Interbranch Competition Over Control of Federal Agencies and the Selection of Career Executives

Abstract

In this article, I explore how presidential administrations may use career civil service appointments, in contrast to political appointments, to compete with Congress over the control of federal agencies. Focusing on career members of the Senior Executive Service, I highlight the hiring of officials from outside the federal government or different agencies rather than promoting from within because outside candidates are more likely to be in stronger agreement with administration policy. By analyzing data on career SES hiring and legislative records, I find that administrations hire more officials without previous federal government experience when congressional competition over agency control is intense, as measured by the number of legislative directives in enacted bills that require or prohibit specific agency actions. I also find that more promotions from different agencies occur when congressional competition is intense relative to within-agency promotions. These findings suggest that administrations use career appointments to assert control over agencies against congressional competition, with implications for the political significance of policy professionals’ career mobility.

Acknowledgment

The author thanks the participants of the “Staffing Bureaucracy” panel of the 2024 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Quoted in Hauser and Segal (2020).

2 To the extent that existing research has examined the political implications of SES appointments, it has focused on noncareer SES appointees, who are among political appointees whose selection presidents directly control (Lewis 2008, 2011; Limbocker 2018). Bolton (2014) examines the allocation of career SES positions but not who get selected to fill them.

3 Presidents do have substantial influence over the allocation of career SES positions across the government (Bolton 2014; Lewis 2011).

4 Worth noting, the SES was intended to increase the accountability of senior executives—both noncareer appointees and career officials—to political superiors including the president and political appointees (Ingraham 1987; Lewis 2008).

5 Career appointees cannot be involuntarily assigned within 120 days of the appointment of a new agency head or the appointee’s immediate noncareer supervisor (U.S. Office of Personnel Management 2017), restrictions that do not pose significant obstacles to reassignments.

6 https://federalnewsnetwork.com/ses/2017/11/former-interior-senior-executive-sues-agency-for-reassignment-records/.

7 https://www.doioig.gov/sites/default/files/2021-migration/FinalEvaluation_SESReassign ments_Public.pdf.

8 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ap_14_strengthening_fy2025.pdf.

9 https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/s0807/chapter6.htm.

10 https://www.exchangemonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ig-letter46100.pdf.

11 The same constraints on presidential influence over hiring outcomes apply to the OPM, which is led by a Senate-confirmed director and deputy director.

12 The motive to join the SES for higher post-government earnings is important for outsiders to apply, as explained below.

13 The opposite expectation has also been suggested, however: Prendergast (2007) predicts that policy ambition motivates both those that most agree and disagree with the principal to become bureaucrats.

14 Agencies have to recruit from at least the whole federal government, if not also outside government (Marzotto, Ban, and Goldenberg 1985). Agencies cannot set qualification standards that emphasize agency-related experience if they preclude qualified outside candidates from consideration (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2008).

15 Since 1997, the basis Qualifications Review Boards employ for such determinations has typically centered on five Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs), which were slightly modified in 2006 (U.S. Office of Personnel Management 2012).

16 Consistent with this post-government career consideration, Shepherd and You (2020) find increased legislative productivity by congressional staffers that will soon quit and become lobbyists.

17 A question worth contemplating is why presidents do not constantly try to influence appointments as forcefully in some sense as possible. This is because exerting full pressure on civil service hiring can cost the president administratively and politically. Administratively, the president needs not only compliance and loyalty in the bureaucracy but also competence (Lewis 2009; Moynihan and Roberts 2010), and competence entails an indispensable amount of agency-specific experience and institutional memory among senior agency leaderships (Gailmard and Patty 2012). The agency corps’ morale also relies on the ability to advance within the organization, also making within-agency promotions necessary. Outside hires are harder to recruit and take more time to onboard than in-house talent (Perry and Miller 1991), potentially causing administrative inefficiencies and delays. Politically, excessive presidential interference on career hiring can attract accusations of politicizing the civil service, as illustrated by Trump’s aforementioned creation of “Schedule F” appointees.

18 Studying how reauthorization restructures agencies to alter their political independence, Selin (2015) reports that the “current limitations on the appointment and removal of key agency decision makers are statistically indistinguishable from the initial agency design” with just one exception—the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund Board (983).

19 https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/.

20 A note on the accession and separation indicators provided in the OPM data, available at https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/datadefn/index.asp: “new hires” as classified by OPM include both promotions into the SES from a non-SES position in a different agency and new hires from outside government, and “transfers-in” as classified by OPM include only transfers from one agency to another agency within the career SES rank. These definitions are unintuitive and do not align with the hiring outcomes I study in this article. I count the number of officials hired without previous government experience and the number of officials promoted from a different agency.

21 The data series stops at 2014 because traceable employee IDs are unavailable after that. In Supplementary Appendix B, I summarize the yearly number of each type of new hires by agency.

22 The full texts of most bills enacted in 1995 or later are readily available as machine-readable text files, but many still require pre-processing using optical character recognition (OCR) before being analyzed. There are few enough of these bills, however, that case-by-case collection and pre-processing is feasible.

23 In Supplementary Appendix B, I summarize both counts by agency across years.

24 These choices are informed by the occupations of SES officials according to the OPM data. The modal occupation is “miscellaneous administration and program” (comprising 40% of officials), followed by “program management” (21%) and “general attorney” (12%).

25 The salary data are available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. I select the following occupational codes: for management, occupations starting with ‘1’ before 1999 and “11” thereafter; for law, 28108 (lawyers) before 1999 and occupations starting with “23” therefore.

26 The apparent role of agency type motivates separate regressions by this grouping (but combining the EOP and Cabinet departments into one category because the former includes too few observations for separate analysis), included in Supplementary Appendix D.4. These separate regressions show that the relation between legislative directives and hiring is primarily driven by components of the EOP and Cabinet departments.

27 Note that the proportion plots in Supplementary Appendix C exclude observations in which an agency adds no official in a given year since a zero denominator makes the proportion undefined, which qualifies conclusions drawn these graphs. To preserve observations where no one is hired, which are a relevant part of the data, I model the count of newly hired officials in regressions but control for the pertinent denominator, as explained below.

28 Poisson models assume that the variance of the dependent variable is equal to its mean, and overdispersion occurs when the variance is greater than the mean. A commonly used remedy for overdispersion is observation-level random effects (Harrison 2014). No overdispersion is detected in the models estimated, obviating the need for observation level random effects.

29 Each type of exit has its own indicator in the OPM data. In Supplementary Appendix D.5, I replace the number of all terminations with that of just the most directly relevant kind—career SES officials that get transferred, reasoning that administrations transfer officials often expressly to make room for new hires (Doherty, Lewis, and Limbocker 2019a). This replacement hardly changes the results.

30 In Supplementary Appendix D.6, I run regressions separately for the first year of presidential administrations, when vacant SES positions are most abundant, and for subsequent years. In this analysis the number of legislative directives is insignificant within both subsets but—consistent with Models 3 and 4—positive only for the subsequent years. Thus, it is the subsequent years that disproportionately contribute to the overall positive relation between legislative directives and outside hires.

31 In Supplementary Appendix D.6, where I run the same regressions separately for the first year of administrations and for subsequent years, the estimate for the number of legislative directives is insignificant within both subsets.