December 10, 2008

Washington civil servants are bracing for that personnel hurricane that sweeps through the federal bureaucracy every eight years or so, when a new administration places thousands of political appointees in all the top jobs -- and some not-so-top jobs.

These bureaucrats call themselves the "we-be's" -- as in, "We be there when you arrive, and we be there when you leave."

They enjoy a sometimes uneasy coexistence with the political appointees, adapting themselves to the priorities of a new administration, sometimes pushing back and influencing policy themselves. While those career staffers have a grasp of the critical issues, they are clearly in subordinated positions to both the political appointees and the elected officials, who are the ones held accountable by the people.

At the Department of Energy, as in all the other cabinet departments, top policymakers from the secretary through a raft of assistant secretaries will be nominated by the new president and approved by the new Senate.

In all, the department has about 135 appointee positions, according to the latest edition of the Plum Book, the definitive government listing. That edition was released this November for the new president-elect's transition.

The agency in total has some 100,000 employees and contractors, so political appointees represent a minuscule percentage of the overall staff. But the bulk of these, more than four-fifths, are contract employees doing things like cleaning up weapons sites. And then most of the civil service employees are involved in programmatic tasks such as implementing legislation and are not affected by changes at the policy level.

"So the influence of the appointees makes itself felt," says Bill Wicker, a former DOE political appointee who is now the spokesman for the Democratic majority on the Senate Energy Committee.

The career bureaucrats can influence policy, as long as it is in line with the overall objectives of the administration. Some of the senior careerists are the go-to people in their fields. "These people are well known," says Wicker. "They represent the institutional memory of the department."

Others, however, can see three or four years' work on a project simply upended when a new team comes in with a different set of priorities. Needless-to-say, their powers are kept in check by virtue of the fact that they report directly to the president's people.

New Faces

Presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation are known as PAS in the acronym-obsessed jargon of Washington. There are also presidential appointees that don't require confirmation (PA). Then there is a chunk of non-career senior executive service (SES) officers who occupy the senior positions above the GS pay scale but below the presidential appointee level. Last but not least, there are the Schedule C employees who occupy positions that require a confidential relationship with any of these other political appointees -- such as a press spokesman or personal assistant.

The Energy Department has 20 presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation. These range from the secretary, deputy secretary, under secretaries and assistant secretaries well into the top echelons of the National Nuclear Security Administration to positions such as deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation.

The number of appointive positions can vary, particularly in the lower categories of non-career SES and Schedule C. The SES appointments, for instance, can only be made for 10 percent of the available positions across the entire administration. Some SES positions, such as auditor, are reserved for career appointments to ensure the objectivity and integrity of the position, and are not available for political appointees.

At the Energy Department, for instance, there are 340 general SES positions available for a non-career appointment, so that a maximum of 34 could be political appointees. There is also a smattering of limited emergency, limited term or other statutory exceptions, totaling just 17 for the agency.

Come January, most of the previous political appointments will pack their bags. Some Schedule C appointees, however, manage to stay on by getting into a civil service position before the transition -- an age-old phenomenon known as "burrowing in." Civil service hires in the final months of an administration are supposed to get a special review to catch this maneuver, but somehow appointees still succeed in burrowing in.

Filling the empty positions with new faces will be the task of the transition team. In the Clinton and Bush transitions, the full-time transition team, drawn largely from the campaign staff, typically worked with an advisory board of experts -- many of them top political contributors -- to identify and recruit personnel for the top appointments.

At the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, things are much simpler. There are only five political appointees -- the five commissioners -- and they require Senate confirmation. They don't have to leave when a new administration comes in. In fact, the president appoints them, but cannot fire them.

The president, however, can designate a new chairman, who generally will belong to the party in the White House. But the president must await a commission vacancy to actually appoint a new commissioner and shift the balance of power if there is a change of party. No more than three commissioners can belong to the same party, so currently FERC has three Republican commissioners and two Democrats. Normally, however, a chairman who is replaced will not want to remain as a commissioner and will resign.

Politics is always evolving. And this year the election was premised on change. That's something that the political appointees know all too well.

 

by Darrell Delamaide
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