Modern Living: Maximizing NATAPROBU

Most Americans have learned to coexist with the inefficiencies and jargon of bureaucracy, accepting them with sullen resignation. Not so James Boren, president of NATAPROBU (for National Association of Professional Bureaucrats), a mischievous group organized to reform bureaucracy by lampooning it. Last week, at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., designed to demonstrate the bureaucratic characteristic of "dynamic inactivism," Boren belatedly named Sandra Summers, a Pentagon secretary, as "Miss Bureaucrat 1969."

Boren's Three Laws sum up NATAPROBU's philosophy: 1) When in charge, ponder; 2) When in trouble, delegate; and 3) When in doubt, mumble. The organization dedicates itself to "optimize the status quo by fostering adjustive adherence to procedural abstractions and rhetorical clearances." It also promotes "feasibility studies, reviews, surveys of plans, surveys of feasibility studies and surveys of reviews." NATAPROBU's gobbledygook letters and memos, sent irregularly to offending agencies, sound alarmingly real. Victims of the Internal Revenue Service's terrifying forms, for example, will immediately recognize such splendid Borenized phrases as "quanticized investment revenues" and "optimized financial implementation."

Boring from Within. NATAPROBU's latest campaign is aimed at the State Department, which has decided that all outgoing telegrams be prepared on special "optical character recognition" typewriters. At the moment, only three such typewriters exist at State, and only a few operators have mastered the system's intricacies. That provides Boren with a target that seems almost too good to be true. NATAPROBU's chief executive officer, president and chairman of the board knows bureaucracy well: he struggled for seven years as a middle-level official in the Agency for International Development (AID) a renowned citadel of red tape, and served previously in the U.S. Army (as captain) and the Congress (as an aide to Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough). Now head of a private business and educational consulting firm in Virginia, he funds NATAPROBU's $3,000-a-year budget from his own pocket. "Some people putter in the garden," says Boren, "some jog around the neighborhood; I orchestrate NATAPROBU."

Some orchestration. Its offices in the National Press Building are a model of inefficiency. Phone wires, some disconnected, make Boren's desk look like a spaghetti bowl. Papers, stamps and stamp pads are everywhere. One example: "Cleared/Deputy Associate Assistant Chairman/Committee on Clearances/NATAPROBU." There are copies of Inaction Line, the organization's own very occasional publication; a clutch of bureaucrat pencils­featuring erasers at both ends­and even copies of a society song called Let's Fingertap Together. Boren estimates that the organization has about 300 members, but admits the roster has not grown much in the past year. Bureaucratic inefficiency has slowed recruiting, of course, but there are other reasons as well.