Mainstreaming The Argument for Reducing the Number of Political Appointees

A couple of months ago, I was carrying on a blog-based conversation with Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein about the need to reduce the number of political appointees and increase the number of civil servants doing those jobs. And today, Matt has a great column in the Daily Beast, in part making the case for exactly that. Matt writes:

The fact that it's the national-security branches of the government that are run this way should be suggestive, as this is the portion of the government where there's traditionally the greatest commitment to efficacy. And, indeed, research by David E. Lewis, of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, has found that on the civilian side the minority of federal programs that are administered by career civil servants are better managed than the majority of programs that are run by political appointees. Follow-up work by Lewis and University of Wisconsin political scientist Donald Moynihan confirmed this in a telling way. Using the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool administered by the Office of Management and Budget, they compared the PART ratings of over 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the program's 242 managers. The political appointees turned out to have more educational credentials than the career people, but the civil servant-managed programs scored better in terms of strategic planning, program design, financial oversight, and results.