Burrowing
“Burrowing” — a practice by which political appointees are transformed into career civil servants near the end of a presidential transition — is a time-honored Washington tradition, albeit not a particularly good one. And as with all bad aspects of the American political system, George W. Bush seems determined to make things worse. The Washington Post had a good report on the subject today, “Administration Moves to Protect Key Appointees: Political Positions Shifted To Career Civil Service Jobs.” Note, of course, that for key regulatory positions Bush usually gave his career appointments to folks who were either officially or de facto industry lobbyists. So basically we’ll have the top layer of the civil service filled with industry shills:
Robert D. Comer, who was Rocky Mountain regional solicitor, was named to the civil service post of associate solicitor for mineral resources. Matthew McKeown, who served as deputy associate solicitor for mineral resources, will take Comer’s place in what is also a career post. Both had been converted from political appointees to civil service status
In a report dated Oct. 13, 2004, Interior’s inspector general singled out Comer in criticizing a grazing agreement that the Bureau of Land Management had struck with a Wyoming rancher, saying Comer used “pressure and intimidation” to produce the settlement and pushed it through “with total disregard for the concerns raised by career field personnel.” McKeown — who as Idaho’s deputy attorney general had sued to overturn a Clinton administration rule barring road-building in certain national forests — has been criticized by environmentalists for promoting the cause of private property owners over the public interest on issues such as grazing and logging.
I’d like to keep track of these kind of hijinks, so it’d be appreciated if readers could send links and/or personal insights if they run across anything of this sort that isn’t getting play.
36 Responses to “Burrowing”
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November 18th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I wouldn’t be too worried about this. Do corporate shills really want to spend the rest of their careers in low paying civil service jobs?
November 18th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Just corrupt friends helping corrupt friends, you know? This administration’s poisonous legacy will live on for years…
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/
November 18th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I agree with John- I think burrowing is especially problematical for Republicans because they’re always chasing the highest salaries and government service doesn’t work for them. However, if K Street really is unfriendly to Republicans now, maybe government service is looking attractive to them.
Burrowing is grossly unfair to people who’d like to access those senior jobs from within the civil service itself, but as a practical political issue it shouldn’t be hard to identify and monitor these people, to the point where they have no choice but to function responsibly rather than as moles. Very few of them will have the ideological commitment to be effective long-term Manchurian Bureaucrats.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Hopefully, the Obama appointess will do what every boss does when they need a pretext to get rid an employee: make their life at work a lving hell.
Either relegate their duties to that of a file clerk, or in the case of Interior, make them wirte memos supporting further protection for endangered species all day, every day.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
The solution is pretty easy: change the Org Chart. Create some new offices with no authority, and move these people into them. They’ll eventually quit because they have crappy authority and crappy wages. That’s how the corporate word quarantines unwanted executives who can’t be fired. If you can’t fire them, make them irrelevant.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
brewmn (#4) hits the nail on the head… rule book the deadwood/moles in the organization until they leave. An alternative is to stick them into an office/task where they have next to no responsibilities, and therefore can’t do too much harm, other than draw a paycheck.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
The critter in that picture is too attractive. Try this one instead.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
The critter in that picture is too attractive. Try this one instead.
Nah, then people would mistake it for a Lieberman post.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
The point has been made very well here. Just as this is a time honored tradition in Washington, so there is a time honored solution. These people will be shunted off into make work jobs with onerous deadlines to make their life miserable. This is especially true for positions that are senior enough to have once qualified for political appointees. They’ll either stick around long enough to collect their pension or they’ll get fed up and leave.
Either way, they’ll do no harm.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
create a “department of shitty ideas that will never get implemented” and move all of them to it, but make sure they publish reports with their findings for the *ahem* “lulz”.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
If you read the WaPo article, not all civil service jobs are “low-paying.” And Bush is specifically concentrating on the highest-paying jobs to give to his political appointees.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Many (but not all) of these Bush appointees were not making hundreds of thousands per year before they got the appointment; they made an individual political $$ contribution or knew the right person to get the job. So the prospect of job security at near the mid-100 level looks pretty good to them. And remember, the new Obama appointees will be in a position to make their lives a living hell if they don’t conform to policy.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
What is that in the picture….looks like maybe a blind mole rat (Spalax), distinct from the naked mole rats of Africa?
November 18th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Is there anything that would explain the structure of the civil service that’s relevant to this article? I found myself generally baffled by the various categories of employment involved.
And the bigger picture question: why does the civil service work so that this is possible? Is it just that every administration wants the patronage opportunities?
November 18th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
On behalf of Idaho, I apologize for Matthew McKeown. Idaho probably doesn’t want me speaking on its behalf, but that’s beside the point.
We’ll always have Frank Church to be proud of, though.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am
The two jobs mentioned in Interior are Senior Executive Service SES) positions, which are not “low paying jobs”. Under SES rules these clowns cannot be reassigned from these jobs until 120 days after a new administration takes control; plenty of time for them to create problems.
The same situation applies with at least four high level (SES)jobs at DOJ.
The guys in these jobs are rkight wing ideologues and pay level is not their prime concern: creating problems on environmental and civil rights is their prime motive.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I dont get it, if bush can make these positions civil service with the wave of a pen, surely obama can make them not with equal ease.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Same thing has been happening at the NLRB.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Why are there so many civil service positions vacant in the first place? Did Bush deliberately allow vacancies to back up in case he would want to do this later? (I assume he’s not firing people to create the vacancies, because if it were that easy to fire people from these positions, it wouldn’t be a problem.)
Also, is it possible for the President or Congress to change the rules regarding civil service appointments (either in general, or specifically by lame ducks) to make the decisions reviewable for some degree of qualifications, or impose a trial period after which they can be confirmed or dismissed by the President or Secretary of their department, or something other than the irrevocable whim of a lame duck? (A prospective change would be good even if it didn’t solve the immediate problem, but if there’s a way to avoid grandfathering the saboteurs, obviously that’s even better.)
Otherwise, these guys are going to do a heckuva job…
November 19th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Given the amount of graft, bribery and general corruption in this administration I’m sure thre are plenty of other, ah, streams of income available to the Bush loyalists.
November 26th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
wallll, President Obama can fire all their pudgy white republican asses and replace them with at least hominids.
ted
November 27th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Well, yeah, if that’s what the corporate bosses want them to do and reward them for it. There are tons of ways that these moles can be rewarded by business interests while still “serving” in the government.
If there’s one thing the Bush administration should have taught us, its that we need to devise laws governing civil service and the relationship between branches of government in full expectation that those in power will exploit every single gap, ambiguity, and weakness in the laws to serve their own ends.
That’s the real Bush doctrine.
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