The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (13 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Ronald Reagan and the Career Bureaucracy
Reaching below the PAS positions, Reagan also exerted considerable control over the SES noncareer positions. By law, the president is allowed to fill up to 10 percent of all permanent Senior Executive Service positions with noncareer appointees. In any one agency, the noncareer SES can reach 25 percent as long as the overall governmentwide balance of 10 percent holds. Another 5 percent can be noncareer in transition times. However, if significant numbers of career positions are left unfilled (often an appointee's call) and the allocated noncareer positions are filled, the noncareer positions can easily and legally exceed 10 percent of the total SES workforce. This is exactly what happened in the Reagan administration. A passive appointment, or more accurately, nonappointment strategy was utilized. In this variant of the administrative strategy, career positions were left vacant while noncareer positions were aggressively filled.
Additionally, taking his cue from Jimmy Carter, Reagan interpreted the 10 percent limit on noncareer SES appointments to apply to
allocated
rather than filled positions. Since at any given time, there are generally more than one thousand unfilled positions, that gives the administration one hundred noncareer appointments in the bureaucracy it would not have otherwise. The result was that by September 1983, political appointees constituted over 10 percent of the government's executive population for the first time (Salamon and Abramson 1984, 46).
Table 2.1. Growth in Political Appointments in the Reagan-Bush Era
Selected Agencies
1981
1991
Commerce
146
204
Education
85
137
Agriculture
128
180
Justice
71
122
Treasury
48
97
Energy
99
145
State
88
130
Defense
118
156
General Services Administration
20
51
Labor
74
105
Environmental Protection
30
51
Health and Human Services
139
156
Interior
77
92
Total governmentwide
2,022
2,436
Source: Washington Post,
June 1, 1993.
 
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The Reagan-Bush era carried on and burnished Nixon's politicization of the bureaucracy
6
as appointees flooded into targeted agencies in what Senator John Glenn called "creeping politicization." From 1981 to 1991 overall political appointments grew by more than 20 percent (see table 2. 1).
The administrative presidency as practiced by Reagan was more subtle than that of Nixon. Using a legislative strategy for cover, battles in the Congress over budget and taxes effectively served as a diversion from the real battle that was taking place in the bureaucracy. There, "an ideologically oriented team of subcabinet officials moved into place and began implementing the Reagan agenda by administrative means, particularly in the regulatory arena" (ibid., 47).
While the Reagan administration was increasing the number of political appointees, it was also enacting severe reductions-in-force in domestic agencies targeted for major alterations in program priorities. And, not coincidentally, the two phenomena occurred at the same agencies and at the same time the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was increasing political leverage over careerists, giving PASs and noncareer SESs more power to relocate careerists or downgrade their responsibilities (Goldenberg 1985, 396). "Under Reagan, most key administrative positions [were] staffed on the basis of partisan and personal loyalties, and career professionals [were] largely excluded from many leadership networks and responsibilities" (Newland 1983, 2).
Following Nixon's lead, Reagan's administrative strategy advanced beyond this somewhat passive strategy to an active one, vis-à-vis the careerists:
Reagan ultimately went ahead to make explicit political use of the Senior Executive Service, usually by removing career officials from important slots and filling them with partisans. He also used reductions in force as a legal means of eliminating whole bureaucratic units staffed by careerists. This was done systematically, in the interests of presidential control and successful pursuit of the Reagan agenda. As a strategy for infiltrating the bureaucracy, it went way beyond anything Nixon had attempted. Yet it met with no opposition. (Moe 1991, 151)
Meanwhile, the numbers of limited-term political executive and Schedule C positions had also grown, more so at some agencies than at others. Like Eisenhower, who in 1953 created the political Schedule C positions to move partisans into the lower reaches of the bureaucracy, Reagan also used these positions to place loyalists where he hoped they could
 
