guessing game a bit tricker this year. The status of state financial aid grants for current students at the UI is unclear, even moreso for new freshman applicants, Tucker said."Sometimes it feels like roulette to me," Tucker said. "We put our bets on the wheel, we watch the wheel go this way and the ball go that way, and on the 10th day we'll see what happens."'International reputation'Last year, the UI made a concerted effort to accept more Illinois residents, as the percentage of in-state freshmen had fallen to just over 71 percent. That grew slightly to 73 percent last fall, and Tucker said the hope is that next year's class will be a similar split."I don't see it growing very much at this stage," he said.If enrollment expands greatly — an idea floated by President Tim Killeen to bolster the UI's resources — "then we'll be enrolling larger numbers of students from Illinois," Tucker said.The campus has also stepped up its recruitment of African-American students and others from underrepresented minorities. The numbers of Latino and African-American applicants were up by 18 percent to 19 percent this year, but "it's really the yield and who shows up in the end that makes the biggest difference," Tucker said.The number of international applicants also rose, though by a lesser percentage.Tucker said the international market is more volatile, fluctuating based on economic conditions and other factors in India, China and Korea."We put almost no effort into recruiting international students," he said. "That's driven almost completely by our institutional reputation around the world."The College of Engineering is hoping for 1,500 freshmen next fall, and that means it will admit approximately 4,500 students today, Pitts said. About one-third of all students accepted to the college wind up coming (although more than half of in-state applicants do), he said."We're working hard to get a higher fraction of Illinois residents," he said, projecting the percentage will be 55 percent to 60 percent.He said that percentage may seem small but the number of Illinois residents in the college is "as high as it's ever been." The college expanded enrollment in recent years by accepting more out-of-state and international students. In particular, it's seen increasing demand from students in California, where the university system doesn't have enough seats to satisfy demand, Pitts said.Up, up and (far) awayFreshman applications at the University of Illinois were up 10 percent overall and in every category this year — in-state, out-of-state and all demographic groups. Some key UI target areas:Black students: Up 384, or 18.8%, from 2,047 to 2,431Latino students: Up 609, or 19%, from 3,184 to 3,793Women engineers: up 438, or 21.4%, from 2,045 to 2,483International applicants: Up 1,247, or 13.8%, from 9,022 to 10,269

It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.As the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes.I could continue, but you get the gist. Yes, the political future I’ve described is unreal. But it is also a linear extrapolation of several trends on vivid display right now. Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.Former presidential hopeful Jeb Bush called Donald Trump “a chaos candidate.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him. (Charles Rex Arbogast / AP)The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.In their different ways, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have demonstrated that the major political parties no longer have intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms. (Charlie Neibergall / AP)Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.The disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them. Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new, and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction. Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the etiology of a political disease: the immune system that defended the body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis and treatment.ImmunityWhy the political class is a good thingThe Founders knew all too well about chaos. It was the condition that brought them together in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. The central government had too few powers and powers of the wrong kinds, so they gave it more powers, and also multiple power centers. The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise.The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on.They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can. By and large, American politicians are independent operators, and they became even more independent when later reforms, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, neutered the Electoral College and established direct election to the Senate.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proved unable to rein in Ted Cruz. (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty)The Constitution makes no mention of many of the essential political structures that we take for granted, such as political parties and congressional committees. If the Constitution were all we had, politicians would be incapable of getting organized to accomplish even routine tasks. Every day, for every bill or compromise, they would have to start from scratch, rounding up hundreds of individual politicians and answering to thousands of squabbling constituencies and millions of voters. By itself, the Constitution is a recipe for chaos.So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that bound politicians into coherent teams. Personal alliances, financial contributions, promotions and prestige, political perks, pork-barrel spending, endorsements, and sometimes a trip to the woodshed or the wilderness: All of those incentives and others, including some of dubious respectability, came into play. If the Constitution was the system’s DNA, the parties and machines and political brokers were its RNA, translating the Founders’ bare-bones framework into dynamic organizations and thus converting conflict into action.The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen, because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government.”The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers.House Speaker Paul Ryan has already faced a rebellion. The reality is that there no longer is any such thing as a “party leader.” (Cliff Owen / AP)Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them. Politics seemed almost to organize itself, but only because the middlemen recruited and nurtured political talent, vetted candidates for competence and loyalty, gathered and dispensed money, built bases of donors and supporters, forged coalitions, bought off antagonists, mediated disputes, brokered compromises, and greased the skids to turn those compromises into law. Though sometimes arrogant, middlemen were not generally elitist. They excelled at organizing and representing unsophisticated voters, as Tammany Hall famously did for the working-class Irish of New York, to the horror of many Progressives who viewed the Irish working class as unfit to govern or even to vote.The old machines were inclusive only by the standards of their day, of course. They were bad on race—but then, so were Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is the ever-present potential for corruption, which is a real problem. On the other hand, overreacting to the threat of corruption by stamping out influence-peddling (as distinct from bribery and extortion) is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents. When a party raised a soft-money donation from a millionaire and used it to support a candidate’s campaign (a common practice until the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banned it in federal elections), the exchange of favors tied a knot of mutual accountability that linked candidate, party, and donor together and forced each to think about the interests of the others. Such transactions may not have comported with the Platonic ideal of democracy, but in the real world they did much to stabilize the system and discourage selfish behavior.Middlemen have a characteristic that is essential in politics: They stick around. Because careerists and hacks make their living off the system, they have a stake in assembling durable coalitions, in retaining power over time, and in keeping the government in functioning order. Slash-and-burn protests and quixotic ideological crusades are luxuries they can’t afford. Insurgents and renegades have a role, which is to jolt the system with new energy and ideas; but professionals also have a role, which is to safely absorb the energy that insurgents unleash. Think of them as analogous to antibodies and white blood cells, establishing and patrolling the barriers between the body politic and would-be hijackers on the outside. As with biology, so with politics: When the immune system works, it is largely invisible. Only when it breaks down do we become aware of its importance.VulnerabilityHow the war on middlemen left America defenselessBeginning early in the 20th century, and continuing right up to the present, reformers and the public turned against every aspect of insider politics: professional politicians, closed-door negotiations, personal favors, party bosses, financial ties, all of it. Progressives accused middlemen of subverting the public interest; populists accused them of obstructing the people’s will; conservatives accused them of protecting and expanding big government.To some extent, the reformers were right. They had good intentions and valid complaints. Back in the 1970s, as a teenager in the post-Watergate era, I was on their side. Why allow politicians ever to meet behind closed doors? Sunshine is the best disinfectant! Why allow private money to buy favors and distort policy making? Ban it and use Treasury funds to finance elections! It was easy, in those days, to see that there was dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water was dirty, which was the baby. So we started reforming.We reformed the nominating process. The use of primary elections instead of conventions, caucuses, and other insider-dominated processes dates to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, but primary elections and party influence coexisted through the 1960s; especially in congressional and state races, party leaders had many ways to influence nominations and vet candidates. According to Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H. W. Bush, here is how Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, got started in politics: “Samuel F. Pryor, a top Pan Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. ‘If you would,’ Pryor said, ‘I think we can assure you that you’ll be the nominee.’ ” Today, party insiders can still jawbone a little bit, but, as the 2016 presidential race has made all too clear, there is startlingly little they can do to influence the nominating process.Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016, only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who hew to ideological orthodoxy.” By contrast, party hacks tend to shop for candidates who exert broad appeal in a general election and who will sustain and build the party’s brand, so they generally lean toward relative moderates and team players.Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but they did their job—so well that the country forgot why it needed them.Moreover, recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge incumbents. “In congressional districts across the country, party leaders were able to carefully select candidates who would contribute to the collective good of the ticket,” Carson and Roberts write in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time. “This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries, in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and thereby made general elections less competitive. “A series of reforms that were intended to create more open and less ‘insider’ dominated elections actually produced more entrenched politicians,” Carson and Roberts write. The paradoxical result is that members of Congress today are simultaneously less responsive to mainstream interests and harder to dislodge.Was the switch to direct public nomination a net benefit or drawback? The answer to that question is subjective. But one effect is not in doubt: Institutionalists have less power than ever before to protect loyalists who play well with other politicians, or who take a tough congressional vote for the team, or who dare to cross single-issue voters and interests; and they have little capacity to fend off insurgents who owe nothing to anybody. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts, incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader who, in a shocking upset, lost to an unknown Tea Partier in his 2014 primary. Legislators are scared of voting for anything that might increase the odds of a primary challenge, which is one reason it is so hard to raise the debt limit or pass a budget.In March, when Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told a Rotary Club meeting that he thought President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee deserved a Senate hearing, the Tea Party Patriots immediately responded with what has become activists’ go-to threat: “It’s this kind of outrageous behavior that leads Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund activists and supporters to think seriously about encouraging Dr. Milton Wolf”—a physician and Tea Party activist—“to run against Sen. Moran in the August GOP primary.” (Moran hastened to issue a statement saying that he would oppose Obama’s nominee regardless.) Purist issue groups often have the whip hand now, and unlike the elected bosses of yore, they are accountable only to themselves and are able merely to prevent legislative action, not to organize it.We reformed political money. Starting in the 1970s, large-dollar donations to candidates and parties were subject to a tightening web of regulations. The idea was to reduce corruption (or its appearance) and curtail the power of special interests—certainly laudable goals. Campaign-finance rules did stop some egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to private channels. Whereas the parties themselves were once largely responsible for raising and spending political money, in their place has arisen a burgeoning ecology of deep-pocketed donors, super pacs, 501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups that now spend hundreds of millions of dollars each cycle. The result has been the creation of an array of private political machines across the country: for instance, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads on the right, and Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate on the left.Private groups are much harder to regulate, less transparent, and less accountable than are the parties and candidates, who do, at the end of the day, have to face the voters. Because they thrive on purism, protest, and parochialism, the outside groups are driving politics toward polarization, extremism, and short-term gain. “You may win or lose, but at least you have been intellectually consistent—your principles haven’t been defeated,” an official with Americans for Prosperity told The Economist in October 2014. The parties, despite being called to judgment by voters for their performance, face all kinds of constraints and regulations that the private groups don’t, tilting the playing field against them. “The internal conversation we’ve been having is ‘How do we keep state parties alive?’ ” the director of a mountain-state Democratic Party organization told me and Raymond J. La Raja recently for a Brookings Institution report. Republicans told us the same story. “We believe we are fighting for our lives in the current legal and judicial framework, and the super pacs and (c)(4)s really present a direct threat to the state parties’ existence,” a southern state’s Republican Party director said.The state parties also told us they can’t begin to match the advertising money flowing from outside groups and candidates. Weakened by regulations and resource constraints, they have been reduced to spectators, while candidates and groups form circular firing squads and alienate voters. At the national level, the situation is even more chaotic—and ripe for exploitation by a savvy demagogue who can make himself heard above the din, as Donald Trump has so shrewdly proved.We reformed Congress. For a long time, seniority ruled on Capitol Hill. To exercise power, you had to wait for years, and chairs ran their committees like fiefs. It was an arrangement that hardly seemed either meritocratic or democratic. Starting with a rebellion by the liberal post-Watergate class in the ’70s, and then accelerating with the rise of Newt Gingrich and his conservative revolutionaries in the ’90s, the seniority and committee systems came under attack and withered. Power on the Hill has flowed both up to a few top leaders and down to individual members. Unfortunately, the reformers overlooked something important: Seniority and committee spots rewarded teamwork and loyalty, they ensured that people at the top were experienced, and they harnessed hundreds of middle-ranking members of Congress to the tasks of legislating. Compounding the problem, Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries, eager to prove their anti-Washington bona fides, cut committee staffs by a third, further diminishing Congress’s institutional horsepower.Smoke-filled rooms were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled.Congress’s attempts to replace hierarchies and middlemen with top-down diktat and ad hoc working groups have mostly failed. More than perhaps ever before, Congress today is a collection of individual entrepreneurs and pressure groups. In the House, disintermediation has shifted the balance of power toward a small but cohesive minority of conservative Freedom Caucus members who think nothing of wielding their power against their own leaders. Last year, as House Republicans struggled to agree on a new speaker, the conservatives did not blush at demanding “the right to oppose their leaders and vote down legislation without repercussions,” as Time magazine reported. In the Senate, Ted Cruz made himself a leading presidential contender by engaging in debt-limit brinkmanship and deriding the party’s leadership, going so far as to call Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. “The rhetoric—and confrontational stance—are classic Cruz,” wrote Burgess Everett in Politico last October: “Stake out a position to the right of where his leaders will end up, criticize them for ignoring him and conservative grass-roots voters, then use the ensuing internecine fight to stoke his presidential bid.” No wonder his colleagues detest him. But Cruz was doing what makes sense in an age of maximal political individualism, and we can safely bet that his success will inspire imitation.We reformed closed-door negotiations. As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily retreat behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills anonymously, with only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory committees, too, could meet off the record. Understandably, in the wake of Watergate, those practices came to be viewed as suspect. Today, federal law, congressional rules, and public expectations have placed almost all formal deliberations and many informal ones in full public view. One result is greater transparency, which is good. But another result is that finding space for delicate negotiations and candid deliberations can be difficult. