The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (20 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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However, neither bureaucracy nor democracy operates in a political vacuum; they both relate to and influence one another with sometimes adverse effects. Depoliticization and debureaucratization take place simultaneously in the government as a result of this reciprocal relationship and both constitute a danger to the higher federal service.
Depoliticization, or movement away from the president's policy agenda, happens when appointees seek to get deeply involved in the daily workings of their agency and to micromanage the work of the career people they supervise. The more involved they become, the more they take on the perspective of their agency and the less responsive they become to the president who appointed them.
Debureaucratization happens when the White House responds to political executives' distancing by trying to exert more control over the top career levels. The result is that the careerists then tend to identify more with the policies and purposes of the executive and to move away from the career standard of neutral competence.
This scenario has political and career executives taking on each other's characteristics and passing one another in the wrong directions. While its degree of accuracy may be a point of debate, the theory does raise important questions because the ability of the two groups to associate with one another with integrity and to work cooperatively relates directly to the quality of government the citizens receive.
The political agenda of the president and his appointees emerges as a key factor in the roles-and-relationships issue, as can be seen in the ferocity of the policy conflicts that occasionally surface between political and career executives. However, despite the rhetoric of the Reagan administration and with some glaring exceptions from that era (e.g., EPA, DOE, FDA, Interior, Labor), political appointees are not generally independent policy actors within the bureaucratic agencies of the federal government.
Even if appointees do come with an ideological axe to grind and a powerful president behind them, ideas cannot be put into practice immediately in democratic governments. It takes time to set the stage for policy changes. Presidents and their appointees can start the process but, given the limited tenure of PASs, in most cases they will not be around long enough to bring their heart's desire to fruition. As they know, to their sometimes considerable frustration, the career bureaucrats can simply outwait them.
It is more likely, however, that while political appointees often enter an agency with hostility and suspicion toward the career employees
 
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whom they must supervise, they eventually come to respect the careerists, their expertise, and their dedication to their work. They come to see them as colleagues who are a valuable resource for managing the affairs of state.
While there is a certain inevitability of politicization in the system, undue politicization is the real issue. As political control of administration is fundamental to a democracy, the question of greater significance is how much and what kind of politicization exists. It is a question that cannot be answered empirically because its answer is grounded in values. Asking this question about the degree and kind of political control, however, is an important component of the debate.
Bureaucratizing the Presidency: Centralizing Power in the Executive Office, from FDR to George Bush
As discussed above, bureaucratizing the presidency, while highly refined by Nixon, did not originate with him. The genesis of the movement toward bureaucratizing the presidency or increasingly concentrating power in the White House staff is generally credited to the 1937 Brownlow Report's plea that "the President needs help" in running the government. Prior to FDR, cabinet officers carried the primary policy portfolios and presidents looked to executive assistants and personal service aides for other needs. The first sign of policy power leaking away from the cabinet came when Roosevelt turned to the Bureau of the Budget "to put the presidential stamp on the federal establishment [and] the modern, centralized apparatus of the White House began to take shape" (Smith 1988, 301).
Then, demands for an activist presidency provided the impetus for the expansion of the White House staff at the expense of both the permanent government and the president's cabinet. "As modern presidents mistrusted the permanent civil service to carry out their policies, they added staff to develop the reach and expertise to impose presidential will on the parochial interests of the departments" (ibid.).
1
Aggrandizement of the EOP at the expense of the cabinet began in the Truman administration, when staff moved from being generalists to taking areas of specialization and assistants of their own, "precedents for the fiefdoms that later distinguished the White House. At the same time, two major units, the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Security Council, joined the White House complex, each giving the president a capacity for overseeing important government activities that was not to-
 
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tally dependent on the departments" (Hess 1988, 2-3). Truman generally used the cabinet as a board of directors until the Korean War, when the National Security Council became his chief policy advisor (ibid.).
Eisenhower turned back to the cabinet for policy advice and slowed "the assimilation of power [somewhat]. . ., still expecting cabinet officers to run their departments with a minimum of second-guessing from his staff." Meanwhile, the White House staff continued to expand under Eisenhower due to "the president's faith in [military-style] management (a staff secretariat, a cabinet secretariat, and so forth)" (Hess 1988, 83). In 1954 he established "a two-person cabinet secretariat [as well as] several subject-oriented interagency councils and committees that operated independently of one another" (Newland 1985, 138).
Kennedy cut back on Eisenhower's institutional machinery, but the demands of an activist liberal administration with its belief that "government should do more faster" soon meant more growth for the "president's personal staff, Executive Office units, and presidential councils; . . . agencies such as the Office of Economic Opportunity were placed directly under the presidential umbrella" (Hess 1988, 3). "The growth of the Kennedy White House was based on the president's belief that if a task was important enough, it was necessary to have someone at the White House with responsibility for prodding the bureaucracy. Roosevelt's favored technique was to spawn new agencies; Kennedy more often chose to add White House expediters" (ibid., 83).
With Nixon's suspicions being at what Hess termed a "pathological" level, he had little or no confidence in either the civil service or his own appointees to carry out his policies. His White House got involved in department operations to the point that EOP staff sometimes bypassed cabinet officers and issued instructions directly to lower-level appointees. While Nixon used cabinet-level bodies, councils, for various policy issues, "that policy management approach was soon discontinued as being too fragmented and time-consuming." In the reorganization that followed, more power accrued to the EOP under Ehrlichman's Domestic Council, which used interagency task forces as "vehicles for isolating cabinet officers from the president and from channels of direct EOP control of subordinate agency levels. A curious mixture of extreme centralization and fragmentation within the EOP developed" (Newland 1985, 139-40).
As discussed in chapter 2, Nixon and his top aides so abused the prerogatives of the office, particularly following the 1972 election victory, that many began to worry about the imperialization of the presidency. Their excesses led his immediate successors to reject the strong-chief-of-staff model in favor of the spokes-in-a-wheel model. This model features
 
