Under-, Assistant-, Etc.

I think Ezra Klein makes a good point about the importance of non-Cabinet-level appointees in this post on the importance of John Podesta, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who is co-chairing Obama's transition team:

So much as we all focus on the cabinet-level positions, the stock of under-secretaries and deputy under-secretaries and assistants-to-the-deputy-undersecretary are actually crucially important (the federal government, in some ways to its credit, has almost comical title deflation). Not only do they fundamentally run the government for the next few years, but they're also the talent pool that moves up in year three of the Obama administration. In government, like in any institution, personnel is destiny, and Podesta is the guy running the hiring process.

But I wish he'd taken the point a litte further. Bob Tobias, the former National Treasury Employees Union President who is now at American University, frequently talks about the difference between public policy creation, and public policy implementation. Cabinet-level secretaries are the go-to guys on public policy creation; you want people in there with good ideas, the ability to think big within the constraints of their institutions, who are comfortable looking at big budgets and making good decisions about how to allocate giant pools of resources. But if you want to get stuff done, implemented all the way down to the roots, you really need fantastic assistant secretaries, fantastic CXOs, etc. In fact, you need to make sure you have fantastic career talent, too, and that those lower-level political appointees can work effectively with the career folks who have been around for much longer than the politicals have.

This is a consistently under-discussed issue at the national level. Both liberals and conservatives have learned how to do great organization building when it comes to elections. Both sides understand how to build leaders, engage with communities, boost turnout and voter enthusiasm. Turnout and election machines get discussed endlessly during the political season. But when it comes to governing, to organizational management, not nearly enough attention gets paid by commentators and mainstream journalists to the organizational issues at hand, and how presidents and agency heads can--and need to--build leaders and motivate workers within their agencies, even though it's a major topic of discussion within government itself.