The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (79 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Page 257
Spouses were often the forgotten people in the federal pressure cooker, called upon for social functions with little to support their own personal fulfillment. There was a group for wives of PASs, and another for husbands of PASs (the latter called the Denis Thatcher Society after the husband of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher), both geared for spouses' support and social needs.
Orientation to PAS duties was stressed more in George Bush's administration than it had been in Ronald Reagan's, perhaps due to the former's emphasis on team spirit. While the Bush one-day orientation could do little in the way of training, it did set the tone of the administration and introduced PASs to the White House staff. This strategy was one way to make the PASs feel connected with one another across agencies: it was also a way to remind them of their obligations to the White House. An official of the PPO indicated that the White House was making a concerted effort to get every new PAS to an orientation session. If the PAS did not attend on the first invitation, it was reissued two more times.
While those who had previously served as a PAS might not feel the need for an orientation on how the federal bureaucracy operated, it is interesting to note that 54 percent of the total respondents indicated that they had attended a Bush White House orientation session, perhaps to get on board with the Bush administration per se, its people, agenda, and way of doing things (read: team spirit. Also, 19 percent attended orientation sessions in their own agency.) This stood in marked contrast to the 79 percent of the PASs in the 1985 NAPA study who indicated they had received no orientation.
PASs clearly (by 94 percent) chose ethical guidelines as the most important aspect of orientation to federal management. This is particularly key, given the ethical lapses of some appointees in the Reagan administrations.
2
PASs considered the following areas to be of very or very great importance for discussion during an orientation is listed below (173 to 178 PASs responded):
Ethical guidelines
94%
Public policies relevant to PAS's agency
80%
The president's policy objectives
79%
Interactions with Congress
77%
The federal budget process
73%
The federal personnel system
60%
Relations with the news media
60%
OMB's decision-making process
59%
 
Page 258
It was also clear that appointees felt the need to learn the basics of how Washington workspublic policy, the budget, the White House apparatus, personnel, the media, the Congress. Obviously, a one-day orientation is not the venue to satisfy this extensive agenda, but the PPO is the unit that should respond with appropriate training and resources.
Because the goals that appointees have going into an office will likely influence how they will approach their tasks, those in the Bush PAS Survey were asked to rate the importance of particular agency goals. The Bush PASs' primary goals for their agencies are listed below (178 PASs responded). Only four goals were rated definitively (by 70 percent or more) as being of "great" or "very great" importance:
Improving their agency's effectiveness
93%
Improving operational efficiency
89%
Developing new policies/regulations
81%
Changing public perceptions of agency
70%
Improving public perceptions of civil servants
52%
Reducing regulations
51%
Enhancing size or scope of agency
20%
It was particularly interesting that in a strenuously antiregulation Republican administration, only the barest majority of its PASs felt that reducing regulations was a significant goal, while more than 80 percent wanted to create
new
policies and regulations. Meanwhile, only 20 percent claimed enhancing the size or scope of their agency was of "great" or "very great" importance, 31 percent saw it as of "somewhat" or ''moderate" importance, while more than 49 percent claimed it was of "little or no" importance. One wonders what tricks of administrative legerdemain nearly half would employ to create more federal regulations without the administrative apparatus to back them up.
Congress: Political Games and Gauntlets
Dealing with Congress was an integral part of bureaucratic life for most PASs. As discussed in earlier chapters, the Democratic Congress was more often seen by Republican PASs as the enemy than as the colleague branch in government.
3
Interviews tended to confirm this perspective.
While several PASs spoke of the importance of maintaining good relationships with key members of Congress and their staffs, and there seemed to be many staff-to-staff contacts that greased the wheels of leg-

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