Predicting the Outcomes of Presidential Commissions: Evidence from the Johnson and Nixon Years (1998)

The problem started when initial decisions were made to hand process to one named Ira Magaziner, who knew, number one, nothing about politics, and number two, nothing about healthcare.(1) Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), on failure of Clinton Task Force on National Health Care Reform When President Bill Clinton presented his Health Security Act (S. 1757, H.R. 3600) to Congress on October 27, 1993, many political pundits pronounced it dead on arrival. By mid-summer 1994, pundits were proven correct. A majority of members of Congress had either or expressed serious doubts about president's 1,342-page bill. The anemic bill was end product of president's Task Force on National Health Care Reform. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton headed commission, with White House Senior Policy Adviser, Ira Magaziner, coordinating its day-to-day operations. The 511-member commission ended up working on bill for nine months. During that period, commission was criticized widely (and, in fact, was sued) for its secrecy and questionable legal standing. In end, force produced a bill that was substantively abstruse and politically infeasible. Why did Clinton commission on health care reform seem destined for failure? Was commission somehow destined to produce an unsalable proposal? Could administration have averted failure by paying closer attention to past presidential commissions? Does history suggest that there is a pattern to successful and unsuccessful commissions? This article addresses these questions by asking more generally whether success or failure of ad hoc presidential commissions involved in political process is at all predictable. We contend that it is. We analyze fates of commission reports issued during Johnson and Nixon administrations and find that a distinct pattern of success exists with respect to president's interest and type of commission that penned report. The dependent variable in our analysis--an empirical index of commission success--focuses on political, as opposed to substantive, success or failure of commission's report. That is, we examine extent to which commission's recommendations find their way into presidential proposals and/or policies adopted by federal government, regardless of their merits as solutions to problems they are designed to address. We restrict our focus for two reasons: first, our background is in political science rather than analysis, so we are more qualified to judge effectiveness of process than quality of its outputs; second, since our goal is to generalize across a number of different commissions covering a large number of very different areas, it would be extremely difficult to come up with a common standard for assessing policy success.(2) Presidential Commissions Presidential known variously as advisory commissions, blue-ribbon panels, task forces, or expert commissions, have been frequent, although always temporary, additions to office of modem presidency. Officially, nearly all of these commissions carry same presidential mandate: to study and propose alternatives in response to particularly new and/or particularly difficult public problems. Yet, commissions' reports, and presidents' responses to them, have been subject to a variety of seemingly contradictory criticisms. On one hand, we have heard presidents and other political actors criticized for ignoring proposals generated by commissions. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) once complained that commissions were the nation's conscience being rejected or ignored by Presidents, deaf officials, deaf Congressmen, and perhaps a deaf public.(3) On other hand, politicians and pundits have been known to complain about presidential commissions designed to do little more than ratify courses of action president was already known to favor. …