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest groups and grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is halfway settled.Despite promising to televise negotiations over health-care reform, President Obama went behind closed doors with interest groups to put the package together; no sane person would have negotiated in full public view. In 2013, Congress succeeded in approving a modest bipartisan budget deal in large measure because the House and Senate Budget Committee chairs were empowered to “figure it out themselves, very, very privately,” as one Democratic aide told Jill Lawrence for a 2015 Brookings report. TV cameras, recorded votes, and public markups do increase transparency, but they come at the cost of complicating candid conversations. “The idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong,” the Democratic former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle wrote in 2014, in his foreword to the book City of Rivals. “The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.”We reformed pork. For most of American history, a principal goal of any member of Congress was to bring home bacon for his district. Pork-barrel spending never really cost very much, and it helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders, it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward loyalists. Starting in the ’70s, however, and then snowballing in the ’90s, the regular appropriations process broke down, a casualty of reforms that weakened appropriators’ power, of “sunshine laws” that reduced their autonomy, and of polarization that complicated negotiations. Conservatives and liberals alike attacked pork-barreling as corrupt, culminating in early 2011, when a strange-bedfellows coalition of Tea Partiers and progressives banned earmarking, the practice of dropping goodies into bills as a way to attract votes—including, ironically, votes for politically painful spending reductions.Congress has not passed all its annual appropriations bills in 20 years, and more than $300 billion a year in federal spending goes out the door without proper authorization. Routine business such as passing a farm bill or a surface-transportation bill now takes years instead of weeks or months to complete. Today two-thirds of federal-program spending (excluding interest on the national debt) runs on formula-driven autopilot. This automatic spending by so-called entitlement programs eludes the discipline of being regularly voted on, dwarfs old-fashioned pork in magnitude, and is so hard to restrain that it’s often called the “third rail” of politics. The political cost has also been high: Congressional leaders lost one of their last remaining tools to induce followership and team play. “Trying to be a leader where you have no sticks and very few carrots is dang near impossible,” the Republican former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told CNN in 2013, shortly after renegade Republicans pointlessly shut down the government. “Members don’t get anything from you and leaders don’t give anything. They don’t feel like you can reward them or punish them.”Donald Trump had no political debts or party loyalty. And he had no compunctions—which made him the perfect vector for anti-establishment sentiment. (John Bazemore / AP)Like campaign contributions and smoke-filled rooms, pork is a tool of democratic governance, not a violation of it. It can be used for corrupt purposes but also, very often, for vital ones. As the political scientist Diana Evans wrote in a 2004 book, Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress, “The irony is this: pork barreling, despite its much maligned status, gets things done.” In 1964, to cite one famous example, Lyndon Johnson could not have passed his landmark civil-rights bill without support from House Republican leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, who named his price: a nasaresearch grant for his district, which LBJ was glad to provide. Just last year, Republican Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked how his committee managed to pass bipartisan authorization bills year after year, even as the rest of Congress ground to a legislative standstill. In part, McCain explained, it was because “there’s a lot in there for members of the committees.”Party-dominated nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business. But sweep them all away, and one finds that business is not getting done at all. The political reforms of the past 40 or so years have pushed toward disintermediation—by favoring amateurs and outsiders over professionals and insiders; by privileging populism and self-expression over mediation and mutual restraint; by stripping middlemen of tools they need to organize the political system. All of the reforms promote an individualistic, atomized model of politics in which there are candidates and there are voters, but there is nothing in between. Other, larger trends, to be sure, have also contributed to political disorganization, but the war on middlemen has amplified and accelerated them.PathogensDonald Trump and other virusesBy the beginning of this decade, the political system’s organic defenses against outsiders and insurgents were visibly crumbling. All that was needed was for the right virus to come along and exploit the opening. As it happened, two came along.In 2009, on the heels of President Obama’s election and the economic-bailout packages, angry fiscal conservatives launched the Tea Party insurgency and watched, somewhat to their own astonishment, as it swept the country. Tea Partiers shared some of the policy predilections of loyal Republican partisans, but their mind-set was angrily anti-establishment. In a 2013 Pew Research poll, more than 70 percent of them disapproved of Republican leaders in Congress. In a 2010 Pew poll, they had rejected compromise by similar margins. They thought nothing of mounting primary challenges against Republican incumbents, and they made a special point of targeting Republicans who compromised with Democrats or even with Republican leaders. In Congress, the Republican House leadership soon found itself facing a GOP caucus whose members were too worried about “getting primaried” to vote for the compromises necessary to govern—or even to keep the government open. Threats from the Tea Party and other purist factions often outweigh any blandishments or protection that leaders can offer.So far the Democrats have been mostly spared the anti-compromise insurrection, but their defenses are not much stronger. Molly Ball recently reported for The Atlantic’s Web site on the Working Families Party, whose purpose is “to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans.” Because African Americans and union members still mostly behave like party loyalists, and because the Democratic base does not want to see President Obama fail, the Tea Party trick hasn’t yet worked on the left. But the Democrats are vulnerable structurally, and the anti-compromise virus is out there.A second virus was initially identified in 2002, by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. It’s a shocking book, one whose implications other scholars were understandably reluctant to engage with. The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, however, makes confronting its thesis unavoidable.Using polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25 and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have a severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful. Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists. From that premise, they conclude that all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven personal agendas.If politicians won’t do the job, then who will? Politiphobes, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, believe policy should be made not by messy political conflict and negotiations but by ensids: empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers. These are leaders who will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special interests, and implement long-overdue solutions. ensids can be politicians, technocrats, or autocrats—whatever works. Whether the process is democratic is not particularly important.Chances are that politiphobes have been out there since long before Hibbing and Theiss-Morse identified them in 2002. Unlike the Tea Party or the Working Families Party, they aren’t particularly ideological: They have popped up left, right, and center. Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacies of 1992 and 1996 appealed to the idea that any sensible businessman could knock heads together and fix Washington. In 2008, Barack Obama pandered to a center-left version of the same fantasy, promising to magically transcend partisan politics and implement the best solutions from both parties.“Pork” can be a vital tool of democratic governance.No previous outbreak, however, compares with the latest one, which draws unprecedented virulence from two developments. One is a steep rise in antipolitical sentiment, especially on the right. According to polling by Pew, from 2007 to early 2016 the percentage of Americans saying they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who had been an elected official in Washington for many years than for an outsider candidate more than doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. Republican opinion has shifted more sharply still: The percentage of Republicans preferring “new ideas and a different approach” over “experience and a proven record” almost doubled in just the six months from March to September of 2015.The other development, of course, was Donald Trump, the perfect vector to concentrate politiphobic sentiment, intensify it, and inject it into presidential politics. He had too much money and free media to be spent out of the race. He had no political record to defend. He had no political debts or party loyalty. He had no compunctions. There was nothing to restrain him from sounding every note of the politiphobic fantasy with perfect pitch.Democrats have not been immune, either. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a “revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor cared—because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared—that his plans for governing were delusional.Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them in.SymptomsThe disorder that exacerbates all other disordersThere is nothing new about political insurgencies in the United States—nor anything inherently wrong with them. Just the opposite, in fact: Insurgencies have brought fresh ideas and renewed participation to the political system since at least the time of Andrew Jackson.There is also nothing new about insiders losing control of the presidential nominating process. In 1964 and 1972, to the dismay of party regulars, nominations went to unelectable candidates—Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in 1964 and George McGovern for the Democrats in 1972—who thrilled the parties’ activist bases and went on to predictably epic defeats. So it’s tempting to say, “Democracy is messy. Insurgents have fair gripes. Incumbents should be challenged. Who are you, Mr. Establishment, to say the system is broken merely because you don’t like the people it is pushing forward?”The problem is not, however, that disruptions happen. The problem is that chaos syndrome wreaks havoc on the system’s ability to absorb and channel disruptions. Trying to quash political disruptions would probably only create more of them. The trick is to be able to govern through them.Leave aside the fact that Goldwater and McGovern, although ideologues, were estimable figures within their parties. (McGovern actually co-chaired a Democratic Party commission that rewrote the nominating rules after 1968, opening the way for his own campaign.) Neither of them, either as senator or candidate, wanted to or did disrupt the ordinary workings of government.Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of City of Rivals, likes to point out that within three weeks of Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, the president was signing new laws again. “While they were impeaching him they were negotiating, they were talking, they were having committee hearings,” Grumet said in a recent speech. “And so we have to ask ourselves, what is it that not long ago allowed our government to metabolize the aggression that is inherent in any pluralistic society and still get things done?”I have been covering Washington since the early 1980s, and I’ve seen a lot of gridlock. Sometimes I’ve been grateful for gridlock, which is an appropriate outcome when there is no working majority for a particular policy. For me, however, 2011 brought a wake-up call. The system was failing even when there was a working majority. That year, President Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, in intense personal negotiations, tried to clinch a budget agreement that touched both parties’ sacred cows, curtailing growth in the major entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security by hundreds of billions of dollars and increasing revenues by $800 billion or more over 10 years, as well as reducing defense and nondefense discretionary spending by more than $1 trillion. Though it was less grand than previous budgetary “grand bargains,” the package represented the kind of bipartisan accommodation that constitutes the federal government’s best and perhaps only path to long-term fiscal stability.Former House Speaker John Boehner explained to Jay Leno before he resigned: “You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” (Steve Helber / AP)People still debate why the package fell apart, and there is blame enough to go around. My own reading at the time, however, concurred with Matt Bai’s postmortem in The New York Times: Democratic leaders could have found the rank-and-file support they needed to pass the bargain, but Boehner could not get the deal past conservatives in his own caucus. “What’s undeniable, despite all the furious efforts to peddle a different story,” Bai wrote, “is that Obama managed to persuade his closest allies to sign off on what he wanted them to do, and Boehner didn’t, or couldn’t.” We’ll never know, but I believe that the kind of budget compromise Boehner and Obama tried to shake hands on, had it reached a vote, would have passed with solid majorities in both chambers and been signed into law. The problem was not polarization; it was disorganization. A latent majority could not muster and assert itself.As soon became apparent, Boehner’s 2011 debacle was not a glitch but part of an emerging pattern. Two years later, the House’s conservative faction shut down the government with the connivance of Ted Cruz, the very last thing most Republicans wanted to happen. When Boehner was asked by Jay Leno why he had permitted what the speaker himself called a “very predictable disaster,” he replied, rather poignantly: “When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”Boehner was right. Washington doesn’t have a crisis of leadership; it has a crisis of followership. One can argue about particulars, and Congress does better on some occasions than on others. Overall, though, minority factions and veto groups are becoming ever more dominant on Capitol Hill as leaders watch their organizational capacity dribble away. Helpless to do much more than beg for support, and hostage to his own party’s far right, an exhausted Boehner finally gave up and quit last year. Almost immediately, his heir apparent, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, was shot to pieces too. No wonder Paul Ryan, in his first act as speaker, remonstrated with his own colleagues against chaos.Nevertheless, by spring the new speaker was bogged down. “Almost six months into the job, Ryan and his top lieutenants face questions about whether the Wisconsin Republican’s tenure atop the House is any more effective than his predecessor,” Politico’s Web site reported in April. The House Republican Conference, an unnamed Republican told Politico, is “unwhippable and unleadable. Ryan is as talented as you can be: There’s nobody better. But even he can’t do anything. Who could?”Of course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich described the cycle this way: The people, he said, “want change, and they keep putting outsiders in to bring about the change. Then the change doesn’t come … because we’re putting people in that don’t understand compromise.” Disruption in politics and dysfunction in government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal.Being a disorder of the immune system, chaos syndrome magnifies other problems, turning political head colds into pneumonia. Take polarization. Over the past few decades, the public has become sharply divided across partisan and ideological lines. Chaos syndrome compounds the problem, because even when Republicans and Democrats do find something to work together on, the threat of an extremist primary challenge funded by a flood of outside money makes them think twice—or not at all. Opportunities to make bipartisan legislative advances slip away.Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry.Or take the new technologies that are revolutionizing the media. Today, a figure like Trump can reach millions through Twitter without needing to pass network‑TV gatekeepers or spend a dime. A figure like Sanders can use the Internet to reach millions of donors without recourse to traditional fund-raising sources. Outside groups, friendly and unfriendly alike, can drown out political candidates in their own races. (As a frustrated Cruz told a supporter about outside groups ostensibly backing his presidential campaign, “I’m left to just hope that what they say bears some resemblance to what I actually believe.”) Disruptive media technologies are nothing new in American politics; they have arisen periodically since the early 19th century, as the historian Jill Lepore noted in a February article in The New Yorker. What is new is the system’s difficulty in coping with them. Disintermediating technologies bring fresh voices into the fray, but they also bring atomization and cacophony. To organize coherent plays amid swarms of attack ads, middlemen need to be able to coordinate the fund-raising and messaging of candidates and parties and activists—which is what they are increasingly hard-pressed to do.Assembling power to govern a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly divided democracy is inevitably hard. Chaos syndrome makes it all the harder. For Democrats, the disorder is merely chronic; for the Republican Party, it is acute. Finding no precedent for what he called Trump’s hijacking of an entire political party, Jon Meacham went so far as to tell Joe Scarborough in The Washington Postthat George W. Bush might prove to be the last Republican president.Nearly everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected.Prognosis and TreatmentChaos syndrome as a psychiatric disorderI don’t have a quick solution to the current mess, but I do think it would be easy, in principle, to start moving in a better direction. Although returning parties and middlemen to anything like their 19th-century glory is not conceivable—or, in today’s America, even desirable—strengthening parties and middlemen is very doable. Restrictions inhibiting the parties from coordinating with their own candidates serve to encourage political wildcatting, so repeal them. Limits on donations to the parties drive money to unaccountable outsiders, so lift them. Restoring the earmarks that help grease legislative success requires nothing more than a change in congressional rules. And there are all kinds of ways the parties could move insiders back to the center of the nomination process. If they wanted to, they could require would-be candidates to get petition signatures from elected officials and county party chairs, or they could send unbound delegates to their conventions (as several state parties are doing this year), or they could enhance the role of middlemen in a host of other ways.Building party machines and political networks is what career politicians naturally do, if they’re allowed to do it. So let them. I’m not talking about rigging the system to exclude challengers or prevent insurgencies. I’m talking about de-riggingthe system to reduce its pervasive bias against middlemen. Then they can do their job, thereby making the world safe for challengers and insurgencies.Unfortunately, although the mechanics of de-rigging are fairly straightforward, the politics of it are hard. The public is wedded to an anti-establishment narrative. The political-reform community is invested in direct participation, transparency, fund-raising limits on parties, and other elements of the anti-intermediation worldview. The establishment, to the extent that there still is such a thing, is demoralized and shattered, barely able to muster an argument for its own existence.But there are optimistic signs, too. Liberals in the campaign-finance-reform community are showing new interest in strengthening the parties. Academics and commentators are getting a good look at politics without effective organizers and cohesive organizations, and they are terrified. On Capitol Hill, conservatives and liberals alike are on board with restoring regular order in Congress. In Washington, insiders have had some success at reorganizing and pushing back. No Senate Republican was defeated by a primary challenger in 2014, in part because then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a machine politician par excellence, created a network of business allies to counterpunch against the Tea Party.The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics. Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry. Because that problem is mental, not mechanical, it really is hard to remedy.In March, a Trump supporter told The New York Times, “I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party.” Another said, “We know who Donald Trump is, and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.” That kind of anti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.I assume you are referring to current state of popular political discourse in the US.Similar to a few of the other answers here, what disgusts me most about contemporary American politics is how each side views the other side as ‘traitors’, ‘unAmerican’, or otherwise denigrates them as having turned against the American system writ large. This is especially common on TV and social media (and certain other ‘news sources’), and is exemplified by the attitudes of far too many Americans towards the ‘other side’, or even to those who do not identify with either. The hilarious thing is that, if you put a group of randomly selected registered Republicans and another group of randomly selected registered Democrats in a room together, odds are that they would agree on more things than they would disagree on. The number of deeply partisan issues are relatively limited, touching a minority of the matters governments at the local, state, and federal levels handle. On top of that, its only certain (very loud) segments of the parties that drive this deep partisanship.I’ve stated in another post how one of my major concerns is government bureaucratic and regulatory growth, and the resulting rise in the stakes elections represent; I imagine this has some influence on polarization. I also think this process of polarization is being driven by media frenzies, and the degree to which various sources have become more political activist sites than news sites. You can turn on FOX or MSNBC, or follow conservative or progressive figures on social media, and live in a reinforcing bubble; typically, you don’t have to actually engage in any long-form conversations with those who might disagree with you. The ‘other side’ is reduced to a stupid, even dangerous, caricature, one that completely misses the complexities of either political party; neither party is homogenous in belief or any other category. Just look at the way Trump is portrayed so differently depending on what sources you use.I have gotten to the point where I don’t trust sources of news I used to trust deeply, almost implicitly, a few years ago. It seems to me, from others I have talked to and things I have heard, that this is a popular view of late. This has an obvious impact on the public trust in our institutions, both public and media, one that worries me. I am of the opinion that we need to remind ourselves that those we may disagree with on a political matter remain human beings, and that we may be able to learn to understand them, and they us. Without this, I question whether or not our democratic system can function over the long run.At the office holding level (i.e. Legislative & Executive branches of U.S. government)The partisanship has achieved disgusting levels. These are our elected officials who are supposed to be imparting a sense of stability and decorum. Instead, we have individuals who promote an “us vs. them” mentality while drawing checks and money from lobbyists. Executive Orders and impeachment (or threats of impeachment) used to be a serious, rare thing but are commonplace now. It disgusts me particularly that the Legislative branch has abdicated their role, allowing the Executive branch to continue to act solo, then the Legislative branch either rides the President’s coattails (if successful) or berates the policy if unpopular or unsuccessful. Disgusting.At the social level (everyday citizens)Again, the partisanship has achieved disgusting levels. There is no more consideration of an opposing viewpoint because we no longer allow an opposing viewpoint (i.e. cancel culture). In fact, I’ve listened to podcasts that bring on people with opposing viewpoints to debate issues and the podcaster is then accused of catering to the opposition and considered a sellout! That is just STUPID!For instance, do I think Donald Trump tweeted or said some stupid and contradictory stuff early & often? Absolutely. Does some of the MAGA crowd absorb that nonsense as truth? Without a doubt. But a new administration is in place so we’ve seen Trump literally locked out of social media…Does anyone think his message or followers have just gone away?! They’ve gone underground, so any opportunity to challenge their beliefs or counter the statements have been buried as well.

This article has only academic value. The author does not intend to cast aspersions on any government functionary or any government/public sector institution but merely intends to share his knowledge with younger generations who aspire to establish a new order founded on ethics. The author believes that right knowledge or truth is key to any educational program. He also believes that students aspiring to join All India services or services of Public Sector should have a glimpse of what is happening in the corridors of political power where awards of multi-million dollar Central Government or Central Public Sector contracts are decided through unethical or corrupt means owing to the ineffectiveness of anti-corruption agencies and laws so that these students after joining these elite government/public sector services may become change agents. Those who aspire to join the Private Sector companies must emulate the good systems and procedures prevalent in the Government/Public Sector organizations and introduce the same in the Private Sector with adequate modifications suiting to the environment of the Private Sector for bringing about corporate governance.On the corruption in India, Wikileaks in its latest disclosure which was published in The Hindu dated 11th April, 2013 quoted an American cable sent to their State Department in Washington during 1976 as follows:“An Indian manufacturer paid a substantial bribe to the minister of civil aviation for a particular contract.” However, “the project became a source of controversy for reasons which had nothing to do with the bribe. The minister sought to return the bribe but the donor insisted on interest.” Finally, “a compromise was reached whereby an additional contract was awarded [to] the manufacturer.”The above instance of 1976 is only a tip of the iceberg hidden in the government sector and the trend of corruption has since become worse and continues to touch an alarming level in the recent past.In the Public Sector Undertakings /Nationalized Banks and autonomous bodies of Government of India and in the Central Government Ministries/Departments, Vigilance Departments headed by Chief Vigilance Officers (CVOs) are functioning since 1964 based on a resolution passed by the Govt. of India after accepting the report of the Santhanam Committee on corruption. The functions of these Vigilance Departments are monitored by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) who has since become a statutory body under the CVC Act, 2003.In every state government, a Vigilance Department at the Secretariat level, an anti-corruption wing with police powers and in some states, ombudsman like Vigilance Commissioner or Lok Ayukta headed by a retired High Court or a retired Supreme Court judge function as anti-corruption agencies. Since the author does not have much exposure to the functioning of these state anti-corruption agencies, he confines himself only to the functioning of Central anti-corruption agencies.Appointment and tenure of CVOsA Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO) is considered as Special Assistant to the C&MD of the organization and has to report to the latter only. They mostly belong to All India Services like IAS, IPS, IRS, etc. and join the organizations for deputation tenure of 3 years to be extended by 2 more years. Mostly, All India Service Officers like IAS, IPS, etc. find berths in Central PSUs of Schedule A and B, based in Delhi for deputation, just to get postings in Delhi or to have leisure in the environment of Public Sector Undertakings where there are fewer responsibilities. Some honest IAS and IPS officers choose to join the post of CVO in Central PSUs as they find it difficult to dance to the tune of their political bosses in state administration. Many of these officers just spend their time in PSUs without any aptitude for vigilance work.According to the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, a panel of officers cleared by the Central Vigilance Commission will be suggested to the administrative Ministry/Department concerned with the approval of the Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Department of Personnel & Training. The administrative Ministry is required to select an officer out of the panel with the approval of its Minister-in-charge and communicate the same to the Department of Personnel and Training for obtaining the approval of the Competent Authority. Once a Chief Vigilance Officer has worked in a particular Organization, he should not be posted as CVO in the same Organization. This aims at ensuring that an officer appointed as CVO in an Organization is able to inspire confidence that in deciding vigilance cases, he will not be hampered by anyp ast association with the organization. An officer who is appointed from outside as CVO in Central Public Undertaking shall not be permanently absorbed in the same organization on expiry or in continuation of his tenure as CVO in that organization. The Chief Vigilance Officers are extended hands of the CVC. The Chief Vigilance Officers are considerably higher level officers who are appointed in each and every Department/Organization to assist the Head of the Department/Organization in all vigilance matters.CVOs are mandated to screen all complaints of graft and criminal conspiracy before referring them to the CBI, to monitor on corruption, malpractices and misconduct on the part of employees and to take remedial action. Besides, they are tasked to closely monitor cases related to criminal misconduct of employees being investigated by CBI and to coordinate with the latter for expeditious disposal of such cases.The duties and functions of CVOs as laid down by CVC are given below:The role and functions of CVOs has been broadly divided in to two parts, which are (I) Preventive and (II) Punitive.On the preventive side:The CVOs undertake various measures, which include:(a) To examine in detail the existing Rules and procedures of the Organization with a view to eliminating or minimizing the scope for corruption or malpractices;(b) To identify the sensitive/corruption prone spots in the Organization and keep an eye on personnel posted in such areas;(c) To plan and enforce surprise inspections and regular inspections to detect the system failures and existence of corruption or malpractices;(d) To maintain proper surveillance on officers of doubtful integrity; and(e) To ensure prompt observance of Conduct Rules relating to integrity of the Officers, like(I) the Annual Property Returns;(ii) Gifts accepted by the officials(iii) Benami transactions(iv) Regarding relatives employed in private firms or doing private business etc.On the punitive side:(I) To ensure speedy processing of vigilance cases at all stages. In regard to cases requiring consultation with the Central Vigilance Commission, a decision as to whether the case had a vigilance angle shall in every case be taken by the CVO who, when in doubt, may refer the matter to his administrative