The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (11 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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cabinet appointees were out of touch, too busy, or too harried by the White House to find out [what was happening]. Not only were domestic affairs not handled well under this type of a system, but tensions arose as junior White House staffers second-guessed presidential appointees on matters that the latter thought were of relatively lesser consequence and that they should have been trusted to handle themselves or to delegate. (Nathan, 52-53)
An unintended consequence and additional irony of this strategy was that the White House and Executive Office staffs, in contrast to the original plan, grew in size and power early in the Nixon administration. The result was that by the end of its third year the cost of the Executive Office staff had doubled since the Johnson years. Nixon, "'distrustful of bureaucracy, . . . built a kind of defense against it-and in doing so he . . . built his own bureaucracy"' (ibid., 45).
There were other costs to Nixon's administrative presidency. For one, it roused the Congress to action. In response to his budget impoundment actions, the Congress acted to protect its role in the governing process by passing the Budget Impoundment and Control Act in 1974. This act sought to restore congressional oversight of federal expenditures by, among other actions, forbidding backdoor spending of funds by agencies without advance allocations. It also prohibited executive impoundment of congressionally mandated funds for programs the president sought to kill administratively when he could not do it legislatively (Warren 1988, 183).
The impoundment strategy also provoked the first rumblings of impeachment of the president and put the Congress on general alert:
In part at least because of its conviction that presidents were ignoring or usurping legislative authority by governing in a unilateral way through the administrative presidency, the Congress has reacted against this presidential strategy. In recent years, the Congress has both strengthened its own surveillance of the executive branch and sought to subject the decisions and actions of executive officials to closer scrutiny by outside forces. (Rourke 1991a, 116)
These outside forces include the courts. The Democratic-controlled Congress, distrustful of executive agencies headed by the Republican White House, made it easier for the agencies to be taken to court through its writing of legislation and encouragement of watchdog public interest
 
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groups. The courts have thus become involved in the bureaucracy through judicial review, subsequently limiting administrative discretion in carrying out agency mission (ibid., 117).
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Congressional retaliation also resulted in the enactment of the War Powers Act that sought to limit the president's power to wage undeclared wars and in revisions to the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater access to government materials. Congress also made alterations to the Privacy Act, giving individuals access to files the government might be keeping on them, and to the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which required the president to notify the Congress of covert operations abroad. Regardless of the long-term efficacy of these acts, they signaled the power of the Congress to block or blunt presidential administrative aspirations.
Ronald Reagan's Administrative Presidency
Although most presidents in the modern era employed the administrative presidency to some extent, President Reagan was President Nixon's true heir in that respect. Proclaiming a counterrevolution to the past fifty years of social and political affairs, Reagan rode into office on a wave of popular discontent. He intended to reverse the nation's course held since FDR's New Deal and to undo the Great Society programs of LBJ. "Government is not the solution to our problem," said the new president in his inaugural address, "government is the problem."
Reagan's administration placed strategic emphasis on political control of the bureaucracy. In fact, he so successfully exploited the powers vested in political appointees by the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978 that
One informed observer "concluded that the CSRA has been "a disaster for merit". . , that traditional merit values have been undermined. . . . Under Reagan, responsibility of the personnel system to the political system is largely defined as responsiveness to ideological executive control. That contrasts with the traditionally neutral civil service responsibility to statutory provisions in a constitutional system of separation of powers and a rule of law. (Newland 1983, 15)
Unlike Nixon, who determined the need for an administrative strategy by the end of his first term, Reagan coupled his legislative strategy with an administrative strategy almost from the beginning. His legislative strategy initially met with sweeping success with passage of the budget act in 1981, but stalled thereafter. As that happened, he stepped up his ad-
 
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ministrative strategy in the second and third years of his first term. Those years also saw an increase in use of the judicial strategy as the administration assumed a more aggressive stance in court cases (Nathan 1986, 128-35). The Reagan (and later Bush) Justice Department became a frequent complainant against the extension of civil rights and regulatory control of industry, particularly in regard to the banking and airline industries and in health, safety, and environmental issues. Also, by the end of his two terms Reagan had appointed four Supreme Court justices and over half of the federal judiciary, filling those positions with predominantly young judges who passed his political litmus test.
Nixon's "executive privilege" was perfected to a fine art by Reagan, who made joint appointments of individuals to both PAS and PA (appointments in the Executive Office of the President [EOP] that do not require Senate confirmation) positions. When called upon to testify before Congress, these PAS/PA appointees would simply don their PA hat and refuse to testify, citing this executive privilege. As had Nixon before him, Reagan set the White House over and against not only the Congress, but also against his own bureaucracy, appointing chiefs of domestic civilian bureaus who were hostile to the basic mission and goal of their agency (Rourke 1991a, 114-15). One commentator, Harold Raines, described the "Reagan appointments strategy in the
New York Times
in 1981 as 'a revolution of attitudes involving the appointment of officials who in previous administrations might have been ruled out by a concern over possible lack of qualifications or conflict of interest or open hostility to the mission of the agencies they now lead"' (Aberbach 1991, 227).
The breadth and depth of Reagan's approach made Nixon's administrative strategy look amateurish by comparison, as Reagan made use of all the strategic tools of the administrative presidency-appointment, removal, budget, reorganization, delegation to the states, central clearance, and cost-benefit analysis.
Facing a Democratic House and, after 1986, a Democratic Senate as well, the Reagan administration increasingly looked to the PASs and their powers to advance its policy objectives. According to Salamon and Abramson,
The predominant characteristic of the Reagan approach to personnel selection was its emphasis on centralized, unrelenting White House control of the appointment process. The control was achieved through a variety of means: starting the personnel search early; giving the personnel chief access to the president; discouraging independent "head hunting" on the part of cabinet secretaries; making a heavy commitment of senior White

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