Co-Opting Subordinates Through Ordering Unethical Conduct

Last week, the Kansas City, MO city council ordered an investigation into possibly unethical conduct by the city's mayor, according to an article in the Kansas City Star. The principal conduct is the use of the mayor's former communications director to work on a political campaign (not the mayor's re-election campaign). According to another article in the Star, the mayor also allegedly told the former communications director not to make a particular document public.

It's common for ethics codes to require that government staff and facilities not be used for political campaigns, although it is probably the rare mayor who doesn't use staff in re-election and other campaigns.

But what is more important than the misuse of public resources is the misuse of subordinates, and that seems to have been the problem here, at least from the point of view of the former communications director (needless to say, the mayor considers him a sore loser, because he wasn't made chief of staff, but let's assume for the sake of argument that he's being sincere in expressing bad feelings about what he did).

There are two problems here. One is that the most unethical thing one can do is manipulate people, to use your power over people to get them to do something you know is wrong or, at least, suspect. This is worse, I believe, than the misuse of government funds or facilities.

Second, requiring subordinates to act unethically is a principal way to keep them quiet about a superior's unethical conduct. Co-opting subordinates is the first thing every corrupt official does to protect himself. Not only is this effective in the short run, but when a scandal occurs, it can ruin the careers of subordinates who were afraid to stand up against their superior, even though they may have acted, at least partly, due to concerns about their careers if they didn't play along.

Using the power of office to make subordinates act unethically should be the equivalent of murder in what constitutes unethical conduct in government. It certainly isn't the top sort of misconduct in terms of undermining the public's trust, but it the most effective and destructive way of destroying a local government's ethical culture. Fear should play even less of a role in government than it does elsewhere.

Co-opting subordinates does not so much pit personal interest against the public interest (at least not directly) as it does make a superior's personal interest the interest of one's staff. When it comes to whether to act ethically or unethically, staff is responsible to the position, not to the man or the woman who happens to inhabit it. This cannot be stressed enough.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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