The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush Read Online Free PDF Page A

are at a president's command to do so? Advocates of the strong presidency lament the president's lack of real command power to master the "unruly beast" that is his or her own bureaucracy: "The most difficult task most presidents face is trying to sell their programsnot to Congress but to the bureaucracy. This is the case even when an agency is headed by an official selected by the president" (Waterman 1989, 20). There are, however, three well-worn strategieslegislative, judicial, and administrativethat presidents can use to promote their policy objectives both inside and outside their administration. A legislative strategy focuses on passage of favorable legislation and involves close work with congressional leaders. A judicial strategy focuses on the selection of judges who are supportive of administration goals, and it seeks heightened court activity on behalf of policy goals. An administrative strategy looks to political appointees to shape the bureaucracy so that policy goals are paramount (Nathan 1986, 125). Richard Nathan was once in Richard Nixon's employ and, by his own
admission, "no shy flower" when it came to advocating a strong president. He represents those who think it "appropriate and, in fact, desirable in our governmental system for political appointees to be involved in administrative processes." Because the agencies they head are legally empowered to create, implement, and adjudicate regulation, the PASs have significant power to set direction and tone for their agency. The responsive competence embodied in the president's own appointees is expected to dominate and lead the careerists' neutral competence to govern in accord with the president's agenda (Nathan 1985, 376-77). 1
Nixon is widely credited with originating what Nathan christened "the administrative presidency," though FDR, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had all used it to some extent, devising new programs and agencies to bypass the existing administrative structures. President Eisenhower's 1953 creation of Schedule C political appointments allowed higher-level appointees to place partisans deep in the agencies as secretaries, confiden-

 

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tial assistants, even chauffeurs, as low as General Schedule (GS) grade 9. Jimmy Carter's civil service reforms of 1978 created the Senior Executive Service, composed of noncareer partisans (10 percent) and supergrade (GS 16 to 18 or equivalent) careerists (90 percent) significantly accountable to political supervision. With these and other innovations, presidents hoped to find more political responsiveness in new people and agencies loyal to them and their policy ideas.
In the modern era, this substitution of "responsive competence" for "neutral competence" becomes even more pronounced in a time of divided government, in which one or both houses of the Congress and the White House are in the hands of different parties. Divided government has become the modus vivendi of American government; consequently, one should expect more use of the administrative presidency as presidents seek to achieve through administrative means what they cannot through legislative 2
The administrative presidency puts the career bureaucracy in a difficult position. Careerists must be both neutral and competent, serving the policy goals of the current president yet maintaining sufficient professional proficiency and credibility to work effectively and efficiently in their agency. Their success at the former, however, makes them suspect the next time the White House changes parties (or even presidents within the same party).
As the administrative strategy developed over time, so did an array of tools with which to implement it and to elicit responsive competence from the bureaucracy. These tools are the powers to: appoint and remove surrogates, control budgets, reorganize agencies and government, delegate program authority to the states, mandate central clearance from the White House for agency actions, and order cost-benefit analysis