The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (22 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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operate programs of high presidential priority, and representing in the White House all interests that are demographically separable" (ibid., 6).
Difficulties controlling the executive agencies and keeping PASs in line with White House policy drive presidents to seek to concentrate more power in the hands of their White House staff. However, centralization can backfire and damage the president, as happened in the Iran-Contra scandal when White House tracks were everywhere in abundance.
In this case, as in others, policies that are secretly devised in the White House bypass an important error-correction mechanismcriticism from well-informed departmental [career] officials. And policies executed with dispatch may only be ill-considered schemes that could not survive prolonged examination and debate. So they are high-risk undertakings from which a president may extract great benefit but [that] may also have disastrous consequences. (Rourke 1991b, 132)
Bureaucratizing the presidency, then, can be a risky strategy. Presidentializing the bureaucracy, or following a decentralization strategy, as discussed above, is a safer way for presidents to "imprint their own preferences on their administration's record in office." Its clear advantage is that "it helps distance the president from the political damage caused by failure in making or executing policy that inevitably occurs in every administration. On such occasions it is far better for the president if an agency outside the White House has hands-on responsibility for policy decisions in the area where a mishap has taken place" (ibid., 133).
For example, because the 1986
Challenger
disaster was safely located in NASA (presidentialized and decentralized), the White House managed to quiet speculation that the launch was timed and perhaps rushed for presidential advantage in the congressional elections. In contrast, as discussed earlier, because the Iran-Contra affair was managed from the White House (bureaucratized and centralized), Reagan could not escape at least some responsibility for it. As Rourke observes, "it is not easy to remove the president's fingerprints from a policy disaster when it is engineered by his immediate circle of White House advisers and assistants" (ibid., 133).
Ups and Downs of the Centralized Presidency
There are questions and problems with this strategy of centralization, such as the extent to which the EOP staff can act on its own initiative to carry out what it perceives to be presidential policy. "Presidents can become captured by the strongest personality in their White House. Bob
 
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Haldeman had this effect on Nixon, as did Donald Regan on Reagan" (Campbell 1991, 216). Beyond drawing power away from the cabinet, centralization has the potential to "become an irrational force in executive policymaking, capable of inflicting far more damage on the president's and the nation's welfare than any of the executive agencies whose errors it has been charged with preventing" (Rourke 1991b, 134). As in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, centralization, simply put, can spell the potential for huge disaster with no one else to blame.
Another problem is the extent to which the shift of power to the White House staff has undermined the value of expertise and the career bureaucracy.
the administration can become so absorbed with retention of its approval ratings that it stops looking after the long-range interests of the United States. The systematic discounting of the advice of career civil servants and the reflex to accuse dissenting cabinet secretaries of having "gone native" serve as the principal symptoms of this condition. The Reagan administration displayed this syndrome to an unparalleled degree. We need only point to the still unresolved deficit issue and its many consequences for economic, social, and foreign policy to highlight the dysfunctions of White Houses governed by polls. (Campbell 1991, 216)
This is discussed further in chapter 5. There is also a significant potential for overload on the White House as it seeks to micromanage issues and the agencies, massage the Congress, direct spin control, and plot the political course. The White House could easily collapse under the weight of its own self-imposed overload, a problem that plagued the Carter White House (ibid., 216).
Additionally, tight control may work against the mission of some agencies, threatening their perceived integrity. As Rourke points out, "Agencies such as the Fed and independent regulatory agencies (IRCs) such as the TVA have found their effectiveness and credibility enhanced by their independence" (Rourke 1991b, 134).
Given the problems and dangers of centralizing the presidency and the advantages of a certain degree of administrative freedom, centralization is a strategy presidents would do well to employ only sparingly.
The centralized presidency can work if the president is in tune with public opinion, if lines of communication to the cabinet remain open, and if the president does not become a prisoner of his own inner circle of advisors (Hess 1988). Lyndon Johnson effectively managed a centralized presidency until massive popular resistance to the war in Vietnam drove
 
