Needed: More Bureaucrats
Alyssa Rosenberg makes an excellent point about the missing Treasury Department subcabinet officials:
It’s hard to argue that it’s in any way a good thing that Obama hasn’t filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn’t have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That’s what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.
Americans tend to assume that however we happen to do things is just the way things need to be done. But in reality, compared to other democracies we’re an extreme outlier in terms of how “deep” into the org charts of our agencies political appointees go. If you don’t like to think about foreigners, one way of thinking about how to build effective public sector institutions is always to look at the United States military where, unlike on the civilian side, political consensus has generally existed that effective institutions are important. You’ll see that while the president has discretion about which senior officers go where and do what, he doesn’t get to just pull new three- and four-star flag officers out of the ether (back in the day, things didn’t work that way, and during the Civil War there were plenty of “political generals” who did worse than the professionals). And what’s more, though a new president could shake things up right away, the expectation is that he won’t and that commanders will generally stay in place and provide continuity. They’ll report to a new commander-in-chief, and eventually they rotate to new assignments or into retirement, but the general assumption is that you don’t start everything from scratch. In addition to the various direct, practical benefits of greater professionalism this also greatly enhances the prestige of the low- and mid-level officers. The way you get to be an extremely important military commander is to start out as the most junior possible kind of commissioned officer and work your way up.
One potential model for civilian agencies might be the State Department where there are a ton of offices that are technically political appointments but where strong norms and traditions suggests that you fill them with career civil servants. Christopher Hill, for example, is a career foreign service officer. As such, he served on the team that negotiated the Dayton Accords. Based on that, he was given a “political” appointment as Ambassador to Macedonia. In 2000, he became Ambassador to Poland and he stayed in office until 2004 across a Presidential transition. Then he became Ambassador to South Korea, and in 2005 he became Assistant Secretary for East Asia. Soon, he’ll be Ambassador to Iraq. In general in the State Department it’s considered normal for the Undersecretary for Political Affairs and almost of all the Assistant Secretaries who report to him, and the policy-relevant ambassadorships to be occupied by career people.
Of course it’s worth saying that Timothy Geithner is essentially a person along this model—a guy who was working in a civil service job who, starting in 1995, got tapped for a series of increasingly-important political appointments in the Treasury Department who then left at the end of the Clinton administration. If the Bush administration had been inclined to make more Geithner-esque appointments at Treasury—elevating senior civil servants to subcabinet posts—it might have been more feasible to have a smooth transition.
19 Responses to “Needed: More Bureaucrats”
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March 11th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Of course, instead they did the exact opposite, and made Treasury such an unpleasant place to work that many of the senior career staff left in disgust, leaving a pile of positions to be fed by Heritage staff.
March 11th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
What goes unsaid is the hacktitude with which Republicans hire during the time they control the WH. They are not interested in competence or enforcing the laws. The Republicans appoint people as a way of fluffing up their resume so they can make more dough at some think tank later on. So when you have a Republican President for eight years, don’t be surprised to see the after effects once a new sheriff(in this case, Obama) comes to town. That said, Geithner is just a stooge for the banks, not someone that should head up Treasury.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Nice choice of accompanying image.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I think the transition between Bush’s and Obama’s corporatist fiscal policies has already been a little too fluid.
What Matt is really asking for here is for a professional, elitist class to take over all function of government that actually matters. Then elections won’t matter, as we’ll just be swapping in and out mostly powerless figureheads.
That shouldn’t really be acceptable to anyone.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I learned this when talking to a pal of mine who worked for the UK foreign ministry.
Know how many appointees the Foreign Minister gets there? Three. That’s it. And they all have to be from Parliament. No wonder foreign policy over there is so consistent / stagnant!
I think that I prefer our system where a change in regime means a change in regime, but still, it is an outlier, and we do pay a cost for it.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“Americans tend to assume that however we happen to do things is just the way things need to be done.”
It’s hard to imagine that you get paid for writing that.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I hereby join Matt in supporting Magritte’s Son of Man for Under Secretary for International Affairs.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I think Bush preferred to have people loyal to him rather than the Beltway.
Perhaps you should consider the value of quality rather than quantity.
March 11th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
during the Civil War there were plenty of “political generals” who did worse than the professionals
During the Civil War, there were some “political generals” who did better than the professionals, too, e. g., Sen. Sherman’s brother . . .
March 11th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
This is what always surprises me during presidential transitions in the US, the sheer number of people that get replaced in the bureaucracy.
In Canada, we get no such thing. The senior civil servant in charge of a department is known as a Deputy Minister (like a British Permanent Secratary) and he or she is the *only* person who *might* get replaced by a new incoming government, and even then, likely not. I’d say more than half of DMs kept their posts in 2006 when the Tories replaced the Liberals.
