The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (66 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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companions who went along, the nominee's lifestyle, sexual orientation, finances, and tax returns. The investigation extends to her or his family, as well.
4
There was also the fear among potential nominees that some behavior considered appropriate, or at least legal, in business would be unearthed and reported on the front page of the
Washington Post
in a way that would damage the reputation of the nominee. The Senate's investigation is more public and more open to leaks, making this a not unrealistic fear. (The stress of and dangers posed by the Senate confirmation process itself are discussed in greater detail in chapter 9.)
While no one wanted to ease the ethical considerations that had helped rescue political service from the depths to which it had sunk during the Reagan years, there was widespread conviction that the financial disclosure, divestiture, and revolving door restrictions made it difficult to recruit PASs and SESs into government service. This was particularly true in the Defense Department, which is more involved in procurement than are the domestic agencies. There are "fewer rising young tigers and more older retirees or lawyers [in PAS service] who can more easily move in and out of jobs than can younger persons and those in production industries," said one longtime careerist at Defense. One PAS wished that the divestiture and other requirements were not so restrictive because they made it difficult for "people like me [i.e., people of means] to serve."
How Difficult Are Political Positions? PASs' Perceptions
One approach to evaluating qualifications is to analyze PASs' sense of the ease or difficulty of various aspects of their job in relation to their past professional experience in order to determine if particular kinds of experiences led PASs to feel a greater sense of self-confidence in their work. In doing so we focused on PASs' occupation immediately prior to their initial PAS position in the Bush administration and their previous experience in management and in budgeting. We asked individuals to make an assessment of their own ease or difficulty of accomplishing their current job. While obviously a subjective judgment, it did allow a glimpse into the self-perceptions of the PASs.
A few, telling relationships were found between current ease or difficulty of job and a PAS's prior occupation or primary function. As might be expected, those coming from the federal government more often found directing senior civil servants easy (75 percent, as compared to 62 percent easy overall). Those whose primary function in their previous position was government relations were most likely to find such supervision easy (75 percent). However, those coming from academia or a research firm
 
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were much less likely to find directing senior civil servants easy (39 percent).
Those who had come from the business sector reported the most ease in dealing with the news media (55 percent of that group considered it easy, compared with 39 percent overall). However, this business-oriented group encountered the most difficulty dealing with the informal party networks that affected the work of their agency or department (35 percent, compared with 19 percent overall who experienced difficulty).
Those who were self-employed prior to their PAS service were more likely to find the lengthy, convoluted and consensus style of the decision-making procedures of their agency difficult (63 percent, compared with 43 percent overall who found it difficult). Those who had come directly from academia or research organizations reported the most difficulty in dealing with the White House (39 percent, compared with 16 percent overall).
As a group, PASs were notably inexperienced in personnel supervision. While PASs' prior direct supervisory experience with paid staff varied greatly (from those who supervised none to those who carried direct responsibility for sixty thousand employees), the median number they supervised was only seven employees. Supervision of volunteers was likewise varied. Some PASs had managed as many as fifty volunteers; 75 percent had supervised none directly.
Equally diverse were the numbers of employees in the organizational units for which PASs had previously been responsible. While they ranged from zero to as many as 150,000, the median was thirty-three paid staff employees. Volunteer employees ranged from zero to one thousand but again, most PASs (66 percent) had not supervised volunteers in their larger organizational units.
While a few PASs had had experience supervising large staffs, only 12 percent had directly supervised more than fifty, and fewer than one-fifth had had even indirect responsibility for more than five hundred employees. This relative inexperience in personnel supervision could have serious repercussions in government agencies where PASs are often directly responsible for many employees and indirectly responsible for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands more.
5
Given this, the PPO should take personnel management experience into consideration when it recruits, assesses, or trains candidates.
Although two-thirds of the PASs had had some direct budget responsibility, one-third had not. When added to the 37 percent who had had responsibility for budgets of only up to $10 million, that meant that 70 percent of the PASs had not had responsibility for budgets of more than $10 million (see table 7.4).
While the federal government is certainly replete with accountants
 
