Matt Yglesias

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.

Podesta Speaks

John Podesta is back from his work as co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project to his day job as CEO of CAP and CAPAF. And we’ve got video of him answering questions submitted by ThinkProgress readers. It’s a lot more informative than anything you’re going to see on cable.

At The Department of Forgotten Cabinet Secretaries

As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).

Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:

In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.

Of course it’s hard to actually save very much money doing this, since you wouldn’t actually be eliminating the department’s main sub-agencies. NOAA would be a good fit inside the EPA or the Department of the Interior, the Patent Office could be spun off as an independent agency or sent to Justice (or even Education; I think several countries put their patent agencies inside their education ministries) and the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And actually the price of carrying out the reorganization might well exceed the monetary savings. Still, political symbolism isn’t always about doing things that make sense.

At any rate, as long as the Commerce Cabinet Crisis continues, I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man. Check this space tomorrow for the first edition.

The Other Jobs Program

The country’s still awaiting not only a Commerce Secretary but a great many subcabinet appointees, deputy directors of agencies, etc. etc. etc. And this points to a paradox of presidential power. Politically, Obama is going to be at his strongest for the next several months. But organizationally, an administration tends to be weakest at the beginning—with many jobs vacant or filled by holdovers and some filled by people who don’t work out. Maximizing effectiveness requires Obama to pick good people and do it quickly. To that end, two documents out from CAP:

• Six Ways that the Obama Administration Can Improve the Political Appointment Process
• Presidential Appointments by the Numbers

A couple of factoids from the “numbers” report—it took Bill Clinton on average over 450 days to fill deputy agency head and inspector-general positions. That’s not good.

On The Sly

Laura Rozen has an interesting item about a secret dinner Barack Obama had with some foreign policy experts outside his circle of official advisers:

[Lee] Hamilton, the longtime House member from Indiana who cochaired the Iraq Study Group, the 9/11 Commission, and numerous others over the years, has become a kind of wise-man mentor to Obama. Last Thursday, the Wilson Center president assembled a small collection of scholars on the Middle East and South Asia for a meeting that stretched through dinner for hours into the night.

Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore); Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting); incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts. [...]

A source close to Hamilton explained that he had a long relationship with Obama, and noted that many former Hamilton staffers had gone on to be key staffers and foreign policy advisors to Obama.

Among them: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who wrote speeches and was a policy advisor for Hamilton for several years; Obama’s top foreign-policy advisor Denis McDonough; who worked for Hamilton on the staff of the House International Relations Committee, Obama Mideast advisor Daniel Shapiro, who worked for Hamilton as his professional staff member on the Middle East when Hamilton was chairman of the then-House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 103rd Congress (1993-94); Dan Restrepo, a top Obama Latin America advisor now with the Center for American Progress who worked for Hamilton on the Hill; and Mara Rudman, who worked for Hamilton on the Hill and is now a member of the formal Obama transition team.

There are a few noteworthy things about this. One is that Roger Cohen was observing earlier this week, echoed by many others, that it might be good for Obama to have some people of Arab or Persian ancestry in his brain trust on Mideast issues and not just a spectrum of Jewish-American opinion. And evidently Obama sees some truth to this or he wouldn’t be reaching out to this group. But so how come there aren’t any names like this being bandied about for the top jobs? And then there’s the matter of this national security team featuring Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Daniel Shapiro, and Samantha Power with Lee Hamilton in the background as an eminence grise. That sounds to be an awful lot like the Obama national security team I remember from the campaign. What ever happened to those guys? Or to non-Hamilton folks like Scott Gration and Richard Danzig? Obama feels like he’s already “in the bubble” but it appears to be a bubble overwhelmingly of his own devising. The names we’ve got for the most senior positions—Gates, Lynn, Flournoy, Clinton, Steinberg, Slaughter, Jones, Donilon—are all well-qualified people, but it’s really striking that none of them are Obama’s people. It’s not surprising to me that he might start to feel uncomfortable with that situation, but I don’t really see why he created the situation in the first place.

The Missing Faction

Laura Rozen has a good reported piece on the continuing anxiety of the foreign policy hands who took risks with their career to support Barack Obama in the primary, and who now seem to be left a bit out in the cold as the time comes to fill jobs. At issue is the fact that Obama decided to give the jobs with the most subordinates at Defense and State to people who obviously weren’t Obama loyalists. And Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton understandably want to fill their top subordinate positions with people they like and are comfortable with. And then those people in turn have their own ideas. Meanwhile, Susan Rice, who headed up the foreign policy operation in the campaign, has been sent off to be UN Ambassador. That’s a very senior position. But unlike in alternate realities in which she’d been made Deputy Secretary of State or Deputy National Security Adviser, it’s not a position that gives her a lot of sway over a large number of subordinate jobs.

