The Appointed

The problem with political appointees isn't what the conventional wisdom suggests it is.

Early this year, I almost wrote a column praising the caliber of President Bush's recent political appointees. The theory was that it's easier for a president to focus on the quality of appointees in his second term. There's not as much pressure to reward political supporters, because there's no longer any concern about reelection. This means the president can actually focus-wonder of wonders-on governing.

Several of Bush's high-profile second-term appointees seemed to bear this out. His choice of Michael Chertoff-a former prosecutor, high-ranking Justice Department official and federal judge-to serve as Homeland Security secretary earned praise across the political spectrum. Bush also selected John Negroponte, a career diplomat with 40 years of experience in government, to be director of national intelligence. He tapped Stephen L. Johnson, a 24-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran with vast management experience, to head the agency. And he named Michael Griffin, a highly regarded scientist and former chief engineer at NASA, to take over space efforts.

Still, even back at the beginning of the year, the Bush-appoints-quality-people theory cut against the grain of popular opinion, which held that second-term plum jobs were going to administration insiders who passed loyalty tests. And it really flies in the face of the conventional wisdom now. As the Bush administration struggles to explain the sluggishness of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina, it's become fashionable to suggest that government's problem is that unqualified political hacks can't get the job done. Chertoff himself is on the hot seat for the Katrina response, which cost another Bush appointee, Michael Brown, his job as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As is so often the case, though, the conventional wisdom doesn't get it quite right. On the whole, political appointees actually are experienced, capable executives. They just don't perform as well as career managers do.

Let's start with Brown. After he became the public face of the hurricane response, the shorthand description of his career was that Bush had plucked him from a job at the International Arabian Horse Association and deposited him at the head of FEMA. Well, not exactly. Brown got the top job in January 2003 largely because of his experience in emergency management-at FEMA. He had been serving at the agency since 2001, when he joined as general counsel.

Now it's true that then-FEMA chief Joe Allbaugh, an old friend of Brown's, got him that first job. But Brown was a lawyer, had a degree in public administration and experience in state and local government. (He's been accused of overstating that experience on his résumé, but even without any padding, it would have been sufficient to qualify for him for a fairly low-level political job.)

This helps explain why, when Brown finally had to defend his credentials before a Senate committee when he was appointed to be FEMA's deputy director in 2002, he didn't run into any problems. Indeed, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., then the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, said, "I am glad the president has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become deputy director."

Familiarity with the mission and the capacity to execute it effectively in New Orleans turned out to be two different things. But the problem wasn't that Brown lacked experience or qualifications. It's just that when it comes to running complex federal operations, the more you have, the better you do. The Bush administration's own data say so.

In a recent study, David E. Lewis, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, analyzed agencies' scores on the administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool, and correlated them with the backgrounds of the people in charge of the organizations. His conclusion? "Politically appointed bureau chiefs get systematically lower management grades than bureau chiefs drawn from the civil service." On the whole, appointees have higher levels of education and more management experience than their counterparts in the career civil service. But these things don't matter as much as the years of expertise in public administration that career officials have gained.

On some level, President Bush knows this. If he didn't, he wouldn't have appointed Chertoff, Negroponte, Johnson or Griffin.