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Article Excerpt
The presidential power to appoint senior government officials has evolved from a few phrases in the second paragraph of the second section of Article II of the U.S. Constitution into an unwieldy and opaque system of rules and expectations. "The appointment power operates in a framework of studied ambiguity," Louis Fisher observes, developing through generations of "imaginative accommodations between the executive and legislative branches" (1985, 59). Demands for broad-based reform occasionally take hold, most recently through the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, which sought to reassert the Senate's advise and consent power by placing strict (though sometimes neglected) limitations on the service of "acting" appointee (GAO 2003; Stayn 2001). Yet, as in the case of the controversy over the appointment of interim U.S. attorneys in the Department of Justice, the system's "studied ambiguity" remains unyielding. (1) Its complexity is rooted in tensions inherent in presidential administration: the drive for political control and policy competence; the dynamics of issue networks and policy domains; and the priorities and ambitions of politicians, interest groups, and administrators.
Recognizing that efforts to fix the appointee system are as inevitable as the system is, in some basic respects, unfixable, this article aims simply to provide a measure of clarity. We describe one prominent feature of agency appointee politics--continuity--based on appointee turnover, tenure, and position vacancies. (2) We develop a series of snapshots in time, illuminating the succession of the top-tier of appointees--presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed (PAS)--during the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, between January 20, 1989 and January 20, 2009. Using a new data set drawn from the Office of Personnel Management, Government Accountability Office, and a variety of published sources, we analyze roughly 2,200 appointments across three presidencies, describing patterns of tenure and vacancies that form the contours of the administrative presidency. (3) We consider research linking appointee continuity and agency performance and conclude by reflecting on the nature of this relationship for research on and the practice of presidential administration.
More than three decades ago, Hugh Heclo's A Government of Strangers (1977) depicted America's transient governing elite--the presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed administrators populating the upper echelons of federal government agencies--as the role of appointees shifted with the expanding reach of institutional presidency. Heclo observed that transience among appointees forms a stark, sometimes uneasy contrast with the continuity of senior-level career civil servants, often at the culmination of successful government careers. He saw relations between appointees and careerists shifting under the weight of thickening bureaucracies and the politicization of government administration, central themes in contemporary presidency and public administration scholarship (Goodsell 2006; Light 1995; Peters and Pierre 2004). Richard Nathan's (1983) administrative presidency and Terry Moe's (1985, 1990, 1993) politicized presidency have inspired a generation of scholars who have embraced political control of the bureaucracy as a means to fulfill Hamiltonian visions of an energetic executive. (4) Critics of politicization, by contrast, stress the value of administrative competence, contending that politicized agencies put the state's capacity for expertise and, ultimately, performance at risk (Lane 1996; Williams 1990).
Most contemporary thinking about politicization posits a trade-off between political control and administrative competence (Bawn 1995; Bertelli and Feldman 2007; Epstein and O'Halloran 1999; Miller 2005). This control-competence trade-off is analytically useful, framing a critical tension in bureaucratic structure (Waldo 1948; Weber 1958). Nevertheless, this dichotomy obscures the social foundations on which administrative institutions are built. By way of illustration, David Lewis (2008) defines politicization as the penetration of appointed positions, measured by the ratio of appointees to total agency staff. Lewis's research represents the most sophisticated empirical research on politicization in U.S. federal agencies to date. Nevertheless, this operationalization fixes on the formal features of politicization, neglecting its normative dimensions, which are represented, for example, by the erosion of professional autonomy in appointments to expert advisory committees. (5)
Consider the qualities defining appointee competence. Integrity, commitment, intellectual ability, managerial skills, personal charisma, adaptive capacities--to a greater or lesser extent, all are attributes one might associate with quality or competence. While it may be easy to agree about what incompetence looks like, competence often rests in the eye of the beholder. (6) As a consequence, the character of appointee competence is more difficult to discern than its absence. For whatever combination of reasons, a consensus now holds that the George W. Bush administration deployed a number of appointees who lacked the competence to fulfill their mandates. (7) An effort to explain the causes and consequences of Bush-era politicization by focusing on its formal artifacts risks omitting some of its most vital implications. More importantly, apart from the administration's most controversial appointments, broad segments of the Bush administration, like all presidential administrations, maintained what Heclo terms "mutual performance" between appointees and careerists. (8) Rather than a trade-off between competence and control, he finds learning, the cultivation of professional networks, and a "conditional cooperation" between appointees and bureaucrats. Time plays a critical part in the cultivation of mutual performance. (9) Heclo writes,
Time on the job brings an opportunity not only to learn about the substance of programs and how to operate in the Washington networks but also to use what has been learned. Policy priorities are not immune to change, but they are most likely to respond to leaders who are around long enough to build support, to institutionalize changes in the bureaucracy, and to string together the narrow margins available at any one time to a strand of policy development. (1977, 237)
Duration is a vital component of agency leadership, as a source of both competence and the credibility of leadership commitments. Continuity among appointees promotes the accumulation of knowledge, improved judgment and accountability, and the cultivation of good-faith relations between appointees and careerists. At the same time, it is striking how little the scholarship on appointees offers when it comes to the systematic empirical observation of appointee continuity. The following section describes a new data set, which we hope will contribute to growing scholarly interest in measuring the causes and consequences of politicization and the role of appointees in the interplay between presidents and government agencies.