Cass Sunstein to OIR

More appointments:

The president-elect is expected to name [Cass] Sunstein—his friend and informal adviser—to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a transition official said late Wednesday.

A low-profile position in the current administration, the job is likely to be a higher-wattage one after Obama takes office this month.

Sunstein seems like an unusually high-wattage person for this somewhat obscure job, further reenforcing the extent to which Obama is assembling a real team of all-stars where you have a bunch of people in secondary positions who would have enough stature to take on higher-profile jobs. OIR itself is a sub-part of the Office of Management and Budget and even though nobody’s ever heart of it, it has rather sweeping influence across the whole ambit of regulatory activities. Since there’s talk of doing a big overhaul of financial regulations that will be an obvious focus, but there’s lots and lots of regulating happening all over the place.

Chief of Staff

With regard to the Panetta situation, it’s worth noting that not only has it never been the case that the CIA Director must be a career intelligence professional, it’s also long been the case that past service as a White House Chief of Staff has been viewed as a wide-ranging qualification for future public office. Alexander Haig became Secretary of State. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both went on to serve as Secretary of Defense. James Baker become Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State. There’s nothing unusual about the idea that service in that job qualifies people for senior national security positions.

Richardson Out

Bill Richardson is withdrawing from consideration as Commerce Secretary. I’m going to throw my hat into the ring Caroline Kennedy-style.

Department of Good Ideas

Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.

That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.

Clinton State Department Taking Shape

I didn’t really think of this when it was first announced, but one advantage to appointing a big-shot like Hillary Clinton — and perhaps more important than being a big-shot, someone for whom saying “yes” wasn’t a no-brainer — to head the State Department is that it gives her the clout to argue forcefully for a rebalancing of institutional power away from the Pentagon and toward Foggy Bottom. That’s something the country needs, and even Robert Gates has acknowledged that it’s something we need, but Secretary-designate Clinton has both the motivation and the clout and network and credibility needed to get the job done. The official news that James Steinberg will be her Deputy is also good news. As Steve Clemons observes Steinberg was one of those who recognized the wisdom of setting a date for getting out of Iraq before that became the politically kosher stance for big-shot Democrats to take. Ironically, his co-author on the piece in question was Michael O’Hanlon who later backed off that view, but Steinberg never has. Steinberg also wanted to meet some bloggers at Netroots Nation over the summer, which I think makes him more aware than most security wonks of where things are headed in terms of activist groups.

I’m less sure that having the State Department play a bigger role in international economic policy is really such a great idea. Letting the Treasury lead on this worked fine during the Clinton administration and insofar as it hasn’t worked under Bush it’s been because his Treasury Secretaries have been unimpressive and subcabinet jobs have often lingered vacant for long periods of time. In general, I’d like to see economic people more involved with foreign policy rather than foreign policy people more involved with economics.

The idea of reviving the practice of sending “special envoys” to places is a good one. The three people specifically named as potential envoys to deal with the Israel-Arab conflict, however, were not so encouraging — I’m not sure either Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, or Richard Holbrooke would be seen as credible honest brokers in that role. There are a lot of other parts of the world where Holbrooke, in particular, could be very effective and where that wouldn’t be an issue. Of the buzzed-about names for Israel-Arab issues, Dan Kurtzer continues to be my favorite, though in principle anyone could be good in that job if they really want to be.

Obama in Context

Chris Bowers has an interesting post looking at the composition of the Obama cabinet and concluding that the personnel is on average to the right of the average Democratic member of congress. It’s worth understanding, however, that the same methodology would lead to the conclusion that Obama’s cabinet is to the right [CORRECTION: by "to the right" I mean "to the left"] of the veto points in congress. Those points are the median member of the House (a Blue Dog) and in the Senate either a centrist Democrat for things requiring a majority or else someone like Susan Collins to break a filibuster. It’s those characters who determine the scope of what’s possible legislatively. And though I think progressives will have many disappointments in the coming years, many more of those disappointments will come because something good Obama proposes gets watered-down in congress than because congress wants to do something good and somehow gets thwarted by the White House.

I was watching West Wing re-runs over the weekend and it’s an interesting thought experiment in the “what if Bill Clinton had been more left-wing?” hypothetical. It makes a big difference in some areas, including judicial nominees and Israel-Palestine diplomacy, but on core domestic policy issues there was no plausible script to write in which Bartlett being a big lib led the congressional GOP to suddenly surrender on expansive new social spending.

