Acting

The Office of Personnel Management isn't the only agency that has a new Acting head. President Obama yesterday appointed Stuart Ishimaru Acting Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and named Christine Griffin Acting Vice Chair. I don't know Ishimaru well, but Griffin is an uncompromising advocate for hiring more disabled federal workers, and someone I've heard mentioned as a possible future chair of the Commission. And GSA also has a new acting head: Elizabeth Newell will have more on that later today.

But less than any of these individual appointees, the decision to put a group of acting agency heads in place seems a clear signal that Obama isn't going to get to the federal bureaucracy any time soon. I'm not sure I agree with "Concerned Retiree" in comments that Tim Geithner's tax problems are necessarily going to ramp up scrutiny--the Obama process already seems fairly rigorous, and there's not really any indication that the issues came as a surprise to the Obama team. But I am intrigued by the suggestion that federal management nominees could be a place where Republicans choose to challenge Obama on his vision of government, or even on social issues.

In the end, though, I think Obama mostly sees other issues as more pressing. He's got an economy to fix, two wars to figure out to handle, etc. And while Obama's said repeatedly that he wants to make government cool again, I think he sees the biggest vehicle for doing that as policies that have fairly immediate impacts and that restore trust in government, rather than at the micro level. I don't think management reform is his passion, and so I can understand why he'd pick some worthy placeholders for these agencies. But at OPM, where it appears he had a strong candidate who was close to being chosen, or had accepted the job, I'm still not sure why he went with an acting director. No word yet from OPM or the White House.