Rating Elected Officials
ho says Congress and the White House can't cooperate enough to get anything done these days? They may have missed the deadline for completing annual appropriations again-for the fourth time in five years-but they nailed a measure giving legislators their second pay raise in 18 months and doubling the salary of the next President.
For most people who work for the government, pay and promotions are based-at least in theory-on performance ratings. Not so for elected officials, who argue that they face the ultimate performance assessment when voters go to the polls.
Many government watchers suggest, however, that voters need better information to judge whether they'll get their money's worth from lawmakers who will be pulling down $141,300 a year-with members of the leadership earning considerably more-and a new President, who'll pocket $400,000 annually.
An ambitious effort is being launched to try to inject the G-word-governing-into the 2000 political campaigns. It's called the Transition to Governance Project and it aims to spur candidates to espouse not just policy goals but strategies for implementing them. The effort, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, involves scholars from think tanks that span the political spectrum.
While it is timed to influence the next presidential transition, the project will address the larger issues of nonstop campaigning and partisan paralysis that have become characteristic behavior on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
"The performance of elected officials has deteriorated in recent years," argues the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein, project co-director, because the fighting no longer ends once the election is decided and because candidates devote little thought or preparation to dealing with the complexities of governing. For example, much of President Clinton's trouble with Congress is rooted in his failure to give priority to installing a strong White House staff and filling key sub-Cabinet posts, Ornstein insists.
Project co-leader Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution adds that competitive balance between the political parties-marked by Republicans' narrow control of Congress since 1995-has lengthened "the permanent campaign" to the detriment of governance. The fact that "the center of gravity in each party has shifted toward the ideological extreme" makes the sit- uation even worse, he adds. "When you had a permanent majority and a permanent minority in Congress, Republicans had an incentive to figure out ways of building coalitions with Democrats in order to have an impact on the governing process," Mann says.
Those days are no more. Congressional animosity toward Clinton has led to naked confrontation and exacerbated worrisome trends, including the delaying of presidential appointments, the politicization of the oversight process, and resistance to budgetary compromises. In the Senate, where a single member can temporarily place a "hold" on a presidential nominee, Ornstein notes, "no one places a particularly high priority on getting people into positions so that they can govern." As a result, he says, "the use of the 'hold' has deteriorated almost entirely from it's original purpose [to learn more about a prospect's qualifications] to become an instrument of blackmail" to extract concessions on unrelated issues.
Appointment delays often mean civil servants fill sensitive policy positions on an acting basis. According to Ornstein, that means "that in a number of policy areas, you don't get action or implementation the way you should."
Effective governance also can be stymied by intimidating investigatory practices, adds Mann. "There is such visceral hatred of the President among Republicans on the Hill that it oftentimes leads to quite destructive uses of oversight tools. In this intensely politicized environment, it's easy for the bureaucracy to become a whipping boy. People put their guards up and it really works against having a healthy, well-functioning agency or department," he argues.
The same is true for the tricks and shortcuts that result from budgetary impasses, such as attempts to impose across-the-board cuts, which Mann labels "an abdication of responsibility for making choices." He also slams "such gimmickry as proposals that simply push costs off to the next fiscal year." For government managers, he notes, "working around gimmicks becomes a whole job in and of itself."
By early January, the Transition to Governing Project will publish its "Manifesto for the Campaign," which will challenge both presidential and congressional candidates to explain how they would translate their campaign rhetoric into cooperative actions to improve government performance. In other words, what would they do to move beyond partisan stalemate and actually earn their newly increased salaries?
As things stand now, political grandstanding and roll call votes designed solely to frame campaign issues have replaced comity and compromise on Capitol Hill. What's needed is a groundswell of aroused public opinion demanding a halt to the permanent campaign and a return to governance.
Dick Kirschten is a contributing editor for National Journal.