The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (96 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Page 331
page form, and an hour-and-a-half personal grilling by two OPM investigators, both form and interrogators asking most of the PAS-related questions (going back fifteen years) in an atmosphere of dispassionate suspicion. It was a weird and intrusive experience, one difficult to imagine being willing to undergo to the depth required of PASs.
5. One example tells the story: The assistant secretary for health (EL 4) at HHS is responsible for a total staff of fifty thousand in a wide range of offices and departments, including the Surgeon General's Office, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Indian Health Service, and the National AIDS Program.
6. The same HHS assistant secretary mentioned above oversees a budget of $20 billion.
7. There are always exceptions, of course. In August 1993 Robert Bostik, a Bush associate deputy undersecretary of labor for international labor affairs, pleaded guilty to violating federal conflict-of-interest laws. While working on the North American Free Trade Agreement he accepted an interest in a Mexican housing development. He was to receive 10 percent of the profits of a housing development. His take: between $250,000 and $1 million.
8. It is worth noting that President Bush's first public speech (to the Senior Executive Service) is often cited as a show of presidential support for the public service and its servants. He said,
You are one of the most important groups I will ever speak to. . . . Our principles are clear. That government service is a noble calling and a public trust. I learned that from my parents at an early age, and that, I suspect is where many of you learned it as well. . . . I want to make sure that public service is valued and respected because I want to encourage America's young people to pursue careers in government. There is nothing more fulfilling than to serve your country and fellow citizens and to do it well. That's what our system of self government depends on. And I have not known a finer group of people than those I have worked with in government. (Aberbach 1991, 236)
These kind and gentle words earned Bush nothing but scorn from the die-hard Reaganites. According to John Podhoretz, Bush declared himself "Chief Clerk of the United States" by this act. Calling the public service the highest and noblest calling, as he did, was to the Reaganites and Libertarians "the rhetorical equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. Bush . . . used those words to declare his independence from the Republican majority and his intention to throw in his lot with his true fellows." They never forgave him for this and his other grievous sin, the tax increase, and so abandoned him to his fate in the 1992 election.
9. OPM statistics indicate 20 percent women and 14 percent minority PASs as of June 30, 1992.
10. PASs hired for reasons of competence rather than political connections were not reluctant to disclose that fact with some pride in the interviews. One told how he had been interviewed by the PPO and asked whom he knew in the White House, on whose campaign he had worked, or to which candidate he had contributed. The PPO official was incredulous that his answer to all three questions was negative and finally asked, "What the hell are
you
doing here?"
 
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8
Intrabureaucratic Issues
1. The PASs' willingness to consult with careerists on policy making (72-74 percent) closely paralleled the 78 percent of the CSESs who reported in the GAO survey that their political boss allowed them to be involved in policy formulation.
2. Early in his administration Bill Clinton was advised to find a way to fire the political IGs, nearly all of whom had been appointed by Reagan or Bush. In the summer of 1993 the unlikely team of Republican Senator Jesse Helms and Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd came up with a way to do just that: They proposed a bill establishing terms of office for political IGs. It died a quiet death.
3. See Appendix 2, Question 39, for overall rates of satisfaction and dissatisfaction on these job-related factors.
4. Other examples of PAS levels and titles can be found in table 1 and with the names of the interviewees in Appendices 3, 4, and 5. See The Plum Book for the most accurate and easily accessible listing of PAS levels and titles (as well as Schedule C and SES noncareer and career positions). Even it, however, is not exhaustive. As noted above, a comparison of the 1988 and 1992 editions reveals that the former contains the PASs of the judicial branch, while the latter does not.
9
Interbureaucratic Issues
1. A case in point regarding agency overlap: eleven agencies are currently engaged in global change research (e.g., greenhouse gases and global warming) at a combined budget of $1.5 billion. This includes NASA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Smithsonian Institution, and the departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Defense. President Clinton announced his intention to create a National Science and Technology Council to oversee the implementation of his policies across the various agencies.
2. See Thompson 1992, Lardner 1988, and Stengel 1987.
3. It is unlikely that the Clinton administration's PASs felt any differently dealing with a Republican Congress.
4. With Republicans in control of the Congress after the 1994 elections, such document demands escalated, seemingly out of control in the case of the House Resources Committee and the Department of the Interior. The agenda of Don Young (R-Alaska), committee chair, was, according to columnist Jack Anderson, to conduct a witch hunt of and to neutralize Secretary Babbitt with demands for "tedious details . . . and dubious and voluminous requests for documents." For example, Young demanded photographs taken of the secretary during any trips from 1994 onward, to no conceivable end. As the secretary responded, "I can assure you that I have aged normally during that period . . . and if there were any truly titillating photos, we both know they would have been published long before this." Perhaps Young was inspired by a "how to gum up the works" manual circulated among Republicans in 1995 that was clearly reminiscent of the notorious Malek Manuel of the Nixon administration. It advised: "Demand documents, draft tough letters, and recall (Democrats) who forced Republican administrations to spend a lot of time on their requests." Its philosophy was blatantly stated: "The more time employees of the administration have (to take) to respond to legitimate congressional requests, the less time they have to carry out their agenda''
(Washington Post,
April 1, 1996).

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