WP: What Has Bush Done to the Government?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 24, 2007
....It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the president's public acts and statements get the most attention from the media. But it's well past time to ask ourselves: What has Bush done to our government?
Bush's two top advisers -- Vice President Cheney and just-departed political guru Karl Rove -- made little secret of their desire to have the wider federal bureaucracy serve their purposes. But just how much has the exertion of absolute White House political control, through a network of loyalists put in key positions, damaged government agencies' ability to accomplish the tasks the American people expect of them? How many long-time senior career employees have been marginalized, micromanaged or driven out of government? How low have the standards dropped for senior-level appointments amid the need to find people who would be sufficiently loyal?
David E. Lewis is a political scientist at Princeton University and author of an upcoming book, The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Over on NiemanWatchdog.org, where I am deputy editor, Lewis today raises some important questions the press should be asking about the federal government under Bush. Among them:
"Have Bush political appointees taken away hiring authority from senior-level career employees elsewhere besides the Department of Justice? Is there any evidence that those career hires have been made on a partisan basis? . . .
"Are presidential loyalists being placed in jobs with direct influence over grants, contracts, the granting of licenses, etc? If so, was there a centrally directed effort to use these powers for the benefit of Bush's reelection or the Republican Party?"
Lewis also asks: "(I)s there a competence gap developing? Have this administration's actions to politicize the bureaucracy in order to get control of the bureaucracy and satisfy patronage demands done serious damage to government competence? My research shows that politicization hurts performance. Apart from the competence gap between new hires and those departing, politicization of the bureaucracy creates systematic management problems that hurt the agencies more generally. It makes it difficult for agencies to recruit and retain high-quality civil servants; it reduces incentives for careerists to develop expertise; and it leads to increased management turnover -- three factors that can hurt performance even under the best of conditions."...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/09/24/BL2007092400717_pf.html