The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (86 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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which otherwise enjoyed a somewhat cleaner reputation for appointing qualified people than did the Reagan administration.
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While qualifications for particular positions are notoriously difficult to ascertain on a broad scale due to the widely differing demands of federal jobs, the survey sought to determine where these individuals had come from, their degree of prior experience in managing people and budgets, and their attitudes toward public service and the federal workforce, as an avenue of general assessment.
Another bit of conventional wisdom is that Republicans, traditionally hostile to big government, brought with them an agenda of limiting or severely weakening its power. This was certainly the reputation of the majority of the Reagan appointees. One goal of the survey and follow-up interviews was to ascertain the degree to which that was an accurate characterization of the Bush appointees, as compared to the Reagan appointees.
SURVEY DESIGN
Individual preliminary consultations were held with sixteen persons in Washington, D.C., to suggest areas for exploration in the survey instrument itself and in follow-up interviews with PAS executives. These persons included Senate staffers, current PAS executives, former PAS executives, Senior Executive Service (SES) members, think tank members, White House officials, and academics.
SAS 5.18 was used to analyze the survey. Medians and modes were most often used to describe PASs' years and types of experience and supervisory background. As is usual with survey research, not every respondent answered every question. In some cases respondents answered only parts of a question, depending on their experience. If enough of a survey was useable, it was included in the data set. Responses sometimes total more than 100 percent due to computer rounding or multiple responses. Generally, percentages were used throughout this book, though numbers were occasionally included for clarity. In questions that encourage multiple responses but do not have component parts (e.g., Questions 5, 16, 43, 45, and 53) it is difficult or irrelevant to report solely a percentage for analysis. In those instances both percentages and numbers are given, and percentages are generally rounded to the nearest whole number, as they are throughout this book.
Additionally, in order to avoid skewing the responses, we decided to eliminate "no basis to judge/not applicable" responses in computing answers to questions that provoked large numbers of such responses. This was particularly important in questions dealing with job orientation programs, recruitment of PASs, relations with other PASs and with Senior Executive Service members (both noncareer [political] and career), turnover of executive staff, accountability of both themselves and other executives, and job satisfaction and difficulty.
Though many PASs would have other PASs, noncareer SESs (NSESs), and Schedule Cs close at hand, many individuals were often the only political appointee in their immediate unit. This was particularly true of those in the regulatory commissions. Unfortunately for purposes of this study, PASs did not always seem to know the distinctions among the PAS, NSES, and career SES (CSES) categories. PASs' estimates for numbers of each in their own units and
 
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agencies were often wildly inaccurate (sometimes more than twice the number governmentwide) and so must be disregarded.
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However, their comments about their relations with other political and senior career employees do provide valuable insight into the interpersonal workings of the government and so should not be discounted.
As was clear from some interviews and marginal comments written on the surveys, some PASs who did not have any SESs in their agency counted senior professional civil service staff as if they were SES. In these cases, responses to SES-based questions were discarded, as GAO was interested in gauging reactions to the SES members themselves. A few, not from ignorance but from principle, refused to separate the SES into noncareer and career categories, feeling, as one put it, that this "set up artificial divisions in government and there were more than enough of those already."
Job satisfaction and how various conditions affected it was of particular interest. Job satisfaction was crosstabulated with numerous factors such as executive level, type of agency (regulatory commission or executive agency), satisfaction with salary, and relationship with career SES members. Those results, along with others, are reported in chapter 8.
The Bush PAS Survey questions were distilled in large measure from the 1984 NAPA survey of PASs. However, the questions were often altered to meet GAO's interests, needs, and methodological requirements.
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This rendered difficult the original plan of providing a comparison between the past and present PASs. Nonetheless, the survey did serve to present a broad picture of the current PAS population and to establish a baseline for comparison with future administrations' PASs
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The survey instrument was pretested with five PAS executivesone each at Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, the Peace Corps, the Export-Import Bank, and the Federal Trade Commission. As with earlier interviews, these individuals' cooperation was obtained by referrals and by cold calls. The survey pretest was administered in personal interviews by the author and one or two staff members of the GAO's Design Methodology Technical Assistance Group (DMTAG), who worked on its design. We employed the standard GAO method of intensive individual pretesting, evaluation, revision, and additional pretesting. The survey was also sent to the White House and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for comment.
The survey covers areas such as PASs' background, qualifications, education and experience, orientation to their job, relationship with careerists and other political appointees, the White House, and the Congress, feelings about public service, job satisfaction, and stress.
SURVEY ADMINISTRATION
Because only 639 allocated PAS positions constitute the entire universe for this survey, it was decided to survey all the PAS executives in the executive branch agencies and independent regulatory commissions, with the exceptions noted above. The handful of PASs in non-executive branch agencies, such as GAO and the Copyright Royalty Tribunal, was excluded from the survey.
 