head, i.e. Secretary in the case of Ministries/Departments and Chief Executive in the case of public sector organizations;(ii) To ensure that charge-sheet, statement of imputations, lists of witness and documents etc. are carefully prepared and copies of all the documents relied upon and the statements of witnesses cited on behalf of the disciplinary authority are supplied wherever possible to the accused officer along with the charge-sheet;(iii) To ensure that all documents required to be forwarded to the Inquiring Officer are carefully sorted out and sent promptly;(iv) To ensure that there is no delay in the appointment of the Inquiring Officer, and that no dilatory tactics are adopted by the accused officer or the Presenting Officer;(v) To ensure that the processing of the Inquiry Officer's Reports for final orders of the Disciplinary Authority is done properly and quickly;(vi) To scrutinize final orders passed by the Disciplinary Authorities subordinate to the Ministry/Department, with a view to see whether a case for review is made out or not;(vii) To see that proper assistance is given to the C.B.I. in the investigation of cases entrusted to them or started by them on their own source of information;(viii) To take proper and adequate action with regard to writ petitions filed by accused officers;(ix) To ensure that the Central Vigilance Commission is consulted at all stages where it is to be consulted and that as far as possible, the time limits prescribed in the Vigilance Manual for various stages are adhered to;(x) To ensure prompt submission of returns to the Commission;(xi) To review from time to time the existing arrangements for vigilance work in the Ministry/Department for vigilance work subordinate officers to see if they are adequate to ensure expeditious and effective disposal of vigilance work;(xii) To ensure that the competent disciplinary authorities do not adopt a dilatory or lax attitude in processing vigilance cases, thus knowingly otherwise helping the subject public servants, particularly in cases of officers due to retire;(xiii) To ensure that cases against the public servants on the verge of retirement do not lapse due to time-limit for reasons such as misplacement of files etc. and that the orders passed in the cases of retiring officers are implemented in time; and(xiv) To ensure that the period from the date of serving a charge-sheet in a disciplinary case to the submission of the report of the Inquiry Officer, does, ordinarily, not exceed six months.Functioning of CVOs and Vigilance Officers (VOs)Though CVOs are required to function independently, practically speaking, they are not doing so. Since the CVO has to report to the C&MD, the former has, at times, to toe the line of the latter. It is very difficult for him to maintain a balance between his reporting to the C&MD and his reporting to the CVC in the event of disagreement by the CVO with the C&MD. In technical organizations, many CVOs from IPS or other police services, without technical background, find it rather difficult to understand the nature of corruption cases involving technicalities when there is a blurring line of demarcation between cases of corruption and bribery and cases of irregularities where procedures are bypassed for commissioning of projects on time. They find it difficult to judge cases wherein malafides are not shown by suspect officers.No doubt, CVOs in many Central PSUs have done tremendous work, bringing about transparency in their organizations and introducing preventive measures for curbing corruption by plugging loopholes in systems and procedures. However, on the whole, there are many negative factors which need to be addressed urgently.At times, Vigilance Officers working under CVOs are not ethical in their investigations. Once they take up cases for investigation, they are reluctant to close the same when materials surface to show that the actions of suspect officers are not malafide.Vigilance Officers consider themselves to be more intelligent than the highly qualified technical or engineering staff. Being arrogant, they are not humble in learning from the technical officers when they do not understand the intricacies of technical cases.Many CVOs simply go by the reports of their Vigilance Officers without taking pains to cross verify the investigation reports by taking independent technical opinion with the result that innocent executives get charge-sheeted. Once an executive is charge-sheeted for a major penalty, then his career is doomed and he loses his promotion. By the time, the executive is exonerated of the charges framed against him, he loses his reputation, promotion and social status.Vigilance Clearance“Vigilance Clearance” is the hurdle for getting promotions in Govt. Services during pendency of trial in courts or during pendency of departmental proceedings. This rule is applied even to those employees who apply for passports or for foreign training programs. According to a procedure called “sealed cover procedure”, if a charge-sheeted officer is due for promotion, he would be considered for promotion and the result of the Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) has to be kept in a sealed cover which would be opened after the finalization of the departmental proceedings or after the close of the criminal case in the court of law, as the case may be. If the officer is exonerated, he would be given promotion with retrospective effect after opening the sealed cover. If he is convicted, then the recommendations of the Departmental Promotion Committee would not be acted upon.Though the sealed cover procedure has to be followed, in many PSUs, this is not followed just to deny promotion to these charge-sheeted executives as the management prefers to promote other executives whose records are clean and who are their favorites. In this regard, the PSU management uses this procedure just to deny promotion to an efficient and hard working officer against whom some charge-sheet is pending but to promote against that particular vacancy some non-performing officer who is close to the top management.C&MD versus CVOThe C&MD of the organization has to spend more of his time in the corridors of the Ministry to please the Minister and the bureaucrats there. He obliges the Minister in awarding contracts to the favorite contractors of the minister. The favorite contractor gets his business from the organization after following the prescribed procedure and becoming the “lowest evaluated bidder”.Wikileaks, the whistleblower website, reveals through one of the cables sent by the American Embassy to their State Department in Washington during 1976 as published by The Hindu dated 11th April 2013, the magnitude of corruption in India prevalent in the system of award of contracts. It says, “The ‘innovative’ Indian method of awarding contracts to the favored bidder is explained in the words of a World Bank official “with extensive experience in India.” He “had never seen a case where an original low bidder ever received a contract” since “repeated tenderings combined with specification changes are instituted by the Government of India until the appropriate bidder becomes low bidder as well.”The Vigilance Department hardly gets into this area at all. If at all this case goes to the CBI, ultimately the officials who have recommended award of contracts would be in the CBI net. Normally, the approving authority i.e. the C&MD or the Board would go scot free on the pretext that they were misguided by the lower level managerial officers. There is no surveillance by the CBI or by the CVO of the Ministry in the corridors of power where the contractors meet the Ministers for getting their work done. When the contractor concerned executes his contract, if the Vigilance pokes its nose, then the contractor informs the C&MD and the C&MD gives his tacit disapproval to the CVO. Some bold CVOs would go ahead and would initiate action against the erring executives concerned. However, the defaulting contractor would agree with the officers/engineers in charge of the work at site for making necessary recoveries from him for the sub-standard work executed by him and would agree to do some rectification work. The contractor would never get blacklisted. In a recent case (March 2013) , the World Bank blacklisted M/s L &T, considered as the most ethical company in the world for a particular period just because one of the L&T officers submitted forged certificates for getting a contract from a public sector undertaking of the Govt. of Tamil Nadu.CVO in Ministry versus CBIThere is a CVO in every Ministry, mostly belonging to IAS cadre. He is of the status of Joint Secretary to the Govt. of India. He acts only on complaints against the senior bureaucrats in the Ministry. He and his department possess all the knacks to close the complaints against the Minister or the Secretary when a report is called for by the CVC. He does not suo motu scrutinize the files in the Ministry wherein the Minister or the Secretary has taken questionable decisions. CBI has hardly any role in the corridor of the Ministry until and unless it is directed by the High Court or the Supreme Court to investigate a scam like 2G spectrum, etc. CBI is prompt in trapping an income tax officer accepting bribe but keeps itself at a distance from the corridors of the Ministry. It does not generate “intelligence” to trap a Minister or his conduit accepting bribes from a businessman but gets intelligence report to trap a police officer accepting bribes.Recently (in May 2013), for the first time in the history of CBI, to the best of my knowledge, CBI trapped a close relative of an Union Minister red-handed while accepting bribe for a top government post.CVOs versus CVCCVOs are very particular about sending their monthly statistical returns to CVC, whether their Departments really work or not to the extent desired by CVC. The CVC have no means to conduct an audit of the work done by the CVOs. The CVC have no adequate staff and machinery to monitor the work of the CVOs in about 200 Central Public Sector Undertakings and 27 Public Sector Banks, apart from CVOs in Ministries/Attached and Subordinate offices of Ministries. With its limited resources, the CVC takes cognizance of scams and irregularities reported by the media. There has been no accountability on the CVO of the organization concerned when a scam has broken out as reported by the media.Negative Role of Vigilance and CBI in PSUsIn some cases, innocent officers are falsely implicated by CBI after joining hands with the CVO who acts at the behest of the CMD. These innocent officers are being persecuted in the