It takes a new president so long to fill jobs within the federal government that there’s never a time when all the positions are filled. “We call it the government of empty chairs,” says UNC political scientist Terry Sullivan. That would be funny if it weren’t so scary.
Of the thousands of positions to be filled, some 1,500 require Senate confirmation. In President Barack Obama’s first one hundred days in office, he nominated 195 people—more than any other president, Sullivan says. The Senate confirmed 82 of those nominations in the first one hundred days. (Only Ronald Reagan had more nominees confirmed.) By that standard, Obama did pretty well. But 82 appointments aren’t nearly enough. Not in our post-9/11 world.
After investigating how nineteen hijackers managed to wreak so much havoc, the 9/11 Commission found an alarming lack of national security appointments in the Bush administration at the time of the terrorist attacks. Congress and President Bush responded with the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which helps the White House gain quicker security clearance for nominees who will handle national security issues. Still, getting a nominee confirmed remains a tedious process. Sullivan is working to fix that.
The smartest form
Sullivan says our peaceful transition of power from one political party to another is our most prized democratic export. But we don’t treat it as such. “We complain when Afghanistan can’t get its government to stand up fast enough,” he says, “but we’re really not much better.” And we’ve been doing this democracy thing for a couple hundred years.
In 2009 the Aspen Institute formed the Commission to Reform the Federal Appointments Process, and in 2010 it asked Sullivan to join. Cochaired by four former White House staffers and senators—Democrats and Republicans—the commission has been working with the Senate to figure out a way to get 150 nominees confirmed in the first one hundred days. That should translate into hundreds more confirmations in the first year of a president’s term. In July 2011, the Senate passed a bill authorizing the president to create a task force to streamline the process by which the government gathers information about nominees. Sounds mundane, but Sullivan says the bureaucracy of background checks bogs down the confirmation process.
Here’s why. The White House, FBI, Senate, and U.S. Office of Government Ethics use four different questionnaires to vet nominees. Some questions are the same on each form. Some questions are similar but different enough to require slightly different answers. And then some questions are unique to each form because the four government entities seek different information.
“This demoralizes nominees,” Sullivan says. “They don’t see this as the government being humorously discombobulated, which it is. They think the government is making them jump through hoops just to put them in their place.” It takes weeks, sometimes months, to get through this process. According to surveys conducted by the Brookings Institution, many former federal employees say it’s a major reason why they refuse to serve again.
So Sullivan is working on a smart form, which would allow nominees to fill out just one questionnaire. He and the commission are detailing the connections between questions on various forms, and they are creating a programmers’ grid to serve as the foundation for software that would separate the answers. That will allow the FBI, White House, Senate, and Office of Government Ethics to get the answers they seek. “It’s the path of least resistance,” Sullivan says. The other option would require the different units to give up or alter a bunch of their questions. “We don’t think that’s as realistic,” Sullivan says.
The Senate bill would also reduce the number of federal positions that require Senate confirmation. In the past, Sullivan says, the Senate has been reluctant to give up such power. But the Aspen Institute commission compiled a list of two hundred government positions that shouldn’t require Senate confirmation.
For instance, every federal department and agency—defense, state, environmental protection—has a congressional relations staffer who must be confirmed. “These people aren’t policy makers,” Sullivan says. “They don’t set policy; they execute policy.” The jobs are important, but there’s no reason Congress should have a say in who fills these positions, Sullivan says. The Senate, to the shock of pundits, agreed.
Sullivan expects the House of Representatives and the president to sign off on the bill.
Terry Sullivan, executive director of the White House Transition Project, is an associate professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Read more of this Mark Derewicz Endeavors story at http://endeavors.unc.edu/partisan_partners.
