A Deficit of Appointees \u2026 by design or default?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Trump says he won\u2019t fill many political appointments in his new administration. I don\u2019t know whether that decision was by design or default, whether it was the cause or the result of the glacially slow pace of those appointments, but either way, it means fewer political appointees. It also means that career executives will be in charge, whether we like it or not. Does that matter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my view, an \u2018appointee gap\u2019 may not be such a bad thing, but that hasn\u2019t stopped some pundits from raising the alarm, concerned that this will leave the administration with a political leadership vacuum at a time when such leadership may be needed most. However, I would contend that those concerns are based on several myths about appointees (and career executives) that bear closer examination. Let\u2019s do that, using the proven Pinocchio scale to judge the veracity, and just maybe we\u2019ll bust a few of those myths along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So here goes\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Myth No. 1: Appointees are needed because only they \u2018know\u2019 the president\u2019s agenda.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This myth gets a full four Pinocchio\u2019s. It\u2019s just not the case. The fact is that the vast majority of political appointees, particularly below the cabinet level, have never met the president, and they know no more about his agenda than any well-read bureaucrat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s especially true down in the bowels of the bureaucracy, where appointees are asked to lead complex, arcane federal programs and end up spending most of their historically-short tenure just learning about their jobs. And those are the good ones! But most had no more idea of what the president wanted on any given issue than I did. In all my years as a career exec, I only worked for one or two appointees who actually met and talked regularly with POTUS in something other than a purely social or ceremonial setting. They surely knew the president\u2019s agenda, because he told them what it was, often quite directly. However, that was the exception. Not the rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four Ps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Myth No. 2: Career executives can\u2019t be held \u2018accountable\u2019 when they screw up.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are two sides to this myth, and consequently, I have to give it no more than three out of four Pinocchio\u2019s. We all know that the word \u2018accountability\u2019 is code for the ability to fire career executives with relative ease, and that\u2019s what is behind the MSPB reforms legislated in VA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truth be told, those reforms are directed at a legitimate problem: When career execs (or rank-and-file civil servants for that matter) screw up, it currently takes an army of lawyers and months of litigation to deal with them. That must be fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, some of the fixes have taken us down a very slippery slope. It\u2019s just too easy, too tempting for accountability to be judged in a partisan or political sense \u2026 as in unquestioned loyalty, regardless of legality or propriety. To guard against that temptation, career executives deserve the strongest possible protections, even if that militates against the ability to just say \u2018you\u2019re fired!\u2019 And those protections don\u2019t prevent an exec from being held accountable. There are plenty of less formal but no less effective ways (like immediate reassignment) to do so. However, on balance, there is some truth to this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Myth No. 3: Appointees are needed to change an intransigent bureaucracy.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The not-so-implicit assumption behind this myth is that career executives (and career civil servants generally) are the ones that need changing \u2026 in other words, they\u2019re the \u2018intransigent bureaucracy\u2019 that lies at the heart of this legend. There\u2019s some truth to this one too, but more appointees aren\u2019t necessarily the cure for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bureaucracies can be intransigent, but at least in theory, career executives are just as capable of breaking them up as an appointee \u2026 perhaps more so, inasmuch as SES candidates have to actually prove they can \u2018Lead Change\u2019 before they can even become an executive. Nevertheless, we all know too many of career execs who consider themselves defenders of the status quo, and in those instances, new leadership \u2014 whether it comes from an appointee or a career executive \u2014 may be just what\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, the fact that it more often falls to an incoming appointee to provide such leadership may be more a testament to the SES corps\u2019 lack of mobility than their ability to do so. Thus, because it\u2019s true about as much as it\u2019s not, this myth gets two Ps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Myth No. 4: Appointees bring a richer, broader set of experiences to the job.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This may not be much of a myth at all, and I think that\u2019s unfortunate. Historically, career executives have been a mostly immobile lot; there are some exceptions of course, but most of them spend their entire careers in a single agency and function. Thus, those that may be called upon to act in an unfilled political position may bring strong technical skills, as well as unrivaled institutional memory, but when it comes to broad leadership experience, especially the kind acquired by serving in a variety of senior positions, political appointees may have an edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not all of them, to be sure \u2014 many appointments are filled by policy experts (a.k.a., wonks) drawn from think tanks and academia \u2014 but enough come with the leadership chops to make a difference. That\u2019s not to say that career executives can\u2019t be developed as \u2018whole of government\u2019 leaders (see my anthology, Building a 21st Century SES, recently published by the National Academy, for lots of ideas in that regard), and there are many career executives who have demonstrated those skills; however, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, this myth is too close to reality to warrant more than a single P.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bottom line: The \u2018appointee gap\u2019 matters, but just not as much.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
We need not complain too loudly about the slow pace of the Trump administration\u2019s political appointments, nor should we lose a lot of sleep over his stated intention to leave many of them unfilled. In many cases, if not most, those posts can and will be filled ably by career executives, with no adverse impact whatsoever. We\u2019ve already seen evidence of that in the relief efforts for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and now Maria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those relief efforts have gone remarkably well, given the \u2018epic\u2019 circumstances, and you could count the number of federal-level political appointees involved in them on the fingers of one hand. Despite the dearth of political leadership, all those faceless, \u2018deep state\u2019 bureaucrats have gotten a very tough job done. To be sure, they are being stretched by Maria, but no one (other than perhaps the most ardent climate change conspiracy theorist) could have anticipated three storms of the magnitude we\u2019ve seen this summer. It would seem that career civil servants can actually perform without a lot of adult supervision from political minders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, this should NOT be taken as a polemic against appointees. I\u2019ve worked for dozens from both political parties, and with only a few exceptions, they provided the leadership expected of them \u2026 by their administration, as well as by those they led. All of the myths (and the realities) notwithstanding, they were honorable people who wanted to do the right thing. Whether you need over 3,000 of them is debatable, but given the president\u2019s stated intentions, it looks like we\u2019ll get the chance to resolve that debate once and for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A retired career federal executive with almost 40 years of public service in six different agencies, Ron Sanders was recently named director of the University of South Florida\u2019s School of Public Affairs; Ron has been contributing to Federal Times since 2013 and will continue to do so in his new capacity.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my view, an \u2018appointee gap\u2019 may not be such a bad thing, but that hasn\u2019t stopped some pundits from raising the alarm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":38190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":26,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,31,15,68,33,26],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2373],"class_list":["post-13486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-management","category-leadership","category-newsletters","category-opinions"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"FABGRMDTL5BSHCZVRXSAQDZQSA","arc_canonical_url":"\/opinions\/2017\/10\/03\/theres-a-looming-political-appointee-gap-does-it-matter-commentary\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n