Obama Announces Working Families Task Force

Transition announcement today that Barack Obama intends to form a White House Task Force on Working Families, to be chaired by Joe Biden and to include “the Secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, as well as the Directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.”

It’s a bit hard to say what that’s going to accomplish, but in the announcement Biden says “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.” It’s good to see these questions getting asked. Over the past eight years to a remarkable degree the focus has been on trying to put as good a spin as possible on things rather than on trying to actually improving wages and living standards for the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

Dan Tarullo

It seems Barack Obama is poised to nominate Dan Tarullo for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to being a law professor at Georgetown, Tarullo is a CAP senior fellow:

Professor Tarullo held several senior positions in the Clinton administration, ultimately as Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy, responsible for coordinating the international economic policy of the administration. He was a principal on both the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. Prior to his appointment to that position, he had been Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, with special responsibility for regulatory and international issues.

From 1993 until early 1996, he was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs. In March 1995, President Clinton appointed Tarullo as his personal representative (”sherpa”) to the G-7/G-8 group of industrialized nations, with responsibility for coordinating U.S. positions for the annual Leaders Summits. He continued this assignment after he moved to the White House, participating in four summits.

Before joining the administration, Professor Tarullo practiced law in Washington and served as Chief Counsel for Employment Policy on the staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Earlier in his career he worked in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, served as Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of Commerce, and taught at Harvard Law School.

You can read some of his CAP stuff on reforming the IMF and World Bank, or trade deals and labor rights, and the case for reviving the Doha round. Now as it happens none of that is especially relevant to his new job. But still, there it is.

UPDATE: This might be more relevant: Banking on Basel: The Future of International Financial Regulation.

LaHood for Transportation?

The Hill is almost reporting that Barack Obama will appoint Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois as Transportation Secretary.

In principle, I think this is a great slot for a bipartisan pick. In practice, Democrats tend to be better on transportation issues than Republicans, but there isn’t actually a ton of ideological linkage between these issues and the broad disagreements between the parties. You could think abortion is murder, and also that investment in high-speed rail would be a good idea. Or you could favor tax cuts and congestion pricing on roads. And of course lots of Democrats have terrible views on transportation issues.

As for LaHood, he’s no Paul Weyrich, but he did break with the GOP to support the Passenger Rail Investment Act and the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act so that seems promising.

The Farm Exception

I didn’t know a great deal about Ken Salazar’s environmental record, but according to Grist’s Kate Sheppard he’s been quite solid on most “green” issues with the important exception of agriculture where he’s done things like vote against “a subsidy-reform amendment to the farm bill that would have boosted conservation funding by $1.2 billion and made access to the funds more equitable.” And the shocking reality of the legislative politics of agriculture is that the amendment in question failed by a large margin.

Meanwhile, Tom Vilsack is going to be Agriculture Secretary. Vilsack did some very important yeoman’s work a few years back trying to heal the wounds between the labor-oriented and centrist factions of the progressive movement, but on farm issues as far as anyone knows he’s a very conventional Iowa subsidy guy. Given the Obama administration’s high environmental aspirations, it seems perverse to just pretend that agricultural policy doesn’t have environmental impact. But that’s the convention in American politics and it looks like something Team Obama is comfortable with.

Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan always seemed like the obvious choice for Secretary of Education to me. He works in Chicago, just like Obama. Obama knows him personally. He went to Harvard and he plays basketball. On top of that, he’s had a good record in Chicago. And compared to other reform-oriented big city superintendents he has a much better relationship with teacher’s unions.

Under the circumstances, it seems to me that there was an enormous tactical cleverness in the way Obama let this thing play out with increasing levels of hysteria from unions and reformers about potential choices. If Obama had done the obvious thing early, it’s possible that both sides would have come away disappointed. But by getting everyone afraid of the specter of Joel Klein or Linda Darling-Hammond, he wound up making a pick who makes everyone happy. And, honestly, everyone should be happy! Of course this means conflicts will now be deferred onto subcabinet choices and so forth. But I would say that with NCLB architects George Miller and Ted Kennedy still running the relevant committees in congress and a reformist in the White House, the basic principles of testing and accountability look set to remain in place.

Meanwhile, the team of ballers has just added its most accomplished player. Duncan was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and after graduation he played professionally in Australia for several years. That puts him a cut above the pick-up crew that you’ll see in the rest of the administration.

