Government Executive - Authors - Alina Selyukh

Immigration adviser faces learning curve

Alina Selyukh — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Dora Schriro was recently appointed to the new position of special adviser to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention and removal. Immigration detention is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in the U.S., and the issue will inevitably come up in the push for immigration reform from President Obama. After moving to Washington from Arizona, where she headed the Department of Corrections under Gov. Napolitano for six years, Schriro spoke to NationalJournal.com's Alina Selyukh about adapting to government at the federal level and working to improve the national detention system.

NJ: After being in Washington for about two months, how do you feel about the city?

Schriro: It's great to be here for cherry blossoms.... I've always been kind of a news junkie, so it's pretty exciting to be in a place where so much news comes from. People here are great. I'm very close to the airport because I'm on the road a lot.

NJ: Where do you travel?

Schriro: In these first 90, 120 days, I am actively involved in preliminary assessment for the secretary, so I've been hitting a number of facilities... speaking with as much of the detained population as I can, talking with staff.

NJ: So what will come out of these travels?

Schriro: It's a first assessment. That's why I'm calling it preliminary; it's not a one-time kind of a thing. It is to get a really good feel for the many strengths that are here at ICE.

NJ: When will we start seeing new policies from ICE?

Schriro: There have been some small but I think symbolically substantive changes already. For example, the whole of how we detain aliens has attracted considerable public and congressional attention -- as it should. Included in that is the health care that the population receives, and included in that is deaths in detention. Early in my tenure, at the beginning of March, there was an appropriation hearing... about deaths in detention. Within several weeks of that hearing, there was a death, apparently of natural causes -- we are still pending, of course, the autopsy to make that confirmation. That was an opportunity to make an immediate change... to make immediate notification to Congress, also to release a news advisory and to put that news advisory on our Web site. So it's faster and clearer transparency.

NJ: What sort of shifts in policy should we expect to see soon?

Schriro: There's been quite a bit of discussion about the decision-making when aliens are identified and are in the process of determination of amenability for deportation and going through the removal process. You know, [one] of the first decisions is where to place that individual pending all those processes: Shall they be detained and under what circumstances, or can they be released to the community? There's quite a bit of interest, including myself, in revisiting the processes by which we make those decisions.

NJ: You've been working with Janet Napolitano since her tenure in Arizona. As governor, she was often described as very hard-headed, tough. Do you agree with that?

Schriro: She's just all about the facts and accountability. She's very focused on outcomes. She wants results.... But she's also about having fun. She really loves the work she does, and she's exceptionally good-humored about pushing us along to be our best selves.

NJ: Walking down the hallways here in the ICE building, I didn't particularly sense the fun vibe.

Schriro: Well, there's a terrific amount of work to do.... People get here pretty darn early and we stay pretty late. There's a lot of collaboration, a lot of information-sharing and certainly a learning curve for those of us who are new to the federal side of government.

NJ: What is the main challenge for you in adapting to the federal side?

Schriro: Other than learning all the acronyms? (Laughs). I got a little crib-sheet that I keep going on those. You know, the strategies are very much the same. But, for example, when I was newly appointed as director [of the Department of Corrections] in Arizona and being new to the Southwest, it was getting out in the field and meeting as many people as I could and touring all the facilities and meeting with legislators, the other interest groups, the constituents that had particularized interest in corrections. Here, the world is a little bigger.... If there's an adjustment, it's the scope and the scale of things.

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Obama sets mark for early nominee dropouts

Alina Selyukh — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Just as the dust was settling last week from the exits of Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., whipped up the tumult again. By pulling out of consideration for Commerce secretary, a post previously abandoned by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), Gregg became the Obama administration's fourth high-level dropout so far.

But while this administration has set a turnover record for an incoming Cabinet, it's hardly the first to run into problems with its nominees. Bill Clinton leads among recent presidents with a total of six major nominee dropouts over the course of his presidency, followed by George W. Bush and his Cabinet's two withdrawals. Three previous presidents -- George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter -- each slipped once. All but Reagan had at least one kink in their first-term Cabinet selection process, with Clinton accepting three withdrawals.

Below are details about each of those instances:

George W. Bush

Dec. 10, 2004
Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner, dropped his bid to be secretary of Homeland Security because of unpaid taxes related to employing a housekeeper who wasn't a "clearly legal immigrant." Kerik was the first and only stymied nomination to Bush's second-term Cabinet.

Jan. 20, 2001
Former Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill, Bush's nominee for Treasury secretary, was forced to pay $92 in back taxes on bonuses to his housekeeper that he had failed to declare. He went on to receive Senate approval.

Jan. 9, 2001
Linda Chavez, a political commentator and former civil rights official, withdrew her candidacy for Labor secretary because of controversy surrounding her decision to shelter an illegal alien in the early '90s. Daschle, then Senate majority leader, was a vocal opponent of her nomination.

Bill Clinton

Oct. 25, 1997
Hershel Gober decided not to pursue his promotion from deputy secretary to secretary of Veterans Affairs because the Senate was expected to reject his nomination based on conflict-of-interest charges stemming from a sexual misconduct allegation.

