The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (36 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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advised to concentrate on the top tier of his or her administration, filling those positions with individuals who support the administration's policies and are capable of inspiring the same support from both political and career subordinates in their agency. Mutual accommodation or double veto of lowerlevel PASs will do much to promote the twin goals of smooth relations and policy loyalty.
And what of civil servants in this mix? As their role and relationship with political appointees and the risks they pose to administration policy are discussed in chapter 6, they are considered only briefly here.
Goldenberg considers four roles civil servants can take vis-à-vis their political superiors. They can be passive extensions of the president, active supporters of the president, brokers of conflicting interests, or protectors of the public interest. Generally speaking, Reagan managed to enhance the passive extension role. His emphasis on control meant that he received relatively little active support from the civil service but, as Goldenberg notes, "its absence was hardly noticed during 1981 when administration attention was focused on cutting budgets." The usual difficulties of bucking policy in any administration made the brokering and whistle-blowing roles as risky as usual for civil servants in the Reagan administration (Goldenberg 1985, 383-403). With less energy having to go for self-defense, careerists in the Bush administration were more likely to fall into the broker or public interest roles.
Political Appointments as a Growth Industry
The federal bureaucracy was originally composed of limited numbers of short-term unpaid volunteer appointees who were mostly wealthy, landowning, white male citizens. Today, the bureaucracy has evolved into a paid, lifelong career for nearly two million persons of both sexes and all races and socioeconomic standings. However, the now paid, short-term political administrators continue to play an important leadership role in the country's bureaucracy. The interaction of political appointees with the subordinate career bureaucracy undergoes continual development and refinement. Political appointees head the bureaucracy of government, yet their relatively short tenure puts them at a comparative disadvantage vis-à-vis the longer-tenured career executives, 70 percent of whom have been with their agency for ten years, 50 percent for fifteen years (Volcker 1989, 215).
From the founding of the Republic, inevitable problems of turf, expertise, neutral competence, and political responsiveness accompanied the development of the bureaucracy and its division into political and ca-
 
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reer components. The growth of the bureaucracy with the New Deal and its politicization in recent years have added other issues to the mix, such as the relative and absolute growth of political appointments, the placement of political appointees lower down in the governmental hierarchy, the mobility and morale of career executives, and the overall politicization of the public service. Other issues are the political and policy agendas of presidents in appointing executives and the PASs' degree of commitment to those agendas once they are in office.
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Political appointments in this country proliferated with no apparent foresight or planning. "There is no document of state, no great debate or major decision of public record available which uncovers the foundations of our current in-and-outer system. The assorted arrangements for appointing political executives grew little by little in no preconceived way and in no particular order throughout the nooks and crannies of the executive branch" (Heclo 1987, 196).
As civil service reform from the 1880s through the 1940s moved more and more positions out of the spoils (political) system and into the merit (career) system, no clear plan of action emerged to deal with the remaining political positions. According to Heclo, the subtleties of Progressive Reform thought were lost in the popularization of the "politics/administration dichotomy" that most vigorously stressed the growing country's need for a professional bureaucracy inoculated from the corruption rampant at the end of the nineteenth century. Experience had taught that "Washington was failing to perform the first task of a government: to create an orderly community. . . . Modern government was no longer the place for amateurs" (ibid., 198).
The Progressive reformers envisioned what might be termed a "politics/administration partnership," with
political departmental secretaries with small staffs of personal aides . . . and one career officer playing the role of general manager of the department. . . . Political officials would represent the public view and play the deciding role over policy issues. Permanent career officials would represent the expert point of view, offering their advice as nonpartisan professionals and line supervisors over the day-to-day work of government. Contrary to the later caricatures by their critics, the more thoughtful of the reformers did not see politics, policy, and administration as separate realms carried on in isolation. The design was intended to achieve a more reliable way of ensuring a proper mixture of perspectives in the work of government. (Ibid., 198-99)
 
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Clearly, the design was significantly altered during the course of its haphazard implementation. There are a number of reasons why political appointments grew in a direction not foreseen by the reformers: First, presidents and the Congress have taken the path of least resistance, not stopping to step back and assess the overall appointments structure. It was easier simply to let "the system based on happenstance" grow largely unchecked. Second, as more demands were made on government and it grew to meet them, more political appointees were added to meet the crisis-du-jour. Departments were rarely eliminated, however, so the overall number of appointees kept growing to supervise them (ibid., 201).
Third, there is an ongoing asymmetry between PASs and careerists, with several facets. The former can operate on an ad hoc basis irrespective of maintaining institutional ties or traditions while the latter depend on a web of tradition, mentoring, and institutional connections. There are also significant power differentials between the two groups. High-level careerists have no opportunity to add more careerists to their number to solidify their ranks. Meanwhile, political appointees who supervise a system that was previously wholly career-run can more easily "manage the workflow, bring in personal assistants, and disregard successors in such a way as to undermine any first-rate career operation. In the first case the effects on the personnel system are never felt in the long run, while in the second case they are felt only in the long run, when there is no one around to blame" (ibid., 201-02).
Consequently, a self-perpetuating dynamic is set off that eventually locates politically connected technocrats in PAS appointments, ironically created specifically for them. It happens in what Heclo calls a two-step dance: An interest develops, for whatever reason, in having a particular position filled by a partisan. A struggle ensues in which Congress stipulates requirements for that position and, making it subject to Senate confirmation, another short-termer position is born (ibid., 202).
A fourth reason for the growth in appointments is that diffusion of powers between the legislative and executive branches means that there is no one center of decision-making power. The operating assumption of the Progressive Reform movement that gave birth to the notion of "political neutrality depended on a different kind of democratic regime [than the American model], a regime of government and opposition." It assumed a very highly placed civil service, a parliamentary government along the lines of Britain, Europe, or Japan with an ongoing state or crown, a ruling or governing party, and an opposition party.
"Neutral competence" by those civil servants at the top meant "being committed to serving the party in power to the fullest of one's pro-
 
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fessional competence, and then doing the same for any successor government." The American system of separation of powers between the Congress and the executive, even if both are controlled by the same party, means that responsibility is diffused throughout the political system. If different parties control the two branches, the government is further divided and responsibility diffused even more (ibid., 203).
This uniquely American situation leaves
senior [career] executive officials . . . in an inherently ambiguous position. They cannot simply serve one government of the day but instead must accommodate a number of different power centers. They cannot live in an insulated departmental setting but must be in constant liaison with the legislature. They cannot hide under a doctrine of neutrality between succeeding governments because microgovernmentsthe ruling coalitions around first one issue and then anotherare constantly being formed and re-formed simultaneously on many different fronts. These strictures apply not only to the head of a department and his or her personal assistants but to all persons in responsible executive positions. (Ibid., 204) The pressures on civil servants leave them walking a political tightrope strung between two jealous branches of government." It is little wonder, then, when they abandon neutral competence for technical competence and avoid any responsibility to offer political or policy advice (ibid., 204).
Political Appointee Numbers
The number of political appointees of all types has increased dramatically in the past few decades, from approximately twelve hundred in the late 1960s to nearly four thousand in the early 1990s. They have also moved from the top levels of the bureaucracy down lower into the ranks through Eisenhower's innovation of Schedule C in 1953. This creation allows the president to make appointments to relatively low-level (GS 9-15) assistant or secretarial positions so "his people" could serve the other political appointees in confidential or policy-making positions or keep an eye on the career staff.
It is difficult to give exact data on appointment numbers due to differing definitions of which positions should be included in the count, due to hidden positions, and the cyclical nature of political appointments (lowest immediately following the inauguration of a new president and at the end of an administration, highest at the midpoint of the presidential

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