The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (15 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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cent formally nominated, and 21 percent actually confirmed. (Ibid., 73-74)
Another result of the Reagan ideological litmus test was that significant numbers of the appointees had no previous government experience. Of those confirmed as of late June 1981, "59% (76 of 112) of subcabinet appointees lacked prior government experience, as did 78% (18 of 23) of those in independent agencies and 100% (seven of seven) of those in independent regulatory agencies" (Newland 1983, 3). The Bush appointees stood in marked contrast to those of the first Reagan administration, as will be discussed in later chapters.
7
Reagan's administrative strategy fell apart late in his first term as abuses by some of his appointees started to come to light. Excessive loyalty to the president, single-minded focus on his agenda, and standard-issue corruption had led some of the president's men and women outside the law. In Ronald Reagan's eight years in office, more than one hundred officials were accused of illegal or unethical conduct.
8
As one reporter put it, in terms of sheer criminality, the Reagan administration, mainly because of Iran-Contra, took the prize for ethics violations. The guilty verdicts of John Poindexter, national security adviser, and Oliver North, White House aide, were overturned only on procedural grounds; Caspar Weinberger was indicted but spared trial in that scandal by a pardon from President Bush.
9
Other violations abounded. For example, Paul Thayer, deputy defense secretary, pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and giving false testimony in an insider-trading case. Rita Lavelle, EPA toxic waste cleanup chief, was convicted of lying to Congress, as was Michael Deaver, White House deputy chief of staff. Questionable or illegal financial dealings led to trouble for others: both of Reagan's attorneys general, William French Smith and Edwin Meese, faced ethics investigations, as did the CIA's director, William Casey, and chief spy, Max Hugel. Deborah Gore Dean, top aide to HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, and two of her assistants were convicted of corruption. The secretary himself escaped indictment but not suspicion. In a plea bargain case that eventually saw a twenty-five-count indictment reduced to a one-count misdemeanor of perjury, a sympathetic judge decided to give former Interior Secretary James Watt "a break" and sentenced him to only six months of probation, a $5,000 fine, and five hundred hours of community service for his scheme to defraud HUD by funneling millions of dollars in low-income housing funds to his friends and then lying about it to Congress and a federal grand jury. The heads of numerous agencies were involved in ethical breaches: Food and Drug Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Occupational
 
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Safety and Health Administration, Maritime Administration, Legal Services Corporation, Veterans Administration, Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and Synthetic Fuels Corporation.
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There were personnel as well as agency casualties of Reagan's administrative strategy. For one reason or another, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, EPA head Anne Burford Gorsuch, and John P. Horton, also of EPA, White House aides Robert McFarlane, Michael Deaver, David Stockman, and others were ousted or resigned under fire. "Ten senior officials at EPA resigned or were fired and seven at HUD quit under pressure. Nine independent counsels conducted inquiries during the Reagan years."
11
Long past Reagan's presidency, investigations continued into the various HUD and Interior scandals. Nevertheless, as countless commentators noted, the genial, aw-shucks, Teflon president escaped unsullied as many aides fell in disrepute or political controversy around him.
While there were numerous accomplishments of the Reagan administration, the final assessment of its effect on government must be more negative than positive:
Overall . . . the Reagan Administration has weakened more than strengthened the more permanent institutions of presidential management, has undermined the morale of the civil service, has taken a narrow auditing approach to improving management in the executive branch, has done little to encourage competent professionals to serve in the federal government, and has overlooked opportunities to strengthen existing partnership arrangements between the federal government and other institutions at the state and local level and in the private sector. . . . Pressure has been placed on the bureaucracy to cut costs, but far less has been done to improve program effectiveness. In fact, some of the basic information resources needed to gauge program effects have been sharply cut back. (Salamon and Lund 1985, 23)
George Bush's Administrative Strategy: A Tory at the Helm
Lacking what he called "the vision thing," i.e., an overriding ideological impetus, such as that driving Nixon and Reagan, George Bush was, perhaps, less likely to turn to an administrative strategy.
Nonetheless, he did employ some of its aspects, particularly in his use of appointees and in the regulatory realm. In terms of his appointees, according to Chase Untermeyer, Bush's Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) director, the new president "'wanted to make clear this was a new administration, not Ronald Reagan's third term, but George Bush's first"' (Aberbach 1991, 239). While it was said that Bush initially kept at least 50
 
