 | 5. The president can make a temporary appointment of no more than eighteen months when Congress is in recess.
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| 6. This relates to White House review of an agency's regulations. The House Government Operations Committee and the Senate Government Affairs Committee felt OMB was doing this review in secret to undermine the agencies. This was holdover suspicion from Reagan, who had used administrative delay to slow promulgation of agency regulations. Bush used a variation of this tactic. He simply sent regulations back to the agencies for revisions if he did not like them, a somewhat more aboveboard procedure. The ongoing question is the degree of sunshine in the inner workings of the executive branch, as opposed to the rulemaking-as-lawmaking that agencies do. Vice President Quayle's Competitiveness Council, discussed above, was subject to this ongoing debate due to its unilateral power to block agency regulations.
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| 7. In the case of one PAS, the cuts were "self-inflicted." Her story is illustrative: She headed a specialized agency and alienated the PPO by choosing her own staff and ignoring its candidates. She refused to have a White House liaison until they forced someone on her and then she ignored her. She wanted to get on the Domestic Council but when the White House rebuffed her, she appealed to her friends in Congress, neglecting to tell them she had already been turned down by the White House, and so alienated her Hill support when they discovered the truth. Eventually, she had no friends left. "If you alienate the PPO, they'll get you. It may take three years, but they'll get you," was Barreaux's ominous prediction.
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| 8. It is difficult to imagine the team orientation of George Bush allowing the independence and "disloyalty" of a type shown to succeeding president, Bill Clinton: his secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, and his military chief of staff, Colin Powell, publicly and without presidential retaliation disagreed with the president's plan to open the military to self-affirming, out-of-the-closet lesbians and gay men. The independence shown by Attorney General Janet Reno, who bucked White House reorganization plans, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who suggested that legalization of drugs should be studied, was much-remarked upon by the press and, in the latter case, prompted calls for her resignation. Clinton's response was measured and calm. His spokeswoman, Dee Dee Myers, noted that the president knew in advance of calling these individuals that they would speak their minds and he expected that controversy would occasionally follow. (Although the Republican drumbeat of demands for Elders' ouster never did let up, he only threw his old friend overboard two years later after the disastrous midterm elections and for a mild comment about sex education.)
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| The personality of the president, perhaps as much as his or her party's number of years in the White House, determines the degree to which those who staff the White House and executive agencies toe the party line. It will be instructive to observe the degree to which this sufferance of dissent helps or hinders development of a sense of cohesion among Clinton's PASs.
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10
Conclusion and Future Directions
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| 1. The interviews took place in the summer and early fall of 1992 in the PASs' office and at a time when the outcome of the presidential contest was far from
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