The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (43 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Page 136
in Washington. Where most political appointees trip up is in three areas: inability to deal with Congress, with the media, and with interest groups." One former PAS suggested that successful appointees are
open minded, willing to learn and trust, and they possess a sixth sense of when to delegate and when to make the decision themselves [because there is] a fine line between responsibility and authority. They stress competence over agenda. Those who are cause-oriented tend to let agency management go downhill while they push one or two pet causes. Those who are apolitical technocrats simply don't have a feel for how the town works. The most successful are the generalists and political animals who understand the political process and possess a sense of how the town and the country work. Their principal task is to manage the organization they inherit. Too many PASs come in with an agendathey want to accomplish one or two things. This is a fatal flaw. You have to deal with everything that's on your plate. You can't let everything else go in the name of agenda. Those who see their role as steward and manager will have a more lasting impact than those pushing their agenda.
As noted earlier, concerns over the neophyte status of the PASs are somewhat assuaged by studies showing that many have experience working in the agency to which they are appointed or are from congressional staffs, think tanks, and interest groups based in Washington. Given this, the EPA's Linda Fisher wonders "whether 'in-and-outer' is still a valid characterization of presidential appointees in a time when so few of them come 'in' to the government from very far 'out"' (Mackenzie 1987, xvi). Certainly,
amateur
is an inadequate characterization of many;
short-timer
or
short-termer
is perhaps the more accurate designation.
Assessing what will make for the success of PASs is even more difficult than measuring qualifications because "success" has different definitions. The same former PAS who stressed management over agenda measured success by "the degree of change in an agency, the number of programs scuttled, and an absence of scathing IG (inspector general) or GAO reports. A successful appointee is one who doesn't embarrass the administration or produce any scandals, real or trumped-up." PAS success is not an unalloyed virtue, however; it can carry costs for both the bureaucracy and the president. Within the agency one of the "organizational costs of political executives' success" may be that the new PAS's agenda for change will likely disrupt or displace the previous PAS's agenda. Also, change in one part of the organization will affect other parts of the orga-
 
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nization, perhaps lowering performance of the agency as a whole. Additionally, PAS-led change may create divisions among the career executives, causing a reduction in the agency's "capacity for effective cooperation and advice when the next appointee comes along with a different agenda . . . it may be precisely the demoralized segments that the next appointee needs most to draw upon. The result is an imbalanced organization that can walk with only its right or left feet" (Heclo 1985, 372-73).
As goes the old saying, "Be careful of what you wish for; you may get it." The success of one appointee may be the undoing of the next. Better one should take a holistic view of governance, looking at the entire government and its interworkings in evaluating PAS success, because, as Heclo notes, "government is a web of actions, reactions, and anticipations spread across the political landscape" (ibid., 374).
External liabilities that can come from PASs "'successes' in translating their agenda into bureaucratic behavior" are that the PAS may become a lightning rod for mobilizing outside groups to counter her or his policies or that the PAS may make necessary compromises that "tie the president to a set of understandings that reduce his future room for political and bureaucratic maneuver." Also, as with internal agency repercussions, change in one agency may adversely affect another. The result of uncoordinated successes may be an "increase in the muddle of the whole" in terms of the larger government (ibid., 373-74).
Benefits of the Short-Termer System
For all its flaws, the short-termer system has points to recommend it.
The appointment power is simple, readily available, and enormously flexible. It assumes no sophisticated institutional designs and little ability to predict the future, and it is incremental in the extreme: in principle, each appointment is a separate action. . . . By taking advantage of these attractive properties, the president is uniquely positioned to try to construct his own foundation for countering bureaucratic resistance, mobilizing bureaucratic competence, and integrating the disparate elements of his administration into a more coherent whole. Given his general lack of resources and options [and the time constraints of his term limitations), these are enticing prospects indeed. (Moe 1991, 142)
The system provides the flexibility to move people between agencies on short notice and to make modifications to agency commitments. It
 
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also provides safe "cover for shuffling out men who [can] not perform" (Rehfuss 1973, 131).
Even those who criticize the short-termer system acknowledge its utility to the country: "The injection of outsiders into high-level positions brings vitality to government, prevents the bureaucracy from becoming encrusted and too powerful, and makes government more responsive to the will of the people as expressed through the election of the president. A fringe benefit is that the private sector is enriched by the return to it of executives broadened by government experience" (Brauer 1987, 193).
Vitality is another of the benefits of the present system: "In a world where bureaucratic routine can easily suffocate innovation, this vitality is a considerable advantage to the work of the executive branch." There are other benefits of the short-termer system, such as its potential for political control that provides an opportunity for a highly focused administration such as Reagan's "to truly shake up the bureaucracy and implement its mandate" (Heclo 1987, 207).
Additionally, many PASs bring skills to deal with political pressures. They must "be able to navigate among competing demands of the White House, Congress, interest groups, and their own bureaucracy," not to mention the ever-present media. Short tenure carries the freedom to shortchange family and personal time and income needs, when one knows that it will not last forever. This has been characterized as "come in, burn out, move on." Furthermore, migration back and forth across the amorphous boundaries of government and nongovernment worlds infuses government with the outside perspectives of business and academia and lends deeper understandings of government to the nongovernment institutions of society (ibid.).
Good PAS appointments redound to the glory of the president who makes them, such as JFK's "best and brightest." "It was the coterie of talented aides he assembled rather than Kennedy alone that gave his administration the somewhat luminous quality for which it ultimately came to be rememberedby the public if not by historians" (Rourke 1991b, 124).
Regardless of Truman's assertion that the buck stopped at his desk, PASs provide political cover to a president, deflecting or absorbing abuse or blame that might otherwise be his.
Secretaries of agriculture have suffered this kind of martyrdom since at least the days of President Eisenhower's appointee, Ezra Taft Benson, as they struggled valiantly, if unsuccessfully, with the endless problems of

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