The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (4 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Immediately below the PASs in the political food chain are the members of the Senior Executive Service (SES), the top-level bureaucrats whose ranks are 10 percent (non-Senate-confirmed) political appointees and 90 percent careerists. The civil service with grades fifteen and below comprises the bulk of the career bureaucracy below the SES, but within the civil service there is a special class of political appointees, the Schedule Cs, who are appointed to ranks nine through fifteen and fill whatever activity their political superiors devise, from chauffeur to personal secretary or assistant. They occupy positions of a confidential, non-policymaking nature.
Concomitant with the growth and filtration of appointees down the ranks of the bureaucracy, questions arose about the quality and qualifications of the president's people. Part of the difficulty in addressing these is-
Table 1.1. PAS Executive Level Positions
Executive Level
Position
EL 1
Cabinet secretaries, agency chiefs, and a few others, such as the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. trade representative
EL 2
Deputy directors of cabinet agencies, heads of major noncabinet bureaus, such as NASA, the Office of Personnel Management, the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, members of some independent regulatory commissions (IRCs), and heads of some offices in the Executive Office of the President, such as the Office of Technology Policy and the Council of Economic Advisers
EL 3
Agency undersecretaries, members of IRCs whose chairs are 2s, and heads of other agencies, such as the Federal Maritime Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the General Services Administration, and the Peace Corps
EL 4
Assistant secretaries and administrators of major units in the cabinet agencies, inspectors general, general counsels, deputy directors whose boss is a 3 or commissioners whose chair is a 3, and heads of specialized agencies such as the Federal Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Selective Service Administration, and the Panama Canal Commission
EL 5
Deputies to 4s, directors of smaller agencies or large departments, such as the Asian Development Bank and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, assistant secretaries, and general counsels in the smaller agencies
 
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sues is what might be termed a knowledge gap about the appointees themselves. Who are they? From whence do they come? Why do they choose to respond to their president's call to serve in what can be a demanding and thankless task?
Meanwhile, a certain conventional wisdom has developed that posits the typical appointee as a "political hack," someone who has a political job for which even the most charitable person would not consider him or her qualified. Usually, persons so labeled are large contributors to or loyal workers in the party, such as fourth-level campaign workers (or their sons and daughters), who are placed in a top-level position in the administration. Additionally, they are thought to possess limited knowledge of or commitment to government and to be self-aggrandizing, agenda-driven ideologues, more committed to their own goals than to the competent administration of their agency. This "wisdom" regarding political appointees has been sliding on a mostly downhill trajectory since FDR's administration, coinciding with government's growth and with the increased number and deeper placement of political appointees that has accompanied the modern presidency.
While appointees have been used for more obviously political strategies since FDR's New Deal, it took Ronald Reagan to mobilize political appointees into a full-blown frontal assault force on the very government they served, that government on which Reagan blamed many of the country's problems. His "bureaucrat bashing" was the rallying cry of many of his political appointees who were appointed, in significant cases, to dismantle the very programs they were named to head. Further, the near-religious fervor with which the Reaganites embraced the business lobby and sought to "get government off its back" led the president to appoint regulators from the industries they were charged to regulate, particularly at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Reagan's people might fairly be termed emotional (as well as virtual) short-termers because so many were actively hostile to that which they served. Simply put, their hearts were not in it.
According to many, the defining characteristics of the Reagan political appointees were personal loyalty to the president, passing a political litmus test on abortion (against), and sizeable contributions to the Republican party. Prominent features demonstrated by members of this group included little or no previous government experience, frequent turnover, the dominance of an aggressive political agenda over general administrative concern or competence, conflict of interest, and often aggressive, sometimes personal hostility toward the careerists in the bu-
 
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reaucracy. Finally, Reagan's appointees included a large number of political appointees eventually under criminal indictment, some of whom were convicted and served time in prison. It all added up to the "sleaze factor."
These characteristics fed the conventional wisdom about political appointees and led to a certain disdain for them that was confirmed by the postadministration revelations of high-level wrongdoing by several Reagan appointees long after he left office. Specifically, the scandals in Reagan's Department of Housing and Urban Development and unresolved questions about the role of President Reagan and then-Vice President Bush in the Iran-Contra arms deal continued to tarnish the integrity and plague the credibility of the Reagan and Bush administrations.
With the election of George Bush in 1988, there were hopes that the credibility of political appointees would be elevated beyond that of "rich party hacks being rewarded for loyalty," as cocktail chatter and political punditry would have it. In contrast to Reagan, Bush stressed the value of public service and public servants, attempting to restore respect for both. He also moved to screen political appointees more carefully in order to assure both competence and absence of scandal. The watchword of this guarded administration, according to inside observers, was "make no mistakes."
To what extent, then, was George Bush successful in reversing the downward trend of the conventional wisdom by upgrading the image of high-level political (presidential) appointees? Were his appointees emotional as well as virtual short-termers, or did they have a larger commitment to government and its smooth running? Further, what is the future of the institution of PASs in the modern era?
To answer these questions a survey of the full-time Bush PASs in the executive branch was conducted. Sponsored by the General Accounting Office, the Bush PAS Survey was mailed to the entire universe of PASs at their homes late in the administration.
2
There was one follow-up mailing. The overall response rate was 38.4 percent, with some 35 percent of the respondents volunteering for follow-up interviews. Some twenty-eight PASs were then interviewed in their offices in one-on-one confidential interviews that lasted from an hour to an hour and a half. Intended to add color and flesh to the Bush PAS Survey, the interviews helped round out the picture of this group and contributed additional data to the study. Twenty-three congressional staff, careerists, and former PASs were also interviewed to help complete the picture.
Beyond an examination of the institution of presidential appointments, this book presents a composite picture of the Bush PASs themselves. It delineates four major areas of inquiry that are grounded in the
 
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empirical study of and personal interviews with the PASs: PASs' personal identity; their professional backgrounds and qualifications; intrabureaucratic issues and interbureaucratic issues.
PASs' Identity
In analyzing the Bush presidential appointees, the first issue is that of identity. Simply put, who were the people at the highest levels of government? How did they attain their positions? What were their general political leanings and party affiliations? What was their gender and racial/ethnic mix? What kinds of sacrifices did they make to accept a PAS position? What kinds of rewards did they reap?
The most recent comprehensive study of PAS executives was conducted during the second Reagan administration by the National Academy of Political Administration in 1985. It surveyed PASs who had served as far back as 1964 but encompassed relatively few current PAS appointees. Therefore, a picture of PAS executives through the Bush administration is lacking. This work fills the information gap by providing an analysis of the Bush administration's PAS workforce.
PASs' Professional Background and Qualifications
The second issue is the qualifications of the PASs. What kinds of professional background and experience did the Bush appointees offer? What was their knowledge of government and its workings? As mentioned, the conventional wisdom emanating from the Reagan era was that appointees had limited knowledge of and experience in government.
3
The temporary and short-term nature of political appointments means that those with few qualifications and little experience in government of necessity spend most of their limited time in office learning the ropes, "two years of on-the-job training," as one PAS termed it. Then they (theoretically) move on to more lucrative jobs outside government, using their government service as a useful line on their resume and their government contacts as a bargaining chip with prospective employers. To what extent was this true of the Bush appointees? Were they also emotional short-termers, or did they have a more long-term commitment to government service? Where would they go after their current PAS service?
Intrabureaucratic Issues
The third issue examined here is the relationship between political and career executives. What were PASs' sense of job satisfaction and feel-

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