court of law. By the time these officers are exonerated by the trial courts, they would lose their promotions, peace of mind, social status. They find it very difficult to get their daughters married during the pendency of trial. If any honest officer falls into the CBI net, it would be very difficult for him to get a clearance from the CBI for getting his promotion. The investigation would be a time consuming affair even if the CBI has to close the case after filing a closure report before the CBI Special Court. Normally, the CBI before closing its prosecution case recommends departmental action against the officer concerned on some other ground or the other.Instead of playing the role of an ally of management (the term coined by the CVC during 1980s), the Vigilance Department at times functions as an enemy of the management by questioning the decisions taken by managers on merit. The time has now come in the PSUs that no lower level manager proposes or takes decision as per the powers delegated to him. He simply sends the file to the Regional Head of the organization who in turn refers the matter to the Corporate Headquarters.In an interesting case, an honest officer was charge-sheeted for performing his normal functions for recommending procurement of spare parts from the contractor to whom the contract was awarded. The Vigilance Department attributed a motive to him saying that he could have recommended procurement of these spare parts from other available contractors whose prices were very low. In the charge-sheet, they cited the name of a contractor whose prices were low. According to the contract provisions, the officer was supposed to propose placing of orders on the same contractor only for procurement of spare parts. Further, the name of the contractor mentioned in the charge-sheet was not a full-fledged contractor but was a budding contractor who was being developed as a vendor and this budding contractor was given a small work on economic rates. Nobody in the hierarchy of the organization ever took pains to read the provisions of the contract which were being brought to their notice by the suspect officer. All of them simply appended their signatures on the investigation report of the Vigilance Department to charge the innocent officer known for his integrity for a major penalty involving lack of integrity, on the presumption that the officer had shown favors to the party on whom spare parts were sought to be procured.In another case, on the recommendations of CBI, an honest officer was charged for a major penalty just for failing to report a transaction of buying a car from his colleague. CBI alleged that he took a loan from his colleague and did not report this fact to the management. Absolutely, there was no iota of evidence to prove that the suspect officer took a personal loan from his colleague. This case was foisted on this officer by CBI at the best of the C&MD. This simple case dragged on for three years during which the officer lost his promotion.Agreed List prepared by Vigilance and CBIThere is a provision of preparing a list of officers who are corrupt but against whom there is no prima facie evidence for initiating action. This is called Agreed List. It contains names of officers of Gazetted status in Central Govt. service or officers of Central PSUs/Nationalized Banks, etc. against whose honesty or integrity there are complaints, doubts or suspicious after consultations between the vigilance officers of the Departments/PSUs concerned and of CBI. As per the guidelines issued by the Central Govt. in this regard, closer and more frequent scrutiny and inspection of their work and performance by the Departments concerned, particularly in spheres there is scope for discretion or for showing favors. Quite check about their reputation both by the Vigilance Department and the C.B.I, unobtrusive watch of their contracts style of living etc. by the C.B.I, secret enquiry by the C.B.I. about their assets and financial resources will be undertaken by the CBI. The CBI will have to collect information of specific instances of bribery and corruption practices against these officers of doubtful integrity and to register FIRs against them if there is prima facie evidence against them.In spite of the above guidelines issued by the Central Govt., the CBI has no time or adequate staff to carry out this surveillance work and the internal Vigilance Department also does not keep real surveillance over such officials, relegating to the background such an important function, mostly due to lack of adequate staff. This list just remains on paper for years together if the management or the government wants to keep some corrupt officials on this list for the sake of maintaining this list as a routine exercise. No real exercise is being made sincerely to verify the allegations for which the officials are kept in this “watch” list.The Vigilance Department does it job perfectly if a case of false personal claim is to be investigated. It does not put under its scanner award of contracts worth crores of rupees when it comes to the Board level. The Vigilance Department in a PSU does close its eyes when the bureaucrats or the Ministers of the Ministry misuse the company’s properties but it takes cognizance of such misuse by the company’s executives at construction sites or at project sites. The Chairman of the PSU deputes his company executives for helping “technically” the Ministers and the bureaucrats in their offices. The PSU has become a milking cow for the Ministry.When the Vigilance Department in the Central Ministries and their attached and subordinate offices, are playing a limited role of investigation, the Vigilance Departments in the Central PSUs are very active but are mostly doing the police functions because many of executives are from the CBI or police background. They investigate complaints and do not take steps to prevent corruption and fraud. Employees are scared of visiting the offices of Vigilance Officers because they think if they visit such offices, they would be looked down upon by their colleagues in the same manner people are not hesitant to visit police stations for lodging complaints. No whistle blower employee would like to visit a vigilance officer in his office for giving information. The whistle blower does not trust the vigilance officer for giving information. The term “Vigilance” has created a bad image about vigilance officers working in the PSUs.Appointment of Independent Monitors and its effectivenessAs per the guidelines issued by the CVC for overseeing implementation and effectiveness of the Integrity Pact Programs in Central PSUs, Independent Monitors are being appointed in consultation with Transparency International India, an international NGO which fights corruption globally, and such appointments are finally approved by the CVC. This is a very good wonderful system in the Central PSU for combating corruption through a third party monitoring.The major goal of the Independent Monitor will be to oversee implementation of Integrity Pact Program to prevent corruption, bribes and any other unethical practices in the company. If the Independent Monitor observes or suspects an irregularity, he will inform the C&MD of the company and Chairman of the Audit Committee of its Board of Directors. Once the Independent Monitor is satisfied that any irregularity has taken place, he may also inform CVC and Transparency International-India. He can also avail himself of the services of private audit or law firms at the cost of the company.The system of independent third party monitoring in Central PSU is the best tool for combating corruption. But there is a genuine doubt whether this system is implemented in its spirit. Everything remains on paper and the CVC is periodically apprised of the work undertaken by the Independent Monitor.In most of the companies, retired bureaucrats who are close to the Chairmen or the Minister or the Secretary of the Ministry are appointed to these positions. Such retired bureaucrats at one point of time might have favored the Chairman of the company who is the sole authority who initiatives this appointment.The Independent Monitor does not have enough staff and expertise to work in a highly commercial and technical organization. He has to completely depend upon the management to provide him the infrastructure. He simply goes by the reports given by the committee of officials who are part of the management.The retired bureaucrat, being the Independent Monitor, who enjoys the confidence of the C&MD cannot be expected to be impartial in his judgment and cannot be having a thorough knowledge of the company’s functioning, especially the procedure of award of contracts and execution of projects. We do not know whether the Independent Monitor has ever engaged services of outside agencies such as accounting firms, law firms, etc at company’s expense to discharge his duties. No public sector management would like to outsource the work of monitoring their work to third party law/audit firms like KPMG, etc.If the Independent Monitor has to be effective in his functioning, he must be, preferably, a retired senior level executive of the Public Sector Undertaking who had served the PSU in the Vigilance Department for a long time. It would be ideal to engage the services of a retired senior level public sector executive who has put in a service of about 15 years in vigilance functions and who is well aware of the systems and procedures of the PSU. The background check of a retired public sector executive can be easily made either with the CBI or with the CVC.The Independent Monitor should be able to function at least on 10 working days in a month with adequate supporting staff from the Vigilance Department/Audit Department.Appointment of the Independent Monitor in the PSU has to be made by independent and competent recruiters through open advertisements. The recruiter concerned has to forward a panel of selected candidates to the Chairman of the PSU for appointment. A person of proven integrity has to be appointed to this position after verification of antecedents.VOs spending precious time on preparing statistical returnsA vigilance officer is supposed to be vigilant over the officials committing frauds. But in many offices, vigilance officers spend more time in preparing statistical reports to be sent to their CVOs/CVC/Nodal Ministry. In the first week of every month, he is busy preparing such reports and has no time to keep vigilance or surveillance over the corrupt officials. One of the vigilance officials working under a senior vigilance functionary was very hard working, having