White House prepares appointee roadmap for next administration

Bush administration officials and the FBI have been in contact with the presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Barack Obama about the importance of filling key politically appointed positions quickly after the election, the administration's top management official said this week. The White House Presidential Personnel Office is developing roadmaps that the new administration can follow to have 100 appointees confirmed by April 1 and 400 by Aug. 1.

"We have provided them information they can use to pick the 100 most important positions … so people working during this transition will be very knowledgeable about what's involved and can assemble the appropriate people faster than it's ever been done before," said Clay Johnson, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and leader of the Bush administration transition in 2000. "Both campaigns are really engaged and eager to tackle this assignment." Johnson made his comments in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on the federal workforce.

At the hearing, Robert Cusick, director of the Office of Government Ethics, said his agency is prepared to review the financial disclosure reports of the new administration's appointees. He noted, however, that Congress has failed to act on an OGE proposal that would simplify required financial disclosure forms.

"After seven years, the forms haven't changed," Cusick said. "We would welcome a form that was simpler in its structure and detail."

The committee's ranking Republican member, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, noted that legislation introduced in the 107th Congress would have streamlined the financial disclosure form and required agencies to examine the number of positions necessary for Senate confirmation. "We never did get it passed," he said, "and shame on us."

Other witnesses told the panel that a top priority of the next administration should be selecting political appointees with experience in managing large enterprises and knowledge of human capital issues.

"Given that management improvements and transformations can take years to achieve, steps are needed to ensure a continuous focus on those efforts," said Gene Dodaro, acting director of the Government Accountability Office. "Agencies need to develop executive succession and transition-planning strategies that seek to sustain commitment as individual leaders depart and new ones arrive."

Dodaro pointed to a series of initiatives GAO is undertaking to assist in the transition, including providing insight into pressing national issues, documenting opportunities to save money, and helping to inform the management improvement agendas of Congress and the new administration.

He noted that while presidential administrations come and go, GAO's list of high-risk federal programs helps keep the focus on pressing management challenges. Dodaro listed human capital issues, the 2010 census and a long-delayed competition to select a new aerial refueling tanker for the Defense Department as key challenges the new administration will have to address.

Johnson agreed that the leaders of the new administration will inherit many management challenges.

"If [Congress] is inclined to encourage them to pay as much attention to management or more attention than we did … they will have little choice to inherit that and take it from there," he said. "They can't walk away from making the federal government more effective."

Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, voiced concerns about the number of federal contracts that could be in the pipeline during the transition, questioning whether the current administration had scaled back the competitive bidding process.

But Johnson said the percentage of contracts that are competitively bid is no larger under President Bush than it was under President Clinton. He added, however, that the government needs to get better at managing contracts and injecting more competition into the process.