Appointee–Careerist Relations in the Presidential Transition of 2008‐2009

Thus the political executive and his political staff become 'jigsaw puzzle' managers. Other staff see and work on the individual pieces, but never have enough of the pieces to be able to learn the entire picture. --Michael Sanera, Mandate for Leadership II (1984) In the end you usually develop a very good relationship. The way you do it is you're loyal to whoever's [sic] here, and you work hard for them. If they're any good, they discover quickly that you're quite an asset to them. --Anonymous Career Senior Career Executive at Department of Education. (1) At the center of the administrative presidency, the relationships between appointees and career executives are critical to understanding a president's effectiveness in advancing his policy agenda. Presidents attempt to achieve responsiveness to their executive authority through the strategic use of appointment powers and increases in the number of unilateral appointments, while simultaneously centralizing policy making to a cadre of identified loyalists (Lewis 2008). Appointees' ideological loyalty to presidential prerogatives is often the driving force behind the placement of many appointees (Durant 1992; Wood and Waterman 1994). The logic underlying presidents' emphasis on loyalty is that appointees can limit career bureaucratic discretion, shift the responsibilities and goal-orientation of employees, and broadly reorganize human capital (Durant and Resh 2009; Nathan 1983; Waterman 1989). Certainly, the personnel management advice emanating from Washington's most prominent conservative think tank during the Bush administration was evocative of the same advice the organization proffered to the Reagan administration two decades earlier. In a document that clearly outlines the hostility the writers held toward the career civil service, Moffit, Nesterczuk, and Devine (2001) outline propositions in a Heritage Foundation policy document that are synonymous with the "jigsaw puzzle" management approach of the Reagan administration: (2) 1. "The new President must make liberal use of his power of appointment, get a loyal team in place to carry out his agenda, and insist on accountability while maintaining a clear distinction between career and non-career employees." 2. "Political appointees must be in charge of implementing the President's policies and readily available to speak for the Administration." 3. "Political appointees should make key management decisions; such decisions should not be delegated to the career bureaucracy." 4. "The new Administration should provide a clear rationale for continued reductions in the size of the federal workforce and for management changes; workforce reductions should be well planned and systematically implemented." An extension of the politicization strategy, the jigsaw puzzle management approach relies on the normative assumption that career bureaucrats will act to sabotage the popular mandates for presidential action in areas that do not comport with the status quo that careerists are purportedly interested in maintaining (Sanera 1984). Therefore, the prescription is set forth that appointees subvert these perceived careerist intentions by bypassing career senior executives for policy advice, using them to carry out programs while keeping them in the dark as to the overall strategy being pursued (Benda and Levine 1988; Golden 2000; Ingraham 1995; Pfiffner 1985). In many respects, the general perception of presidency scholars and journalists prior to that memo supports the notion that the Bush administration replicated largely the jigsaw puzzle management practices of the Reagan administration. The White House had (1) centralized White House Office approval for each Schedule C appointment (Pfiffner and Patterson 2001; Warshaw 2006); (2) developed a strict hierarchical, top-down authority structure in almost every area of government (Suskind 2004); (3) emphasized ideological and personal loyalty to the president as appointee selection criteria (Warshaw 2006; Romano 2007); and (4) exercised a general rejection of the career bureaucracy's involvement in day-to-day implementation and policy-making decisions (Hedge 2009; Lewis 2008; Moynihan and Roberts 2010; Warshaw 2006). …