This goes for ambassadorships also – typically the only ones that get replaced are the one to the US, and possibly the one to the UN.
Of course this is somewhat determined by the tradition that Ministers come from the House of Commons, so they are rarely experts in the matters pertaining to their Ministry. Still, I don’t see why more officials in the US (undersecretaries and such) couldn’t be more permanent civil service positions.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Just why are there so many unfilled positions?
It is not like there is a huge backlog in the Senate and that is putting people off. Is there?
And even so they can, with some exceptions, work at their duties awaiting consent.
Why has Obama not been able to come up with people to serve?
More importantly why didn’t he have a list before Inauguration?
I know that a few Treasury people withdrew for unstated reasons; I assume because of tax issues. Do all our Masters not pay their nanny taxes?
If the problem is one of finding “untainted” individuals from Wall Street well that’s a problem of Obama’s making.
And I bet a lot of academics would decline for reasons of tenure but still…
Time to put the foxes back in charge of the hen house!
March 11th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
look at the United States military where, unlike on the civilian side, political consensus has generally existed that effective institutions are important.
I think this point is more important than you give it credit for. The military has not spent 20 of the last 28 years headed by people who believe the country shouldn’t have a military, or that it should be drowned in the bathtub, or that military problems will solve themselves better by being left alone than by government involvement, or that private-sector militaries are necessarily more efficient, or that it’s not even theoretically possible for government to actually defend anything of value.
In fact, the view that we shouldn’t have an effective military and that laissez-faire policies are sufficient to deal with Osama bin Laden, while often used as a strawman, is not seriously advocated by anyone.
Contrast frequent calls from one end of the political spectrum to eliminate departments like Education, Labor and HHS, take a hands-off approach to securities fra… er, trading, etc.
Perhaps this is a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to imagine someone who comes up through the ranks of, say, the EPA being suddenly seized with the burning conviction that the entire department does more harm than good – for one thing, they will have spent their whole career looking at all the problems that the EPA is trying to solve, which should convince them of the reality and importance of those problems. Therefore, if you value loyalty to your ideology above competence (especially to fill a post that you don’t really want competently filled in the first place, since that would only vindicate the existence of the post you would really prefer to destroy), you’re not likely to select a careerist.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Every flag and general officer is ‘political’ to one extent or another, otherwise they’d retire as O-6’s.
And the very best generals actually have to have very good political skills (e.g. Eisenhower) due to the nature of modern war – in fact as both Clautzwitz and Sun Tzu would say, the nature of any war.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Similarly, you excessively discount the fact that career civil servants who have achieved the top ranks have ‘political skills’ themselves – this doesn’t make them bad people, but it does make them just like people in every other organization.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
One potential model for civilian agencies might be the State Department where there are a ton of offices that are technically political appointments but where strong norms and traditions suggests that you fill them with career civil servants.
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The same State Department that can’t figure out the Russian word for “reset”?
March 11th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
And along these lines
Special relationship? Obama’s people won’t even answer the phone, whines Downing Street
But Sir Gus O’Donnell risked sparking a transatlantic tiff today with an imprudent remark about Downing Street’s relations with the White House.
The head of the civil service, Sir Gus said the handover to President Barack Obama’s administration was severely hindering preparations for next month’s G20 summit.
In an extraordinary blunder, the usually-guarded Sir Gus said no-one in the U.S. Treasury department was answering telephone calls.
He said it meant the Government was finding it ‘unbelievably difficult’ to hold discussions ahead of the meeting of world leaders in London.
Even though the world was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in decades – top of the G20 agenda – Number 10 was having trouble getting in touch with key personnel, said the Cabinet Secretary.
‘There is nobody there,’ he told a civil service conference in Gateshead.
‘You cannot believe how difficult it is.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161037/Special-relationship-Obamas-people-wont-answer-phone-whines-Downing-Street.html
March 11th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Matt,
Isn’t making up excuses for Obama getting to be a drag? This partisan hack career plan of yours sounded like fun when Bush was President when you could take deserved pot shots at Bush, but now you’re stuck playing PR damage control.
March 11th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
This partisan hack career plan of yours
From a professional racist, that’s rich.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:45 am
I’m all for changing all but the most senior positions to be civil service jobs. It would go a long way towards finally eliminating that abominable Spoils System that Andrew Jackson introduced into America back in the 1830s and which has been entrenched to some degree since.*
*By the way, if there’s an afterlife and I end up in the same place as Jackson, I’m going to kick his ass for a number of years equal to the amount of positions he opened up for cronyism.