The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush

27 by G. Calvin Mackenzie, Colby College The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush It was to be the single most visible decision of George W. Bush’s first year in office, inspiring even a rare primetime televised address to announce and explain to the American people his decision on government support for stem cell research. For weeks, the White House press office told of the President’s wideranging search for advice: the meetings with ethicists and scientists, with interest group representatives, and with dozens of ordinary citizens. But Bush’s wide search for advice did not include consultations with the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—the president’s chief science adviser—nor with the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the government’s leader in health research. The simple reason why George W. Bush did not consult with his appointees in those positions is that there were none. President Bush was making decisions that affected the health and concerned the moral values of millions of Americans without the support of scores of important players in his administration. In fact, many of the 500 top positions in the executive branch that required Senate confirmation were not filled in the first nine months of his term in office. Figure 1 shows the month-by-month progress through September 2001 (the deadline for this article). Many of those who voted for George W. Bush wanted decisive action on the new education approaches he had promised. But until the end of May, his Education Secretary Rod Paige was the only confirmed appointee at work in that department. Around the government, the story was much the same: No one but the secretary confirmed at Energy until May 24; no one but the secretary confirmed at Interior until June 29; on September 1, eight of the 14 cabinet departments had no confirmed chief financial officer; when terrorists struck a brutal blow to the country on September 11, there was no confirmed U.N. Ambassador, no commissioner of customs, no director of the U.S. Marshals, no undersecretaries for the Army or Air Force. In 1993, the Clinton transition had broken every record for the slowest ever. But the most recent transition will come very close, perhaps even surpass—if that’s the right word—the painfully slow pace of its predecessor. These are not measures of human failure, of the inability of new presidents and their aides to master the task of staffing an administration. There are some breakdowns and false starts in every transition, of course. But the starker reality is that the presidential appointments process has become a monster that quickly overwhelms any new administration’s capacity to tame it. The problem is systemic, and it grows with each new election. Embedded in all mainstream theories of democracy is the notion that elections are critically important navigational devices. They point political leaders in certain directions and away from others. They supply new leaders determined to pursue the goals that citizens choose with their votes. Democratic citizens rely on the assumption that, once chosen, elected leaders will do as they are bid. But in a complex democracy, that can occur only when elected leaders have teams of experts and administrators in place to help them refine policy options, build support for their initiatives among the people and the legislature, and then implement them. Nowhere in all of democratic theory is there a provision for a lag of six months or nine months or a year between the time the people speak and the essential administrative appointees are in place to act on their instructions. And yet that, consistently, has been the practice in America over the past decade.