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percent of Reagan's appointees, many of these appointees were originally his people within the Reagan administration. Apparently, Bush had been successful in getting Reagan to appoint many of his campaign workers to administration positions, particularly in the second Reagan administration.
When George Bush came into office there was a rather determined effort to relocate those former non-Bush Reagan appointees who did stay on in the administration. With "Old faces in new places, new faces in old places" as the working motto of the PPO, the remaining Reagan appointees were shifted around to other agencies. One PAS in the Bush PAS interviews mentioned that he was the only Reagan PAS to be left in his incumbent position in the new Bush administration.
Those Independent Regulatory Commission (IRC) members who chaired their agency under Reagan (and who, by statute, Bush could not dismiss or reassign) were removed from the chair and generally ignored, according to one IRC PAS interviewee; there were to be no Reagan people left heading Bush administration agencies. The Bush administration was successful in this effort, leaving many Reagan people feeling somewhat abused or at least misused, according to this PAS who characterized Bush and his people as "rude and crude."
Another of Bush's administrative strategies was in the regulatory, or rather, deregulatory realm. He first moved to delay implementation of regulations and to eviscerate the agencies' independent power to promulgate regulations not mandated by Congress. In his State of the Union address in 1992 he issued and later extended an executive order mandating a moratorium on all new agency regulations.
He then moved to strengthen the Competitiveness Council, headed by Vice President Dan Quayle. This council had the power to supersede regulations promulgated by any of the executive agencies if it felt they would be bad for American businesses. With such a broad mandate there was plenty of room for conflict between the White House and the agencies and, of course, between the White House and the Congress. The EPA, for example, was a highly visible target of the Competitiveness Council's fire. In fact, as of the fall of 1992, the council or OMB had held up some seventy-six regulations the agency proposed, some in violation of deadlines established by the Congress. Thanks to the council's decrees, the EPA had missed forty-six deadlines in the Clean Air Act by October 1992. As one careerist observed, "The climate at the White House has been to do nothing. It stops regulators. It makes regulators question every step they take. It's chilled their work." It also led to numerous lawsuits against the EPA for violating the law by not creating regulations to implement laws passed by the Congress.
 
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While this council existed in a previous incarnation in Reagan's administration under then-Vice President Bush, it had a much lower profile as the Task Force on Regulation. President Bush, as committed to deregulation as Reagan and spurred on by Vice President Quayle, elevated its status and power. However, when the council flexed its muscles to undercut the authority of the agencies to implement legislation, it drew heavy fire from the Democratic Congress who eliminated funding for the council in the summer of 1992 (and President Clinton abolished the council in the second week of his administration).
Bush's approach to the Congress was markedly different from that of his predecessor. While Ronald Reagan faced off with a ''Make my day" sneer, Bush initially held out a hand of comity, calling for dialogue and communication with the Democratic Congress. As he said in his inaugural address, "We need compromise; we've had dissension. We need harmony; we've had a chorus of discordant voices. . . . To my friends-and yes, I do mean friends-in the loyal opposition and yes, I do mean loyalI put out my hand. I'm putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I'm putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: this is the age of the offered hand."
The Congress took Bush at his word in the early days of the administration:
During the early period of Bush's presidency, negotiation between the White House and Capitol Hill produced progress and substantial agreement on clean air legislation, aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and the bailing out of stricken savings-and-loan associations. Such was the cooperative spirit that was now abroad that, reviewing his first six months in office, a
Time
cover story [August 21, 1989] dubbed Bush "Mr. Consensus," concluding that "after eight years of the Reagan revolution, Bush's modest pragmatism seem[ed] more welcome than unwavering single-mindedness." (King and Alston 1991, 276)
George Bush's willingness to work with rather than against the Congress was a refreshing change for the Congress and for the country. It could hardly have been otherwise, however, given the factors facing the new president: the Reagan Revolution had pretty well run its course and was out of gas, the huge deficit Reagan bequeathed his successor precluded any new policy initiatives, and the Democrats still controlled the Congress (Pfiffner 1990, 70). Further, Bush's personality and the lack of depth of his election victory made his a presidency of consolidation. Bush's election victory, while certainly his, owed a great deal to his

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