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actually run the agencies. "The effect of this is that by August 1983 the number of Schedule C appointments exceeded the total number of Carter's Schedule Cs during his four-year term" (Salamon and Abramson 1984, 46).
This administrative presidency ploy meant not just the strategic placement of ideological soul mates but encouragement for them to advance policy objectives through use of their administrative power. Using this gambit, the PASs killed pending regulations left over from the final days of the Carter administration and slowed the issuance of new ones through executive orders and OMB procedures. They initiated "severe budget cuts, staff reductions, and a general easing of regulatory vigor," which led to reduced regulatory enforcement actions in many areas. They also "reinterpreted the conduct of agency business in accord with the administration's philosophy . . . of cooperation with business rather than confrontation in achieving regulatory compliance" (ibid., 47).
What was the ultimate result of the administrative presidency as practiced by the Reagan Republicans? Heclo describes the American system resulting from the Republican's version of the administrative presidency as being "hollow at the center" (Ingraham and Ban 1988, 12). Mark Goldstein, a staff member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, in a personal interview extended Heclo's theory to the government as a whole: "hollow government" was the result of twelve years of Republican administration. Government after the Republicans had neither the resources nor the management expertise to accomplish the tasks it had been given. The government had been hollowed out-the shell remained but the inside was empty.
Political-career relations reached new lows during the Reagan years. The high turnover rate of political appointees was second only to presidential hostility as a reason for this nadir. In one study, the career executives
reported an average tenure by their superiors of 12 months. Some noted that appointees who stayed longer than eight months were considered "old timers". . .. Obviously, when political tenure is so short, building a relationship of trust and respect is unlikely. One respondent, who in six years has worked for six different political managers, noted "nobody cared about good management, and even if they did, they were not here long enough to do anything about it." Said another, "Five years [into the Reagan presidency] we are still circling one another in this agency, and there is still a we-they mentality." (Ingraham and Ban 1986, 155)
 
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The Reagan administration's approach had other negative impacts on political-career relations. Because it placed an overriding emphasis on political responsiveness, it created problems for careerists in that it "neither valued nor tolerated more traditional public management perspectives," their area of expertise. This, in turn, poisoned the atmosphere, creating "an environment of hostility and lack of trust in some agencies." Further, Reagan's appointees managed to move career managers "out of the decisionmaking loop" in some agencies, making them, "in a very basic sense . . . superfluous to decisionmaking" (ibid., 158).
The politicization and centralization of power within the White House during Reagan's activist presidency was a "continuation and acceleration of the developmental logic apparent in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years." But more than that, Reagan's success at strengthening the institutional presidency meant that he built "a set of administrative arrangements that by past standards proved coherent, well integrated, and eminently workable." These arrangements would also provide a model for future presidents (Moe 1991, 153, 157).
Not surprisingly, the Reagan administration is typically viewed as anti-bureaucracy. Nathan (1983), Newland (1983), Ingraham (1987), Kirschten (1983), Rosen (1981), Carroll et al. (1985), and Pfiffner (1985) have noted the anti-bureaucratic rhetoric and tone of the administration. Rubin (1985), Waterman (1989), and Harris and Milkis (1989) have studied administration treatment of specific regulatory and social welfare organizations and found that the Reagan appointees did in fact seem more intent on limiting organization missions than enhancing efficiency. (Maranto 1993, 683)
However, this view must be placed in context. It is clear that organizations whose goals were in conflict with administration ideals (such as social welfare and regulatory agencies) indeed experienced antibureaucratic administration. However, organizations with "ideologically neutral missions" experienced less tension, and relations in the defense bureaucracies were positively harmonious. "In short, the Reagan administration cannot be considered anti-bureaucracy as such; rather, it opposed bureaucracies with liberal missions and embraced those with conservative missions," such as the defense organizations (ibid., 696).
This administrative presidency also built on the changes of the Nixon years, transforming the nature of the bureaucracy itself. Selective promotion in the upper civil service grades, beginning with Nixon and picking up speed over the long Reagan years, along with changing ideas in society,

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