The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (5 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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BOOK: The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush
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ings about working in government and their relations with career executives? The general consensus is that there is a long history of poor relations between political and career executives in the federal service, fueled by politicians' hostility toward "the entrenched bureaucracy." This history found its modest genesis in the modern activist presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took a great leap forward under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and stalled until Nixon revitalized it. From Nixon, the old hostility accelerated to its apex in the administration of Ronald Reagan, when poor political-career relations were cemented in his bureaucrat-bashing, "government-is-the-problem" mantra.
The Bush administration claimed that its political-career relations were much improved over those of the Reagan era. To what extent, then, was the time-tested, Reagan-perfected, bureaucrat-bashing mentality characteristic of the Bush appointees? How did the Bush PASs feel about and relate to the career executives with whom they worked? Were they more interested in managing their agencies well or in promoting a particular political agenda? To what extent was their self-reported priority of sound agency management affirmed by the careerists?
A related area of inquiry is PAS job satisfaction. What kinds of satisfaction did PASs derive from their job? In other words, were the Republicans, traditionally antigovernment, actually
enjoying
the business of running the government after twelve years of controlling the executive branch? Further, how did PASs assess their own level of work-related stress?
Interbureaucratic Issues
A final question concerns the reputed insularity of these political policy actors. How did PASs' operate within the larger political context? Did federal statecraft in the Reagan-Bush era still constitute a government of strangers, each isolated in her or his own village/agency, as Heclo asserted? Or did the long Republican dominance of the executive branch lead instead to a government of colleagues with a shared sense of purpose? Did facing the Democratic-controlled Congress and negotiating the bureaucratic labyrinth that is Washington create solidarity among the PASs?
This book moves from the general to the specific to address these four issues. Chapter 2 establishes the overall political and bureaucratic context in which high-level federal political appointees work. It sets the stage for analysis of interbureaucratic issues by discussing the constitutional separation of powers, the politics/administration dichotomy, and the administrative state. The chapter then examines the development and use of the logical extension of the administrative state, the administrative
 
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presidency, as practiced by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, its most dedicated practitioners.
Chapter 3 discusses the fruits of this style of presidential leadership, the centralized presidency and politicization of the bureaucracy. It uses as examples the politicization of the budget and personnel processes in the Office of Management and Budget and in the Office of Personnel Management.
Chapter 4 discusses the approach toward appointments used by presidents in the modern era, the growing number of political appointments, and the larger ramifications of this spoils system.
Chapter 5 discusses qualifications issues via the appointment and confirmation process. It analyzes the benefits and risks of this appointment, or short-termer, system, as well as issues of tenure, PASs' general qualifications, and the costs and benefits of PAS success.
Chapter 6 examines intrabureaucratic issues primarily from the PAS perspective, with particular focus on political-career relations. It looks at the different roles assigned each group and how the inevitable conflict between them is played out, as well as ways in which the politicization of the personnel process affects their relationships. It then surveys various models of political-career relations, from the metaphors of war to the metaphors of appeasement, and concludes with the importance of realistic, pragmatic association between the two camps of federal executives.
Chapter 7 discusses the results of the Bush PAS Survey in terms of identity and qualifications. It presents the composite personal and demographic picture of the PASs with data about their age, gender, race, educational background, executive level, salary, and political party affiliation. It also provides the composite professional picture of those in the Bush PAS workforce, examining their background and qualifications and the sectors in which they have worked (public, private, or nonprofit), their previous level of responsibility for personnel and budget, and their commitment to government service.
Additionally, Chapter 7 compares the Bush and Reagan PASs and revisits the conventional wisdom about political appointees and the extent to which George Bush was successful in upgrading the public image of presidential appointees.
Chapter 8 addresses the intrabureaucratic issues. It analyzes the Bush PASs' relations with their political colleagues and career subordinates within their own agency, examining in particular issues of job satisfaction and stress (both agency and personal). It also defines George Bush's model of political-career relations as a public service model grounded in competent comity.
 
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Chapter 9 examines the larger context of interbureaucratic relations, beginning with PASs' relations with the White House and the Congress. It then examines ways the Bush PASs related to one another within and across executive agencies. It revisits the theory of village-like isolation of PASs and how this was overcome in twelve years of Republican lease on the White House.
Chapter 10 offers advice to future PASs from the Bush PASs, conclusions from this study, and implications for the ongoing institution of presidential appointments in the federal government. It also suggests areas of future study regarding the appointment system and its products, the PASs.
The appendices discuss the methodologies employed in the study of the Bush PASs and reprint the Bush PAS Survey with the raw response data. They also detail the name, title, executive level or designation, and agency of those interviewed in conjunction with this project and the questions addressed in the confidential interviews with the PASs and others.
 