a very good knowledge of what was happening in the organization but he was neither liked by the top management nor was his work recognized in his own department. There are a few vigilance officials who are working hard, round the clock, gathering information. In my opinion, 90% vigilance officials just work in a routine manner without developing sources for getting information or without taking any steps to know what is happening in the organization. They are prompt in taking up investigations when they receive complaints.VOs spending precious time on scrutiny of property returnsAnother time consuming job of a Vigilance Officer is to verify the immovable property returns submitted by executives once in two years. He has to verify such returns of thousands of executives in a routine manner. The purpose of Government introducing submission of immovable property returns which has been made a mandatory requirement in the Conduct Rules is to ascertain whether the executive who submits this return has acquired assets disproportionate to his known sources of income. Frankly speaking, no corrupt officer would reflect the properties acquired by him through corrupt means in this return. The Vigilance Officer scrutinizing such returns cannot verify the genuineness of transactions shown in property returns by visiting the places where properties have been acquired by the executive. Further, the Vigilance Officer has no sanction of law for accessing the government records in Registration Departments or Municipal offices. At times, honest executives fail to report some transactions or report such transactions belatedly for which charge-sheets are issued to them on the advice of the Vigilance Department. CVC expects CVOs to ensure 100% scrutiny of these property returns.In an interesting case investigated by CBI, an IPS probationer while submitting his first property return at the time of joining service had shown acquisition of a large amount of gold as marriage gift. This young police officer had decided to turn the bribe amounts to be received by him during the course of his long career into white money in the form of marriage gift. In fact, this provision came in handy for him to accumulate wealth through corrupt means.Lacking powers of investigation under law and procuring attendance of witnesses during quasi judicial departmental inquiriesIn cases involving scrutiny of records in possession of private persons or vendors/contractors, the Vigilance Officer investigating the complaint has to collect evidences for which the law does not allow him to do so. Only police officers working in the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the state government or CBI have the lawful powers to investigate such complaints. Despite this handicap, many Vigilance Officers carry on investigations interacting with private persons and recording their statements. But, ultimately, during subsequent quasi-judicial departmental inquiries, these private persons are reluctant to appear as witnesses against the charge-sheeted executives, probably under the influence of the charged executives. Even if they appear as witnesses before the Inquiry Officers, they retract their earlier statements given to investigating Vigilance Officer during investigation. To procure their attendance during inquiries is the Herculean job of the Vigilance Department.Prosecutor becoming judge in disciplinary proceedingsAnother area of grave concern is regarding the role of Vigilance Department in disciplinary proceedings. If an officer is charge-sheeted for a major penalty, then his career would be doomed for a long period and during this period, he becomes a dead leaf in the tree. He cannot show devotion to duty as he is suspected to be under a cloud. The Vigilance Department conducts investigations and submits its report to the designated Disciplinary Authority concerned. As per the directions of CVC, a cell called Disciplinary Proceedings Cell has been created in every organization. In many organizations, this cell functions under the CVO. The prosecutor is not supposed to sit in the judgment seat because it would violate the principles of natural justice. Though the Vigilance Department has to function in an advisory role for the Disciplinary Authority concerned, the latter goes by the advice of the former because the CVO of the organization is considered “powerful” in the hierarchy of the organization. In some PSUs, this cell functions under the Director (Personnel). Disciplinary Authorities do not apply their minds to the facts mentioned in investigation reports or the recommendations made by the Vigilance Department proposing disciplinary action. Disciplinary Authorities are supposed to examine the reports of Inquiry Officers and to apply their minds. As the Disciplinary Authority concerned does not assert himself, the advice of the CVO becomes final in the ultimate analysis. The Disciplinary Authority simply signs the charge-sheet even if there is no prima facie case against the delinquent employee concerned just because he does not want to rub his shoulders with the powerful CVO in the organization.Training needs to be given to Disciplinary Authorities so that they may be aware of their disciplinary powers. There should be separation of disciplinary functions from vigilance functions.Ethics for Vigilance OfficersEthics programs should be conducted for vigilance officials, apart from completely overhauling the system of recruitments and functions of Vigilance Officers and Chief Vigilance Officer. Vigilance Department in a PSU conducts vigilance awareness workshop/seminar to sensitize the non-vigilance officials. But there is no ethics program tailor made for vigilance officials.Need for CVC to plug loopholes in Vigilance Management/Vigilance AdministrationCVC does not have any proper feedback system except through the statistical reports being submitted by CVOs to evaluate the vigilance work in PSUs. They do not know about the public perception of vigilance work in any PSU. It is time for CVC to introduce a feedback system, preferably, anonymous from employees in a PSU on a random sample basis to know about their perception and problems in matters relating to the functioning of the Vigilance Department.To induct professionalism into Vigilance Management in PSUs, Vigilance Officers of one PSU should be deputed to another organization for a period of 5 years. There are instructions from CVC that 30% of vacancies in the Vigilance Department should be on deputation basis. But such instructions remain on paper only.The present system of bringing officers of All India Services to the PSUs should be reviewed and dispensed with in due course. Of course, the system of appointment of senior vigilance executives on deputation to other PSUs as CVOs may be ideal. This system is perhaps applied by the Ministry of Personnel only to those Central PSUs located in places other than Delhi and that too in PSUs classified as Schedule C or D. If no IAS or IPS officer is willing to join such a public sector undertaking located in a remote place, then the same is filled up with some senior vigilance functionary from another PSU.Young MBA/Law/CA graduates should be inducted and adequately trained by CBI and other professional forensic training institutes at international level.Need for strengthening existing institutions of CBI and CVCIt sounds a death knell to Vigilance Management in Central PSUs and the Central Govt. Departments. The Government of India has to take drastic measures to regulate the functions of the Vigilance Departments through the CVC.There is a need for revamping the vigilance machinery in the PSUs and the Ministries and for overhauling the functions of the Anti-Corruption Wing of CBI. There is absolutely no need for creation of a new anti-corruption institution like Lok Pal when the existing anti-corruption agency i.e. CBI has adequate powers to investigate the Ministers and top bureaucrats. In the 2G spectrum case, they have done their job.The CVC can be given the jurisdiction that the Govt. of India proposes to give to the Lok Pal, to inquire into the allegations against the Ministers and the senior bureaucrats. The CVC can have its own investigation cell and prosecution wing which the proposed Lok Pal Bill wants to give to the new institution of Lok Pal. The CVC has been known for its integrity since its inception and no scandal has been reported on its performance. The existing CVC can be made a multi-member Lok Pal institution after amending the CVC Act, 2003. There is no absolutely no need for creating another “powerful” anti-corruption body. The latest exposure of Wiki leaks about corruption in India has stated, “there is a direct and positive relationship between laws against corruption and the extent of corruption itself, i.e., each such law only means that there are more people to bribe.”When the author joined the CVC in 1973, there was a talk about the CVC becoming the Lok Pal. But the Govt. of India was sitting over this proposal for 3 decades and opened its eyes only when the social activists took to the street and introduced their own version of the “Jan Lok Pal Bill”. The Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha on December 8 last year. Then the Lokpal and Lokayuktas and Other Related Law (Amendment) Bill, 2014 is now under active consideration by a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice. The moot question is whether creation of another anti-corruption institution would get rid of the monster of corruption, when one institution after another was falling on the wayside on the way to governance. Let us now watch and see how the menace of corruption would be dealt with under this new anti-corruption law.Present scenarioThe AAP government is the only government that means business to deal with the menace of corruption. With its Anti-corruption Bureau, it started catching the corrupt officials. But the LG of Delhi interfered in the functioning of this institution by appointing another chief to head this body, in addition to the official appointed by the AAP government. This institution has now almost come to a standstill. What is the guarantee that the Lok Pal and the Lok Ayukta institutions will not become defunct due to interference of the powers that be? The Lok Ayuka of Karnatake State has now come under a cloud. How can we ensure that the Lok Pals and the Lok Ayuktas being appointed under the revised laws would be fair and impartial in their functioning? No doubt, we can create a perfect Institution through law but such a perfect institution will be again manned by imperfect and unethical persons.