Bureaucracy

The press has reported lately on US export controls and sanctions on Chinese semiconductor companies, suppliers, and intermediaries.

Left out of the article was — what I presume to be — the small team inside the US government that’s driving this effort.

I don’t have inside knowledge on who this team is, or where they live in the organizational tangle that is the United States federal government, but I have some guesses about how they work.

First: these teams are special creatures. They’re rare, fleeting, and usually a product of individual personalities just as much as policy or funding (both prerequisites, to be sure). They’re driven by zealots who know how to work the system. The team leader is undoubtedly a mensch.

Second, some characteristics of high performing bureaucratic teams like this one:

1. Top cover. Prerequisite number one, always. Given this team’s work, it’s probably at the White House (NSC or OSTP). This top cover is a get-out-of-jail-free card: any dust ups, pissed-off agency heads, flakey lawmakers, upset ambassadors, they all get smoothed over with good top cover.
2. Default apolitical. even if led by political appointees, these teams tend to work on apolitical issues (think counterterrorism). The less political the teams are, the faster they can run.
3. Speed. They jolt the system with speed. Speed is central to the culture of these teams, and the sense of urgency behind everything gets things done. Antibodies in the system that can’t move fast enough get bulldozed and lose.
4. Interagency experts. The hardest part of government action is the interagency process (government speak for coordinating across the government, usually for defense/diplomatic/national security matters). These teams excel at it, preempting arguments, leveraging influence and power appropriately, and pushing their vision and sense of urgency through this coordination process.
5. Recruits ringers. The government has broad hiring authority to bring in the best of academia and industry to consult on these efforts. Whereas the “retired in place” (RIP) government people see outside experts as a threat, these teams see opportunity to bring the best brains on board.
6. Avoids press. The fastest way to kill these teams is to publicly elevate certain people over others, and that’s always how the profile pieces go.

The team behind this semiconductor work is precise and brutal. I was tempted to call it a scalpel approach, but it’s more like using a scalpel to cut out the lungs. China’s domestic semiconductor industry will feel it.

When you see coordinated action like this, with speed like this, without names like this, know there is likely a small team in an interior office of the Eisenhower building that’s working long nights to get it all done.