Source: Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, Monday, November 24, 2008.
"The United States has a far larger number of political appointees in government than any other industrialized democracy."
There were 1,778 political appointees in 1960 and nearly double that number in 2004, not counting part-time, advisory and White House positions. The federal government grew dramatically in that period, too, but the number of political appointees grew nearly twice as fast, said Lewis, author of the book "The Politics of Presidential Appointments."David E. Lewis, who is now at Vanderbilt University, compared the Bush administration's own evaluations of more than 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the 242 managers who ran those programs. Three-quarters of the managers administering the programs were political appointees while a quarter were career civil servants.
The political appointees were better educated, on average, than the civil staff. Many had stellar records in the private sector or on the campaign trail. Side by side, the political appointees just looked like a much smarter bunch than the careerists.Lewis "said his analysis controlled for a number of confounding factors, including the difficulty of administering different programs. He said civil servants outperformed political appointees even when the analysis was restricted to comparably difficult programs."
When it came to performance, however, the bureaucrats whipped the politicals: Programs administered by civil servants were significantly more likely to display better strategic planning, program design, financial oversight -- and results. These findings, remember, were based on the Bush administration's own evaluation system -- the Program Assessment Rating Tool, administered by the Office of Management and Budget.
Comment: Of course, the analysis can not resolve the issue once and for all. Certainly there may be some excellent managers among the political appointees and some incompetents among the career government service people.
It is not surprising to me that people who have been selected by competitive evaluations and have long experience in administering their programs often do better in managing those programs than do political appointees, even if the latter do well on intelligence tests.
A balance is needed. The elected president has to implement the program on which he was elected via a huge bureaucracy. He needs a corps of people who understand that program and its administration, and importantly are committed to it, to impose it on the bureaucracy. Indeed, the more change that is mandated, the more difficult it is likely to be to get the bureaucracy to implement it. Whether the president needs 2,000 people or 3,000 people to impose his program I don't know.
On the other hand, it is easy for the political process to go astray. The White House can employ armies of ideologues to impose their ideology on a scientific agency that has evidence that contradicts that ideology. Alternatively, it can reward unqualified supporters with political appointments. It might seem especially likely to do so for the lower level positions in the bureaucracy. (Think about recruiting young ideologues from the Heritage Foundation jobs website to staff important positions in the Iraq Transition Authority.) JAD
No comments:
Post a Comment