The Allocation of Excepted Political Positions: What and Whose Executive Priorities Do They Serve?

Abstract

Scholars have only begun to examine the roles played by non-career SES and Schedule C personnel in managing the bureaucracy. This, despite the fact that these individuals help to establish, communicate, and implement policy, and despite the broad discretion presidential administrations have in appointing them, defining their duties, and allocating their positions across the federal government. As an effort to redress this neglect, we first provide an overview of what lower-level political personnel do and of the processes and constraints that determine how they are distributed. We then examine how changes in presidential administration have affected the allocation of political SES and Schedule C positions across departments. Although dramatic infusions of these personnel into some agencies can be tied to policy objectives, they appear to be idiosyncratic and driven more by the preferences of agency leaders than by the White House. As such, they provide little support for positive theories that frame the administrative presidency in terms of centralized strategic planning.

Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the people who agreed to be interviewed for this study, as well as the reviewers for Congress & the Presidency for their constructive criticisms. We are also grateful to Bob Durant, Dave Lewis, Larry Napper, Jim Pfiffner, Connor Raso, and Chase Untermeyer for their comments in response to earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1 The 2016 Plum Book lists 1,242 PAS positions and 472 PA positions (which do not require Senate confirmation). Although a few of the latter are scattered throughout the line bureaucracy, primarily in smaller agencies, most can be found within the Executive Office of the President.

2 OPM is headed by an at-will presidential appointee. Unlike the independent and quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board, it was placed within the executive branch by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 in order to serve the managerial needs of the presidency.

3 Past volumes of the Federal Yellow Book were especially helpful in identifying officials who served in previous administrations. Google searches allowed us to obtain contact information for some of those who were no longer in government.

4 Although the functional distinction can blur at the margins.

5 We did not use the 2016 edition of the quadrennial Plum Book because the numbers of non-career SES and Schedule C appointees tend to be somewhat lower in the last year of a presidential administration.

6 The latter two factors may help to explain why only seven of the 301 general SES positions in the Department of Energy’s program units were non-career.

7 We have excluded the Departments of Defense and Justice. The former agency is particularly unrepresentative and would skew the analysis given that the majority of its non-career SES (and Schedule C) personnel are assigned to the Office of the Secretary.

8 A veteran official from OPM indicated that requests for Schedule Cs were reviewed informally based on the number of Executive Schedule positions assigned to an agency. Schedule Cs may also be resisted by civil servants who view them as meddlesome neophytes, and this may constrain political executives who are conscious of the need to maintain morale and support within the career bureaucracy. Several of those interviewed indicated that departmental secretaries vary in the weights they give to this consideration. Other considerations may come to bear as well. A member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicated that, after some discussion, the leaders of that new and controversial agency decided not to request additional Schedule C positions to avoid the appearance of being politicized.

9 Agencies may request the authority from OPM to make Superior Qualifications Appointments who may be paid at a higher level than GS–15 (5 CFR 531.203). OPM guidelines specify that Schedule C SQA appointments should be an unusual occurrence based on special needs and qualifications. Agencies that do not have SES positions may also create Senior Level Schedule C positions for the performance of functions at a comparable level of responsibility (5 CFR 534).

10 A majority of Schedule Cs (as well as non-career SES) are assigned to the Office of the Secretary in DoD. In contrast, two USDA programs have Schedule C coordinators in each of the 50 states.

11 As suggested by several of those we interviewed, this is presumably because lower-level political appointees are more apt to seek other employment toward the end of a president’s term.

12 Most would agree that the Department of Defense is relatively conservative and EPA is relatively liberal, for example, yet it is much less clear where to place the Departments of Agriculture or Transportation.

13 Based on survey responses from 26 experts, the index relies on a multi-rater item response model to place 82 agencies along a single dimension. The respondents were given the option of ranking agencies as neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative, and there was not a consensus in some cases where they did choose one designation or the other. Not surprisingly, then, some agencies had scores close to 0.

14 Although Schedule Cs were added to several units, the biggest change was in the Office of the Secretary, where the yearly average rose from 12.3 under Clinton to 32.6. Other increases took place in the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs (14.3 to 19.6) and the Office of Public Affairs (5.0 to 8.7).

15 Whereas the MMS was assigned averages of 1 and 1.5 political SES and 2 and 1.3 Schedule Cs under Clinton and Bush, respectively, the comparable figures for 2010 and 2011 were 4.5 and 4.5.

16 Content analyses of appointees’ resumes suggest that the Bush administration placed relatively more weight on loyalty than competence in the appointment of all lower-level officials than was the case under Obama, and that the importance of loyalty versus competence was higher for Schedule C than for non-career SES personnel under both of those presidents (Hollibaugh, Horton, and Lewis 2014; Lewis and Waterman 2013).