Cabinet Full of Nobel Winners

Zachary A. Goldfarb floats an interesting "what if?" in the Washington Post's Outlook section today, speculating on what a Cabinet made up exclusively of Nobel Prize winners would look like.

Some of the potential selections: novelist Toni Morrison as head of the Education Department, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as secretary of State, Al Gore as Transporation secretary and Habitat for Humanity volunteer Jimmy Carter as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

What would these folks have in common? "Well, its members would be fairly old, for one," Goldfarb writes, "and probably prone to disagreements." Here's what else would characterize this group, with all due respect: a near-total lack of management expertise and experience in running large-scale organizations, especially in the public sector. (Gore and Carter would of course, be exceptions, as would Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate who actually already has a Cabinet job at the Energy Department.)

I realize, of course, that Goldfarb's list is largely a thought exercise, but I think it underscores the fact that when people think of Cabinet jobs (and other high-ranking federal positions), they tend to think of them only in terms of policy ideas. The fact is, there's no shortage of deep thinking about issues in this administration or any other, and if any administration wanted the advice of Nobel winners on how to address them, that would be a simple and straightforward process. What's much tougher is figuring out how to run these Cabinet departments so they deliver on promises made to Americans about how policies will be implemented. Someday, maybe we'll start looking at these jobs this way.