Ronald Chesney Moe, Political Scientist and Historian by Thomas H. Neale

Ronald Chesney Moe, 73, a political scientist and historian, died May 10 at his home in Washington after a short illness. Dr. Moe was born in San Diego in 1937 and spent his formative years in southern California. He spoke fondly of growing up during the post-World War II era, in a time when the Golden State offered a bright future and was a magnet for millions of people seeking the American Dream. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Claremont Men’s College in 1959, he pursued additional graduate-level studies at UCLA, and ultimately earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1962. Interrupting his academic training, he served four years in the U.S. Army Reserve, with active duty as an intelligence officer from 1961 to 1963. He then returned to Columbia, where he was awarded a doctorate in public law and government in 1968. After three years teaching political science at San Diego State University, Dr. Moe moved with his family to Washington in 1970 to accept a position as a policy advisor in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). His job interview was jointly conducted by his first superiors at OEO, Director Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Dick Cheney. Within a year, Dr. Moe moved to the Department of Health Education and Welfare, and subsequently to the Cost of Living Council, which was charged with administering the Nixon administration’s program of wage and price controls. Dr. Moe later said his experience on the council cured him of any illusions that an economy as large and complex as that of the United States could be successfully managed top-down from Washington. In 1973, Dr. Moe joined the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress as a policy analyst. He was ultimately promoted to the senior service level position of specialist in government organization and management, where he acquired a national reputation for his expertise in the fields of government management and organization, and government-sponsored corporations. At CRS, his duties included monitoring developments in his areas of expertise, interacting regularly with the public administration policy community in government, academia, and non-government organizations, producing written analytical products for Congress, and support at all stages of the process of oversight and legislation. He met frequently with Senators, Representatives, and senior congressional staff, provided informational briefings, assisted in legislative development and bill-drafting, and participated in planning and witness development for committee hearings. He also gave formal testimony before committees of Congress. His written products included over 200 CRS Reports for Congress and confidential memoranda for Members of Congress. After Dr. Moe retired from the Congressional Research Service in June, 2002, he continued to provide highly valued advice and mentoring to newly appointed staff members on a volunteer basis for several years.

Throughout his government career, Dr. Moe continued to serve as an active member of the public administration and political science communities. In the Washington area, he taught at George Washington and American universities, the Brookings Institution, and the National Academy of Public Administration, and was an occasional lecturer at Princeton and the University of Virginia. At the time of his death, he was also a teaching fellow at the Center for the Study of American Government at the Johns Hopkins University. As a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration and an active member of other scholarly societies, Dr. Moe was a contributor to and participant in, and frequently chaired panels or delivered papers at a broad range of academic conferences over a period of four decades. He collaborated in scholarly reports on federal government corporations, Federal Prison Industries, the Uranium Enrichment Corporation, privatization of government functions, the decline of the managerial presidency, and guiding principles for organizing federal departments and agencies. He was a prolific author and editor of and contributor to scholarly publications. In addition to the body of his work for the Congressional Research Service, he was the author of two book-length studies, Administrative Renewal: Executive Reorganization Commissions on in the 20th Century, and The Hoover Commission Revisited, and the editor of several more. Dr. Moe contributed more than 50 articles and reviews to newspapers, scholarly journals, and book-length professional publications. Dr. Moe was a steadfast proponent of limited government at all levels, but he was equally passionate in his advocacy for the capable and effective administration of government functions, especially at the federal level. He believed the legitimate duties of government, as he saw them, should be performed efficiently and economically, by a professional civil service, working within the guidelines of federal management law, and subject to a minimum of political interference. These goals, he believed, could best be achieved by a separate federal Office of Management, a proposal he advocated for two decades. The Office of Management would provide long term governmental perspective and guidance throughout the executive branch on such issues as organizational management, legislative review and clearance, procurement policy, financial management, and regulation review and management. Dr. Moe was not, however, an advocate of excessive concentration of power in the executive branch. His 29 years on Capitol Hill convinced him that frequent and probing scrutiny by an active and informed Congress was an indispensable element in promoting efficiency in government, maintaining the balance of power, and restraining executive branch agencies and officials from overstepping their mandates. He was dubious of the value of recurring trends in government management, including the push for “privatization” and the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” proposals. Too often, he wrote, such initiatives were implemented in reckless haste, ran their course with decidedly mixed results, and were then abandoned for the next big idea in public administration when they failed to deliver as promised. In their wake, he asserted, they left a demoralized workforce, hollowed-out agencies, and a misaligned federal administrative structure.

As a leading authority on government-sponsored corporations and enterprises, Dr. Moe was similarly wary of proposals that he believed pushed beyond even the most creative interpretations of federal management law. To him, government-sponsored enterprises, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, privately owned yet publicly chartered, and implicitly enjoying the “full faith and credit” of the United States, set a dangerous precedent. Nearly a decade before their disastrous collapse in 2008, Dr. Moe sounded some of the earliest warnings about the potential for massive federal liability should Fannie or Freddie fail. Dr. Moe was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Academy of Political Science, the American Political Science Association, the American Society of Public Administration, the National Association of Scholars and the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC, and a member of the board of editors of American Review of Public Administration. In 1995, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Beyond his professional commitments, Dr. Moe and his wife, Grace Tyler Moe, cultivated a broad circle of friends and an active social life. Their friends include prominent political figures and members in good standing of the “permanent Washington establishment” from both parties, embracing the full range of the political spectrum. In an era when Democrats and Republicans, and the left and right, are said never to socialize, the Moes welcomed guests of all political persuasions, and engaged in conversation and debate that was spirited, but always civil. Dr. Moe was a voracious reader in American and world history, current politics, and his areas of professional interest. He had a fine eye for antique furniture, and, along with his wife, developed a professional level of knowledge and appreciation of oriental carpets, learned from their personal friend Harold Keshishian, the dean of Washington oriental rug merchants. As a graduate student at Columbia in the 1960s, Dr, Moe met the elderly Alexander Kerensky, the Russian leader deposed by Lenin in 1917. Their chance encounter helped stimulate a lifelong interest in late imperial Russian culture and politics, particularly the events surrounding the murder of Grigori Rasputin, the Orthodox monk who wielded great influence in the Russian court through his relationship with the empress Alexandra and his apparent ability to cure the crown prince Alexei’s hemophiliac hemorrhages. Beginning in the 1970s, Dr. Moe undertook intensive research on the conspiracy to kill Rasputin, tracking down the descendants of many of the principal actors, uncovering lost manuscripts and autobiographies, and correcting the previously accepted historical record of many factual errors surrounding the conspiracy. His forthcoming book, Prelude to Revolution: the Murder of Rasputin, will provide the most accurate account of the events that many scholars agree set the stage for the fateful Russian revolutions of 1917. Dr. Moe is survived by his wife, Grace Tyler Moe, of Washington, a son, Steven, a daughter Cynthia D’Errico and her husband Jim, two grandchildren, and a sister.