We at the International College of Businessry and Managering, as a policy, practice and peccadillo, express no political views. But as the world’s leading experts in organizational structure optimization we have recently completed an in-depth analysis and determined that every political party across the globe is, as one our Senior Fellows put it, “full of nutters.” Instead of proclaiming one party, ideology or dogma superior to another, we develop solutions to managerial and organizational problems and propose innovative new ideas. We view government, our government, your government and every other government, as simply one more organization in dire need of a direct hit from the ICBM. With that foundation firmly layed, we would like to turn your attention to the issue of term limits, specifically in the United States Federal Government.

After extensive research, public opinion polls, consultation with constitutional scholars, historical analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, Markov Chain analysis, extensive legal review, deep soul searching and a rarely applied use of common sense ICBM has determined that every proposal for term limits thus far offered is, in the words of our colleagues at Oxford University “a load of bollocks.” Quite a large load as it turns out. The issue with most proposals is they do not offer the flexibility required in a functional, and more typically dysfunctional, democracy. Every proposal we studied simply established a fixed number of terms that an elected official could serve. The ICBM Term-limit Solution (or ITS as it’s known) is a simple, understandable, and constitutional solution that is most importantly, not endorsed by any candidate or party, living or dead. That means it must be a good idea.

A quick note on optimizing non-democratic forms of government (communist, oligarchy, feudal, monarchy, Yahtzee, etc.) Our research, validated by historical precedent and wide-ranging simulations, determined that the optimized term for a leader in any of these governmental types was at most zero years, occasionally going negative.

ITS, The ICBM Term-limit Solution

The key component of ITS is a time limit, rather than a term limit. ITS’ proposed time-limited term-limit (TL2) is 20 years in US Federal elected office.

Why 20 Years?

Malcolm Gladwell postulates in his book Outliers that 10,000 hours of focused effort is required to become an expert in a field. Nearly any field. Using a nominal 2000 hour work year, it would take 5 years to become an expert in how to perform effectively as an elected official. Research at ICBM indicates that many elected officials become more expert at being elected than being effective, but that is the subject for a different post and course available for online enrollment (ICBM 287 – Management by Elected Officials: “Why you suck at your job”).

The Gartner Group (a research organization not affiliated with ICBM) has created what they term the “Hype-cycle” to describe how a new technology moves from concept to actual in use product.

The research arm of ICBM has performed extensive research on employee effectiveness over many, many years. Exhaustive tracking using radio collars has yielded a treasure trove of data. Compiling, comparing, contrasting and analyzing the data has allowed ICBM to prepare a graph predicting the productivity of a hypothetical standardized spherical employee in a vacuum. We have also, after considerable research and examination developed a graph showing the effectiveness of elected officials (note: while this graph is mainly based on officials in the United States our satellite campuses in other countries have reported nearly identical results generally only replacing coffee with a traditional local caffeinated equivalent such as tea, kombucha, MountainDew Code Red.)

 

There are several important items to note on this graph:

• Both regular employees and elected officials reach maximum productivity shortly after finding the “Coffee Maker of Productivity”
• Employees go through several “Troughs of Despair” during their tenure (for simplicity of this presentation only two of many are shown)
• Elected officials peak and then begin a slow decline until retirement, losing an election, death, or all three.
• At no point is an elected official more productive than a normal employee, with a single exception…
• Meetings! Elected officials are the single most effective meeting producer ever encountered by ICBM. Voting on a bill? Meeting. Congressional hearing? Meeting. Town Hall? Meeting. Security briefing? Meeting. Campaign rally? Meeting. Meeting with constituents? It even has meeting in the name. Everything on an elected official’s schedule is a meeting. In this single aspect, elected officials are the most effective “workers” on Earth.
• Not shown on the graph (because it’s simply too depressing to display) is that some employees, and many if not most, elected officials actually achieve negative productivity with age.

ICBM research shows that most people in nearly every field become useless after about 15 years. That is usually some point after they’ve passed the “Molehill of Acceptance” and are gliding down the “Slow Decline of Caring Until Retirement”. ITS’ 20 year time-limited term-limit (TL2) allows 5 years to become “expert” and provides 15 more years of service to become useless. That “feels” about right, but feelings have no place in management decisions so we performed an advanced AI driven, multi-factorial analysis to confirm our “feelings”. Needless to say, after manipulating the input variables sufficiently our feelings were validated.

ITS in Practice

Using the United States Federal Government as an example a 20 year time-limited term-limit (TL2) allows:

• 10 elected 2-years terms in the US House of Representatives
• 3 elected 6-year terms to the US Senate, plus another 2-year term in the Congress if the candidate is able to win said election (and willing to go slumming in the House).
• 2 4-year terms as Vice-President and 2 4-year terms as President plus 2 additional 2-year terms in Congress.
• 1 2-year term as Congressional Representative, 1 6-year term as Senator, 1 4-year term as Vice-President and 2 4-year terms as President.

The combinations and permutations are nearly endless, limited only by candidates’ creativity and ability to campaign effectively. And of course the 20 year TL2.

When an elected official is nearing the 20 year limit he or she (or zhe, they, it, “rather not say”, other, etc.) will be barred from running for any Federal office that would carry them beyond the 20 year limit. For instance a 3 term Senator could not run for Senate a forth time, nor would they be allowed to run for President or Vice President, but would be allowed to run for Congress and server one term.

Upon reaching the 20 year limit, elected official would be given a participation ribbon, a pension, a lifetime pass to our nation’s magnificent national parks, and then fitted with a subcutaneous GPS tracking device while being figuratively and literally escorted out the door. They would be barred from lobbying in Washington D.C. under penalty of a one-strike mandatory death penalty we term the Terminal Term Capitol Capital Punishment Policy, TTCCPP or T2C2P2 for short. The GPS tracker would allow easy enforcement of the TL2 T2C2P2 while still allowing retired officials to visit the Smithsonian Museum.

The more civics minded among you may ask, what about the Presidential line of succession? Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as amendments 12, 20 and 25 detail the line of succession should the President or Vice-President become unable to perform the duties of office. We propose a single change: if the successor has already served the maximum 20 years time-limited term-limit they will be skipped over in favor of the next eligible candidate. Any time served in any elected position, whether via election, succession or appointment, counts against ITS’ 20 year limit. If the successor is under the 20 year limit, they will be allowed to serve out the remaining term of the succeeded even if it means exceeding the 20 year limit. This provides the necessary exception that proves the rule. Additionally we propose frequently saying Presidential doody as it injects humor into otherwise dull civics lessons.

The same succession timer rule will apply to other elected offices (Senate or Congress). For instance, some states allow a surviving spouse to serve the remaining term when an elected official dies or is otherwise incapacitated (e.g. Bono, Giffords). Other states require the Governor, legislator or party to appoint a successor. ITS takes no position on the replacement candidate process except to start the time-limited term-limit time-clock, TL2TC, and that no potential appointee will be allowed to exceed 20 years in an elected position. A surviving spouse would be allowed to complete the remaining term in excess of the 20 year rule (see Presidential succession above), but an appointed candidate would not and would be required to retire at 20 years necessitating another replacement. While this may seem arbitrary and capricious on the surface, it probably is and will therefore be considered completely inviolate and unwavering.

That, in a nutshell, is the ICBM TL2 time-limited term-limit proposal for the United States Federal Government. This would provide a simple, fair, reasonable and enforceable compromise to maintaining a skilled pool of experienced public servants while also getting the dottering old codgers out of the way.

ps.

Presidential Doody.