President SUPERTRAIN

Inauguration planning we can believe in:

In the tradition of past Presidents-elect, the daylong trip will include a series of events on the way to Washington, D.C. Saturday morning, President-elect Obama and his family will hold an event in Philadelphia before boarding a train bound for Wilmington, Delaware, where he will be joined by Vice President-elect Biden and his family. Together, the families will travel to Baltimore, Maryland, and hold another event, before finally arriving in Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening.

Good times.

Chu-mania

Via James Fallows, a 2004 interview with Energy Secretary Designate Steven Chu from Harry Kreisler’s “Conversations With History” series at UC Berkeley:

Also a further thought on Chu. When his appointment was announced, I observed that the Secretary of Energy doesn’t actually have the sort of sweeping authority over energy policy issues that the title implies to many people. It was observed to me by a correspondent that Chu’s background as a research scientist, rather than say in economics or public policy, actually makes him quite well-suited to the realities of the job as various endeavors in the research and innovation fields are probably the most important programs the Energy Department actually runs.

The Middle East Transition

Washington DC is, of course, currently full of people jockeying for jobs. In most of these cases, the stakes are very high for the individuals involved, but pretty low for the country and the world. That’s because on most issues, the policy disagreements between Democrats mainstream enough to be seriously in contention for positions aren’t that huge. But on a couple of issues the personnel fights could have big policy implications. One such fight concerns education personnel and another concerns policy toward the Middle East peace process where the battle seems to be coming down to Dennis Ross versus Dan Kurtzer.

I could imagine a scenario in which Ross is appointed to something key, his appointment reassures the more Likud-friendly elements of American Jewish opinion, and then he turns in an inspired Nixon-goes-to-China performance. But that would be a hope.

It’s a little bit difficult to ever ascertain anyone’s exact views on Israel-Arab issues because everyone is for peace and everyone is against terrorism. But Ross has a disturbing habit of palling around with neocons. He was, for example, a big fan of invading Iraq. He signed a report on Iran policy authored by AEI’s Michael Rubin that basically called for sham negotiations as a prelude to military action. At the Washington Institute for Near East Policy he has a number of neocon associates, including the odious Daniel Pipes.

At a few stages during the campaign, and with some of his early national security picks — perhaps most notably General James Jones as National Security Adviser — Obama has indicated a desire for a bold new approach to these issues. Leaning on Ross as the major policymaker for Israel and its neighbors would signal the reverse — an approach to the issue dominated by caution and domestic politics in a way that would make serious progress unlikely.

A Bit More on Shaun Donovan

I was a little bit wrong-footed by the Shaun Donovan pick since he’s not really as high-profile as a lot of the Obama administration’s other incoming cabinet secretaries (no Nobel Prize, etc.) but I should say that I’ve heard from a few people involved in affordable housing work and they’re very excited about this guy. They feel that he’s a real expert in the field, and someone who’s really committed to HUD’s issues, in a way that the department has rarely seen.

Shaun Donovan

It seems out next HUD Secretary is going to be New York City Housing Commissioner Shaun Donovan. He’s not someone whose record I’m incredibly familiar with, but he’s extremely well-qualified with a very broad range of experience in housing issues and seems to have been ahead of the curve on some of the problems with subprime lending. What’s more, insofar as the HUD Secretary gets involved with a broader “urban development” portfolio experience in New York City would seem to predispose one toward an urbanist point of view.

NASA vs. Obama

One of the less important things I liked about Barack Obama back during the primaries was that on a couple of occasions he indicated a desire to cut back on NASA’s wasteful human space exploration missions in favor of doing more actual science. It appears that this has not endeared him to NASA, and that the space agency is proving to be a major dark cloud in a transition process that’s otherwise gone very smoothly.

Steven Chu

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu seems to me to be a great choice for Energy Secretary. First, he’s brilliant and has brilliant credentials. Second, he’s got the sound views. Watch him talking:

Unfortunately, the Department of Energy isn’t actually the policy juggernaut one might think it is. In the real world, the department’s responsibilities are pretty limited, and a lot of them relate to our nuclear weapons arsenal rather than energy policy as such. Still, insofar as a lot of what cabinet secretaries do is use the bully pulpit on their key issues, Chu should be a force for good.

On The Left Hand

Jared Bernstein, a first-rate guy with what I’d say is a clearly more left-wing orientation than the members of the Obama economic team that have been announced thus far, was just announced for the new position of Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor to the Vice President. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of influence that post holds. At a minimum, if the president wants to get someone on the phone who’ll criticize Summers/Geithner from the left they’ll know where to call.