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Presidential Appointees in the Modern Era: Political and Bureaucratic Context
Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated the modern presidency that heralded an unbroken trend toward centralization of the institution of the presidency. This centralization featured control over a growing government bureaucracy exercised by an expanding White House bureaucracy. Increasing demands on modern government produced the administrative state and an expanded federal bureaucracy in both the political and career camps to meet those demands.
Beyond merely moving in tandem with the growth of government, the presidency in this era has evolved into an administrative force of its own whose directors seek greater control over government's bureaucracy for increased command of both budget and policy. The centralized presidency that resulted from this political growth has both positive and negative ramifications for the efficient and effective governance of the nation.
Focused on interbureaucratic issues, this chapter sets out the background political and bureaucratic contexts in which modern governance occurs. It discusses the role of the Congress in the bureaucratic dance, the constitutional separation of powers, the politics/administration dichotomy, and the administrative state. It looks at the benefits and costs of the administrative presidency, particularly as practiced by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (its prime exemplars), and the ongoing trend toward centralizing and bureaucratizing the presidency.
 
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Relations Between the Executive and Legislative Branches
Just as the nation's history impacts the role of the bureaucracy, relations between the executive agencies and the Congress are not unaffected by that same history. As some have noted, the Revolutionary War, with its battle cry of "No taxation without representation!" was, in essence, a revolt against the executive, as embodied in George III's colonial officers. The new nation's constitution reflected this anti-executive bias in the pride of place it gave to the Congress, the closest thing to the Continental Congress. The legislative branch was allotted far more attention as to its powers, rules, and duties than was the executive branch.
Furthermore, the Constitution was "conspicuously mute" on the subject of administration of the government's bureaucracy:
The Constitution makes no mention of "administration" or "management" and refers sparingly to "executing the laws." . . . The Constitutional Framers were not necessarily against strong, efficient management, although suspicion of British executive excesses still ran strong. [However,] the role of administration was perceived differently at a time when members of Congress outnumbered the entire executive branch workforce in Washington. Constitutional machinery was designed for its time, before the onslaught of modernizing and bureaucratizing forces. (Garnett 1987, 35-36)
Prior to the adoption of the Constitution, the Continental Congress carried total responsibility for executive, judicial, and legislative functions for the new union. That pattern was carried into the creation of the first five federal departments: in 1789 the Congress stipulated in great detail the functions of each agency and the positions and salaries therein. From the beginning, then, Congress has been involved in the implementation, as well as the formulation, of public policy (NAPA 1992, 20).
This history means that the Congress today continues to feel a responsibility to ensure the proper functioning of the executive agencies, particularly the Treasury Department, to which it has long-standing ties, thanks to its responsibility for the purse. The Constitution established a "system of separate institutions sharing powersa design intended to prevent tyranny, protect liberty, and promote good government" (ibid., 21).
There can, of course, be no absolute separation of powers because the executive branch and the Congress overlap in function and responsibility. As discussed above, the paired doctrines of the separation of powers and
 
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the system of checks and balances are the key principles in the ongoing debate between the executive and the legislative branches. Congress is accused of micromanagement (what one observer defines as ''mucking with the petty details of policy execution") by the very branch over which it is called to exercise vigilant oversight (ibid., 24).
There are, certainly, historical reasons for legislative-executive conflict. While Congress granted broad discretionary powers to the executive agencies in order to increase their flexibility, an unintended consequence of that grant was that successive presidents could bend the laws to serve their values and policy goals through their control of the bureaucracy. These discretionary powers allow
presidents to make dramatic changes in public policy when they take office without having to undertake the difficult task of persuading Congress to repeal or amend existing statutes. President Reagan demonstrated the importance of this power in 1987 when he promulgated new and much more restrictive rules governing federal funding for family planning clinics so as to prevent information on abortion from being dispensed at these offices. (Rourke 1991b, 125)
"Put another way, politics, policymaking, and policy implementation have become inseparable" in the collapse of the separation of powers (NAPA 1988, 2). This guarantees that the president and the Congress will be locked in a power struggle that is both deep-seated and perpetual.
A 1992 NAPA case study of congressional interventions indicates the conundrum in which Congress finds itself when it seeks to do the work of the bureaucracy without access to its resources. Congress goes this route when it
perceives it has little choice but to do so because executive branch difficulties-delays, cost inefficiency, program breakdown, executive refusal to adhere to congressional directives, even outright management failures and deceit-all but impel it to intervene at the administrative level. [However], Congress does not have and cannot create the resources to intervene effectively as an administrative manager across the enormous range of governmental programs. Yet increased congressional interventions are unavoidable unless the executive branch: 1. fulfills its responsibilities with renewed determination, vigor, and management skill consistent with congressional mandates and 2. reorganizes and upgrades its managerial systems accordingly. (NAPA 1992, 9)
While the NAPA study finds that "direct congressional intervention

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