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him into isolation and what many considered paranoia. Nixon, on the other hand, early on violated all of the guidelines for a successful centralized presidency. Nixon, "the first activist conservative president [actually] . . . sought isolation." Suspicious of both his cabinet members and government bureaucracy, "he structured his staff to limit his association to those with whom he felt most comfortable. . . . In the end this Greta Garbo conception of the presidency was unsuited to democratic leadership" (ibid., 3-4).
Nixon was the first president, but not the last, to suffer the self-inflicted wounds of the isolated and overly centralized presidency. To some degree, those who followed him have had the same set of issues with which to deal, particularly with regard to political appointments.
In contrast to Waterman and Nathan who argue for a strong presidency, Hess argues for a president who is the "chief political officer" rather than the "chief manager" of the federal bureaucracy. As he notes, there is no constitutional support for this chief manager function; the role of program manager is given directly to the various agency heads by the Congress. As discussed previously, the president simply needs the bureaucracy to run the country. "This attempt [at centralized White House control] can never succeed. Even an overblown White House staff is simply too inadequate a fulcrum for moving the weight of the executive branch, which employs more than 5 million people and spends over a trillion dollars annually'' (ibid., 6).
Hess believes the president's major responsibility is to set national policies and priorities through the budget and legislative proposals and to guarantee the nation's security. When presidents overstep that function they "undermine confidence in the presidency by burdening the White House staff beyond its capacity to effect change and deliver services" (ibid., 7). Additionally, the inevitable tensions between the career bureaucrats and the EOP staff "are heightened when the competing White House bureaucracy is staffed with inexperienced outsiders with little knowledge of the federal government" (Seidman and Gilmour 1986, 77).
Carter and Reagan further exacerbated those tensions by bringing novice supporters from their home state to Washington, rather than relying on those who already knew the system. The personal loyalty that outside supporters bring, while making the president feel more at ease, tends to create a closed system of go-it-alone independence that isolates the president, à la Nixon and Reagan. With them it created "a presidential court with all the trappings and intrigues associated with an ancient monarchy." Not a Republican failing alone, this tendency toward a closed system fed George Reedy's characterization of Johnson's court late in his
 
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administration as a "mass of intrigue, posturing, strutting, cringing and pious commitment to irrelevant windbaggery" (quoted in Seidman and Gilmour 1986, 77).
Because White House staff possess no power in their own right and serve only at the pleasure of the president, competition and turf battles are a constant feature of court life as aides jockey with one another, other units within the EOP, and agency heads for information and access to the president's ear (Seidman and Gilmour 1986, 77). The many dangers and shortcomings of the centralized presidency argue against excessive bureaucratization of the presidency, but, as developments in two key agencies, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), demonstrate, it continues to be a favored presidential strategy.
OMB: The Metamorphosis of BOB, the Politicization of the Budget Function
Politicization (the replacement of careerists with politicals and the resultant agency movement away from neutral competence and toward political responsiveness) has been particularly vigorous at two central executive agencies, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The budget function began its slide toward politicization, however gently, under Truman, when the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) took on more responsibility and power to provide staff and services for presidential assistants. Thus was blurred "the theoretical line between the institutional and personal presidencies that separated the Executive Office from the White House" (Hess 1988, 2-3).
However, BOB, from the director on down, was totally staffed by careerists for the twenty years of Democratic governance that ended with Eisenhower's inauguration. His suspicions of an entrenched bureaucracy loyal to Democratic philosophy minimally furthered politicization of the budget function. But, while Eisenhower initiated cabinet-oriented innovations, "BOB's neutral policy role survived with orthodox integrity," at least for a while (Newland 1985, 138). BOB started to lose ground, however, as Kennedy
reduced cabinet meetings to a bare minimum and trimmed [the] national security affairs machinery. He appointed political task forces prior to and after his election to develop policy topics or fields. By late December 1960 Kennedy had eleven such groups in foreign affairs and eight in domestic policy. . . . Policy staff functions were increasingly separated out of the

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