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Table 7.4. How Much Prior Budget Responsibility Had PASs Had?
Amount of Budget (in dollars)
Percentage of PASs Responsible
Less than 1,000,000
22
1,000,000-4,999,999
19
5,000,000-$9,999,999
8
10,000,000-24,999,999
11
25,000,000-100,000,000+
11
Source:
The Bush PAS Survey.
and each major agency now has a chief financial officer, PASs are ultimately responsible for vast sums of money as they manage the ever-growing federal budget.
6
Given the "typical" PAS's difficulty with the federal budget process (61 percent found it "generally" or "very" difficult), the PPO should consider budget acumen along with personnel management experience when it recruits, assesses, or trains candidates, particularly those in the big-ticket agencies.
How Competent Are Political Appointees and Careerists? PASs Evaluate Their Colleagues
PASs generally rated one another highly, in terms of their competence and responsiveness to political policy direction. Of 167 PASs surveyed, 79 percent judged their colleagues to be competent, while 84 percent termed their colleagues responsive. The numbers were similar for the 154 NSESs questioned: 70 percent said their colleagues were competent, and 82 percent judged them responsive.
There were, of course, exceptions. One respondent in an independent regulatory commission (IRC) despaired of his colleagues who were then adjudicating law in an area in which they had not previously specialized "outside the Beltway" (that land of non-federal-government reality of which Washington's denizens and pundits speak fondly but to which few are prepared to move). "I don't know what the White House saw in their credentials or lack thereof," he wrote. As one interviewee observed, "Some of my (PAS) colleagues have to work pretty hard to do their job."
Other PASs felt that their own PAS colleagues were good, but mentioned problems at other agencies that get more than their share of incompetent appointees, particularly the well-known "turkey farms" or
 
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"dumping grounds," as they are unkindly called, agencies such as the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD), the General Services Administration (GSA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One careerist observed that "agencies like HUD and GSA that have lots of political slots have to place the sons and daughters 0f big contributors, so there is less quality there."
One PAS noted that the status of the agency follows the status of its secretary. "The quality of secretaries varies by agency. Those with the best reputations are at State, Justice, Education, and Labor. Those with the worst are at Interior, Energy, and Health and Human Services."
As noted in chapter 4, Bush got particularly bad marks for his choice of ambassadors. With eleven of his nominees members of Bush Team 100 (those who gave at least $100,000 to his campaign), Bush gave the naked impression of jobs for sale that most presidents seek to avoid. Marvin F. Moss, chief of staff for Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes, made this assessment:
Ronald Reagan appointed a lot of truly incompetent people to ambassadorial positions around the world, such as his personal secretary, whom he sent to Denmark . . . They created scandals in the countries they were sent to. . . . [But] the Senate had no solid basis to oppose them.
Much more than had Carter, Ford, Nixon, and Reagan, though, Bush appointed to countries that had previously had professional foreign service officers [careerists] as ambassadors a series of Republican high rollers who had given $100,000 to the Bush campaign
and
were unqualified. Only three were not confirmed. One well-known case was [of someone] who had worked in advertising in the 1988 campaign. He was sent to Iceland where he spent his time there faxing, working on the campaign. He was an ambassador for 112 days before he rejoined the 1992 campaign.
Moss noted that it costs fifty to sixty thousand dollars to train each ambassador.
One careerist expressed dismay at some political ambassadorial appointments:
Rampant patronage is a pretty shabby way for the United States to conduct its business in 1991. A big contribution to the party ought not constitute qualifications for political appointments. Higher standards are needed. Sometimes the standard is met, but often it is not. No other major country appoints its ambassadors with the frivolity that the United States uses. . . . No country's going to raise Cain because it's been given

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