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several senior advisors who operate somewhat independently in their own domain and have direct access to the president; the chief has more of a coordinating than a commanding role. This model lasted until the beginning of Reagan's second administration, when Donald Regan reasserted the strong-chief model to similarly negative effect (Campbell 1991, 188).
Gerald Ford quickly restored cabinet and agency involvement in policy development. While his domestic policy staff coordinated interagency task forces, agency heads or other appointees chaired them. Coordination and involvement of all policy actors was improved (Newland 1985, 140). However, management went downhill in the Carter administration.
Domestic policy under . . . Carter was characterized by incoherence and even disorder. Though boasting competent policy staff in Stuart Eisenstadt and Jack Watson, and interagency task forces to facilitate EOP/agency interaction, cabinet departments were endlessly involved in policy formulation-and in disputes. In part, the Carter problem was caused by some trivialization of the policy staff role. Carter pulled back at midterm from his initial heavy involvement of the cabinet, and his Domestic Policy Staff became increasingly used for casework and for short-term political and legislative activities at the expense of policy development and synthesis. . . . A clear Carter difficulty was weak EOP leadership outside the Domestic Policy Staff. . . . The agencies included some strong domestic policy figures, . . . but generally the administration was a collection of disparate elements that never jelled. (Ibid., 140-41)
Further, partisan staffing took a great leap forward under Carter, both in the staffing of the EOP and in that of the top level of the administrative and program management of the agencies. This was accomplished with the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that created the Senior Executive Service. This "resulted in deinstitutionalization at the top of the career civil service, opening the way legally for further partisan politicization not only in the EOP but at key operating levels throughout government" (ibid., 141).
Additionally, Carter's administration saw a denigration of expertise, per se, and a resurgence of neo-Jacksonianism, "the notion that in this democracy any citizen [could] do any public job. Anybody chosen for whatever reason unrelated to management experience or talent, [could] run any government agency" (Sundquist 1979, 4).
Jimmy Carter's outsider status, while largely responsible for his election, also meant that his grasp of the nature and needs of his new office
 
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was unsophisticated and provincial. His knowledge of political and administrative personnel in Washington was likewise limited. So he used his experience as governor of Georgia to map out a plan for organizing and staffing his office "as though Washington were Atlanta, writ large" (ibid., 4). This was not at all unusual, for
all presidents, even those with long experience in Washington, have surrounded themselves with home-state personnel to some degree. Truman had his Missouri "cronies," Kennedy his "Irish Mafia" from Massachusetts, Nixon his southern Californians. Yet Carter seems to have carried home-state cronyism beyond the point of any other recent president. The result was an inner circle that, far from compensating for Carter's personal weaknesses, compounded them to a singular degree. Except for the fortunate influence of Vice President Mondalethe only outsider who seems to have become a generalist adviserthe inner circle was ill-equipped for the crucial task of broadening Carter's own perspective, of educating him in the problems and outlooks of other regions and in the ways of the Congress and of the labyrinthine executive branch over which he now presided. (Ibid., 4)
However, the early days of Carter's administration saw an intentional downgrading of the EOP to balance what was widely understood as its excess power under Nixon. At the same time, Carter emphasized "cabinet government" as distinct from "White House government" and expended considerable care and energy in selecting his team. A thorough nationwide talent search resulted in a cabinet of women and men of "experience and proven competence. . . . [Though] most of the Cabinet members had made no reputation as managers at all, . . . by the standard of any recent presidency [the] twelve rank highnot a hack among them" (ibid., 5).
Carter's notion of a non-ideological process that would create the best of all possible policies required, above all, the best of all possible peopleexperienced, intelligent, open-minded. His instructions, therefore, were for the transition staff to identify the most qualified people available, which resulted in a confused and redundant talent search that generated 125,000 resumes, not including 16,000 suggestions from Congress. Because he thought experience and considerations of affirmative action more important than . . . political philosophy, the administration he cobbled together showed a wide range of opinion that ultimately caused turmoil. (Hess 1988, 154)

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