Agencies' Supporting Actors

The New York Times reports today on the growing number of acting officials at the top of the Justice, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services departments -- and lots of other agencies.

This is one of those stories that tend to arise at this point in a president's term, when top folks start to head for the exits, and it becomes harder to find qualified, politically acceptable people willing to take jobs in an administration that's not going to be around much longer.

In 1998, for example, National Journal reported that senators (including then-Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who is hoping to make a few appointments of his own starting in January 2009) were outraged that in President Clinton's second term, acting officials were holding down 20 per cent of Cabinet-level department jobs that were supposed to require Senate confirmation.

The Times says that "While exact comparisons are difficult to come by, researchers say that the vacancy rate for senior jobs in the executive branch is far higher at the end of the Bush administration than it was at the same point in the terms of Mr. Bush’s recent predecessors in the White House."

I was struck by one comment in the story by Paul Light, a professor at New York University, erstwhile Government Executive contributor, and longtime expert on the appointments process:

He said the problems of having so many acting senior government officials were obvious: “One of the things we know is that they just aren’t as effective as Senate-confirmed appointees. They just don’t have the standing in their agencies. Acting people are very shy about making decisions.”

On one level I'm sure this is true. Acting officials typically don't have the standing to launch major new initiatives. But in another way, at least some of them have more standing than your average political appointee. I'm talking here about those acting officials -- and there are many of them -- who have risen through the ranks and demonstrated both strong leadership and a good working knowledge of an agency's operations. Aren't such people often more respected by the people who report to them than an appointee who comes in from the outside without much government experience?