FCC Chairman uses management theory to improve agency decision-making

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wants to increase the quality of economic analysis done by the FCC staff:

...he explained that economic analysis, primarily in the form of cost-benefit analysis, is largely ignored. Actually, it is probably worse than that: Those types of analyses aren’t even done. For example, significant areas of the agency’s work in recent years ... contained nothing that would pass as economic analysis.

So how to do this?  Chairman Pai wants to change the organizational structure from an M-form (with economists mixed in with attorneys) to a functional organization, with economists in their own division.

Some middling economists had suggested exactly this in an article titled "The Economics of Organizing Economists."

... a functional organization has a couple of advantages over a divisional form. First, a functional organization is more likely to keep up with new methodologies and so be able to apply them to enforcement questions. Second, since the staff economists and attorneys produce information, not traditional goods or services, there is an advantage to the independent analyses done by attorneys and economists. Without two separate memos, the decentralization of decision making in a divisional organization is likely to result in less information reaching the ultimate decision makers.