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Securing a mailing list of PAS executives proved to be a daunting task. There were no readily available lists outside of government and attempts to secure one or address labels within the government were complicated by orders from the White House to at least two individuals (the deputy secretary at the Housing and Urban Affairs Department and the head of OPM) not to participate in the enterprise in any way. Evidently, the project aroused considerable anxiety at the White House.
The author was informed on numerous occasions that, as the survey was a project of the GAO (an agency of the Congress), the White House feared the survey was a setup, a congressional attempt to "get" the White House, and that it had created quite a controversy. She was also told that, had she been merely a lone researcher working on her own, she would most likely have encountered little resistance and more assistance along the way.
Nonetheless, when a draft of the survey was sent to the White House for comment, its officials inexplicably reversed course and offered to mail it to the PASs. Apparently (as the author was told by one PAS interviewee), they decided that the survey was innocuous and that the White House might find the information useful, so it was best to obtain the information directly from the PASs themselves, via the survey. Further, at least one Democratic PAS was called by the White House, told to expect it, and told that participation in it was voluntary. Clearly, the White House switched from a hostile to a neutral stance over the course of the project.
Unfortunately, the damage had already been done: The hostility sown by early White House suspicion had quickly filtered through the PAS grapevine. One result was that the numbering system on the surveys made the whole project suspect in some PASs' eyes. They felt the GAO was not being honest about confidentiality, even though the need for a numbering system and the promise of confidentiality were explained in both the cover letter and the survey introduction.
Some who might otherwise have completed the survey did not participate because they feared they would be identified, according to one PAS who attended a political luncheon where the survey was mentioned. Some who did participate voiced suspicion of GAO and its motives, either in the interviews or in personal notes on the survey itself. Yet they participated, they said, because there were no loaded questions and they felt it was a good survey.
A few who completed the survey obliterated the number; one even went so far as to cut the number off his survey cover but then signed his name to the survey. The logic of these responses was initially difficult to decipher. However, a quick reflection on the often paranoid, small-town, gossip-driven, pressure-cooker, high-stakes nature of the nation's capital lends a degree of understanding to the puzzle: PASs' desire to be heard overcame their fear, but they still were not taking any chances.
The process of actually distributing the survey took several months, given all the negotiations with the White House. There was one insurmountable problem with the mailing list, however: We never got to see it. Citing the Privacy Act, the White House steadfastly refused to allow anyone from GAO (including the author) to have access to or even see the mailing list.
There were other problems: In addition to reluctant and belated White House
 
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aid, the mailing list was not without its limitations. Numerous persons who received the survey called or sent notes to say that they had resigned their position, some as long ago as one-and-a-half years. OPM, which keeps a separate listing of federal personnel, had similar problems of different, outdated, or missing information. In fact, OPM statistics (data personally given to the author) as of June 30, 1992, listed only 565 PAS allocated positions, in contrast to the White House's count of 639. OPM also registered 480 positions as actually filled, a vacancy of 15 percent, in contrast to the White House tally of a 20 percent vacancy.
Yet another snag (one of many) developed to thwart our efforts to maximize the survey response rate. One military service branch chief called to ask if the other Senate-confirmed chiefs had been sent the survey. He had intended to complete it until he found out that the White House had not sent surveys to his peers. Even though they are all PASs, he was the only one on this particular White House mailing list: He refused to participate. Clearly, in-house politics of some sort were at work here.
The survey was finally administered via mail to the PASs' homes, packaged by GAO with a cover letter and a stamped return envelope preaddressed to the author at GAO. The survey packets in franked mailing envelopes were numbered and sealed at GAO and taken to the White House, where its staff matched numbers to names, affixed address labels on the survey packets, and mailed them.
Although there are in this universe 639 PAS positions authorized by the Senate, as noted, some 20 percent of the positions are vacant at any given time and filled by "acting" staff, sometimes political, sometimes career. Consequently, only 505 surveys were sent to Senate-confirmed appointees in the first mailing, according to the White House tally. The first mailing was sent June 8, 1992, with a cover letter over the signature of GAO's assistant comptroller general for general government programs. The second mailing was sent a month later using the same procedure. A third mailing had been planned but the White House inexplicably refused to participate further and, without access to the mailing list, we had to be satisfied with two mailings.
Numerous surveys were completed but discarded for various reasons. For example, some were from PASs in legislative branch agencies, some were returned by the Post Office as undeliverable, others were completed by individuals who were not PASs or who had long since resigned their office. Some surveys did not have enough completed answers to be of use. Of the 474 surveys believed to have reached the appropriate population, 182 were completed, for a response rate of 38.4 percent.
While the intransigence of the White House regarding the mailing list prevented verification of the identity of the individuals to whom it was sent, from the responses received it was clear that, overall, the surveys had gone to the appropriate individuals. Further, calls from numerous PASs requesting additional information, and signed surveys (indicating a willingness to be interviewed in connection with the project) came from PASs in a wide variety of federal agencies. Some 35 percent of the respondents (sixty-four) signed their survey, which provides an interesting answer to suspicions of the White House and others (some among the signers) who had expressed distrust of the GAO and its motives.
Another indication that the survey reached its intended constituency was

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