The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (39 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Page 123
Additionally, expectations are different in government.
Remarked Tom Korologos, a former Nixon White House congressional liaison aide and Reagan transition advisor, "Those who hadn't been here before and who come from the business community find things don't occur when they should, that they don't happen fast enough and often don't work. They become frustrated because they have so many bosses and discover that they don't have the impact they thought they would." (Ibid., 142)
Even
asking
about qualifications of PASs is a politically charged venture. Although many can cite examples of PASs who are in over their heads, there is no standard list of qualifications that one can use to determine if PASs measure up to the job requirements. While the issue of qualifications for specific positions may be addressed more thoroughly in the future,
2
for now perhaps the best one can do is to look to the personal characteristics and overall experience that tend to make for success in PAS positions.
The conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, is very clear about its requirements for PAS appointees. First is "character, toughness, reliability," followed closely by loyalty to the president and his agenda, and then by skills. But, clearly, "the greatest of these" is loyalty:
Loyalty is the cement which binds a team together. This can be tested by questioning whether an individual knows what the president has said he wants; whether the applicant for agency head has, in general, agreed with the president's positions in the past; and whether he has a reputation for sticking by his friends. . . . the president must ask whether the individual has the proper mix of leadership ability, management skills, and program knowledge. He must guard against falling into the trap of appointing someone who has gained program knowledge by spending many years in an industry or field with which the agency has a close relationship. Often such people are the worst appointees, because they cannot subordinate loyalty to a special interest group to the loyalty they owe the president. The selection should not be based primarily on technical qualifications, but rather on
who is the most qualified of those who meet the first two criteria, character and loyalty.
(Heatherly and Pines 1989, 806)
While this sentiment rightly warns against the danger of capture of agencies by the industries PASs regulate, it also suggests a nostalgic throwback to the days of Andrew Jackson's administration. In the reforms
 
Page 124
of public service in the early nineteenth century it was popularly assumed that running the country was a task that virtually any citizen could handle, regardless of education or training. Specialized knowledge and prior experience were assumed to be unnecessary, and perhaps a sign of elitism inappropriate to a democratic nation. The populism of the late-twentieth-century conservative movement with its distrust of professional bureaucrats harkens back to this older form of bias against expertise. It finds its modern-day voice in the odd bedfellows of Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader. It overflowed into the legislative branch, finding its full expression in the 1994 midterm elections when expertise of any sort seemed to discredit candidates and
incumbent
became a dirty word.
"Trusting the Family Heirlooms to a Two-Year-Old": PAS Tenure and its Effect on the Bureaucracy
3
Ban and Ingraham's study of the Reagan SES found a correlation between the agencies that had the most political-career tension and those with the shortest political tenures:
As one might expect, higher levels of tension were clearly evident in those agencies, such as HUD and OPM, where this administration's policies were sharply divergent from those of past administrations. These are also the agencies in which political appointees have the shortest tenure in position. Thus, in the agencies where one might expect it would take the longest to forge relationships of trust, the time available is shortest. The result is often what one would predict. As one appointee described it: "There is no doubt that it will always be East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet in regard to political and career relationships. You have good relationships with the people you work with every day, but not a sense of commonality of mission." (Ban and Ingraham 1990, 114)
The tenure figures for Senate-confirmed appointees are higher than the eighteen to twenty-four months usually cited for political appointees in general. For the period of July to December 1979, for example, tenure for PASs was slightly more than thirty-one months. Meanwhile,
the figure for noncareer SES members was significantly lower; their average tenure was only 1.7 years, or roughly 20 months. This may not seem problematic, but the gross average hides some dramatic patterns. Addi-
 
Page 125
tional analysis reveals that during this period fully 40% of political executives government-wide occupied positions for less than one year. By comparison, Heclo (1977, 104) found that 16% of undersecretaries and 22% of assistant secretaries had a tenure of less than 12 months on the job.
This turnover did not reflect high inter-agency mobility. Rather, it indicates total numbers leaving government, as well as extensive movement
within
agencies . . . (During the Reagan administration) fully one-third of political executives either changed jobs or left government each year.
Inter-agency
moves remained infrequent. In the highest year (the first nine months of 1985), there were only 34 such moves governmentwide. (Ban and Ingraham 1990, 112-14)
This degree of change indicates "a surprising level of continuous turbulence among political appointees, and of continual change" far beyond what could normally be attributed to a new administration. As one careerist put it, "Five years [into the Reagan presidency] we are still circling one another in this agency, and there is still a we-them mentality." Considering that it takes approximately a year to get "fully 'up to speed' . . . the consequences of short tenure may be both decreasing competence and increasing mistrust of the career bureaucracy" (ibid., 114). This has negative consequences for presidential policy direction in agencies generally at odds with that direction. When PASs bring
little substantive experience and high levels of mistrust of the career bureaucracy, the remarkably high percentage of appointees remaining in position for less than a year poses a major problem for political management-managers who cannot learn one job before they move on to another, and whose potential for either competent management or for developing working relationships with the career bureaucracy is necessarily lower than that of longer-term employees. The paradox is that those agencies where the greatest amount of change is desired may be populated by political executives with the least capacity to direct it. (Ibid., 1 15)
Short tenure also puts political appointees at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis the career executives, who are typically in place much longer. It is clear that "without a steep learning curve . . . political appointees are likely to find that their capabilities for effective action have matured at about the time they are leaving office" (Heclo 1977, 110).
The transient nature of political appointees limits both their tenure

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