Appointee Tenure, Turnover, and Vacancies, 1989-2009
How long do presidential appointees serve? A common refrain holds that these "birds of passage" serve only two years, too brief a period to learn the particulars of their important positions. However, two years is a figure grounded in folk wisdom rather than systematic observation. In reality, the great diversity of appointee positions scattered across agencies resists such broad generalizations. The salience of the "two years" refrain in fact suggests just how opaque the appointment process remains, even among students of the U.S. government. For all its importance, the role of appointee continuity in agency administration has not generated a robust empirical scholarship. Until recently, with a few noteworthy exceptions (GAO 1994; Marcum et al. 2001), most analyses of political appointees in U.S. federal agencies relied on surveys (Aberbach and Rockman 2000; Ban and Ingraham 1990; Brauer 1987; Joyce 1990; Mackenzie 2001; Mackenzie and Light 1987; Mackenzie and Shogan; Pfiffner 1987). In recent years, intriguing research has examined the politics of agency appointments (Bertelli and Grose 2007; Lewis 2007; McCarty and Razaghian 1997; Nixon 2004; Peters and Pierre 2004) and the factors contributing to length of service, in particular (Wood and Marchbanks 2007).
In this section, we describe patterns of appointee succession through tenure, turnover, and position vacancies during the George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. (10) We examine one aspect--continuity--of appointments to full-time, civilian PAS positions in all departments, single-headed independent agencies, and Executive Office of the President organizations, a total of a little more than 2,200 appointments. (11) We employ a new data set collected through formal requests to the Office of Personnel Management, Government Accountability Office, and published sources, including the Senate nominations database available through Thomas.gov, Congressional Research Service reports, contemporary news coverage accessed by LexisNexis, and other online resources.
Figure 1 summarizes tenure data during the Bush and Clinton administrations across several categories of PAS appointees. The overall median is 2.5 years, not far from conventional estimates of appointee tenure, but with several intriguing variations. A quarter of the appointees served more than 3.6 years--almost a full presidential term--while another quarter of appointees served less than 18 months. (12) Senior appointees tend to serve longer terms. The mostly cabinet-level appointees in the Level I pay category served a median of 3.3 years. Level II appointees, by contrast, generally serve much shorter terms, a median of 2.3 years, again with a quarter serving less than 18 months. A similar pattern holds for lower executive pay levels: Approximately one-quarter of appointees served less than a year and a half, and another quarter served three and a half years or more. (13)
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Given profound changes in the scope and organization of American government, these figures are strikingly consistent with earlier studies. Figure 2 compares the results of the current study with two earlier studies: MacMahon and Millett's (1939) study of PAS appointee tenure from 1798 to 1938, and Stanley, Mann, and Doig's (1967) review of appointees between 1933 and 1965. Looking at a period that extends essentially from the early years of the republic to the years just prior to World War II, MacMahon and Millett find that 37% of appointees served less than two years, while a quarter served more than four. Between 1933 and 1965, appointee tenure dropped discernibly. Stanley, Mann, and Doig find...
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