March 18, 1997
National Security Adviser Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination to lead the Central Intelligence Agency after prolonged confirmation hearings made him, he said, ''a dancing bear in a political circus."

March 11, 1995
Retired Air Force Gen. Michael P. C. Carns dropped his bid to be director of the CIA after the FBI found out that he harbored and possibly employed an illegal immigrant.

Jan. 19, 1994
Retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman withdrew his candidacy for Defense secretary despite the likelihood that he would have been confirmed. Inman charged that conservative columnist William Safire and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole were plotting against him.

Feb. 6, 1993
Judge Kimba Wood, Clinton's second attorney general nominee, was asked to withdraw her name because, like the previous nominee, she had employed an illegal immigrant baby sitter - even though she had done so before it was illegal.

Jan. 22, 1993
Clinton dropped his nomination of Connecticut lawyer Zoe Baird for attorney general after Senate outcry over Baird's employment of two illegal aliens as domestic help and failure to pay taxes for their services.

George H. W. Bush

March 10, 1989
The elder Bush's pick to lead the Department of Defense, former Texas senator John Tower, became the first Cabinet nominee in 30 years to be rejected by the Senate. He was, the New York Times reported, "plagued by an unusually long list of allegations" involving drinking, extramarital affairs and various conflicts of interest.

Ronald Reagan

March 3, 1987
President Reagan retracted his nomination of Robert Gates to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in part to avoid a public inquiry into the Iran-Contra Affair, in which Gates was involved. The nomination was offered to Tower, but he declined the next day. Bobby Ray Inman was another potential pick for the job.

Jimmy Carter

Jan. 17, 1977
Senate concerns that Theodore Sorenson, Carter's choice to head the CIA, had misused classified material in writing a book about President Kennedy scuttled his confirmation chances. According to Associated Press reporting at the time, the former Kennedy speechwriter called Carter from a pay phone minutes before his confirmation hearing to say he was withdrawing his name from consideration.

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Obama picks New Hampshire senator as Commerce chief

Alina Selyukh — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In a move Sen. Judd Gregg described as "extraordinary," President Obama named the New Hampshire Republican as his nominee for secretary of Commerce, rounding out his economic team and filling one of the last vacancies in the Cabinet.

"He's seen from all angles what makes our economy work for communities, businesses and families -- and what keeps it from working better," Obama said in his remarks Tuesday morning. Obama went on to praise his nominee for his fiscal conservatism and for "reaching across the aisle to get things done." Gregg will be the third Republican addition to the Cabinet, following Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Gregg served four terms in the House and two as New Hampshire's governor before running for Senate in 1992. He currently sits on the Commerce Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, a point Obama made during his introductory remarks.

Gregg spoke sharply about Obama during the campaign but Tuesday called the president's economic plan "bold and aggressive, comprehensive and effective." As the Commerce Department's "steward," Obama said, Gregg will "defy the winds of this crisis" by guiding his team to rebuild infrastructure, create jobs, promote industry and retain U.S. leadership in science and technology developments.

The nomination of the 61-year-old senior senator comes almost a month after the original nominee, Gov. Bill Richardson (D) of New Mexico, bowed out, citing a pending investigation into his administration's possible involvement with lucrative contracts to a political donor.

The news of Gregg's potential nomination had Democrats exulting over a chance to add another Senate seat to their caucus, giving them a supermajority there if they are officially awarded the disputed Minnesota contest. But Gregg proved unwilling to give up the seat if it would tip the Senate's balance further in the Democrats' favor. "I have made it clear to the Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle and to the governor that I would not leave the Senate if I felt my departure would cause a change in the makeup of the Senate," he said earlier this week.

In his acceptance comments Tuesday, Gregg thanked New Hampshire's Gov. John Lynch (D) for "courtesy and courage in being willing to make this possible" by agreeing to appoint a Republican as Gregg's Senate successor.

Sure of the Senate balance remaining stable, Gregg turned to bipartisanship appeals in his final remarks. "This is not a time when we should stand in our ideological corners and shout at each other. This is a time to govern and govern well," he said, accepting the nomination. "It was my obligation to say yes."

The president and his new Cabinet pick took no questions from the assembled press.

Check out the blog Lost in Transition, a joint effort of Government Executive and National Journal.

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Obama's promise to cut middle managers won't be easy to keep

Alina Selyukh — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The Change We Need in Washington," Obama promised he would free up resources "both for deficit reduction and for increasing the number of frontline workers."

Experts agree the promise might be hard to measure and -- more importantly -- accomplish.

"The vast majority of federal employees are not managerial, so it's not clear, if we pursued this promise vigorously, how much in savings we'd reap or how many folks we'd get to move to the front lines," said Robert Shea, an associate director for the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget, who is now at consulting firm Grant Thornton.

Obama adds complexity by committing to move middle managers to the front line. Without that clause, the promise would be "a lot easier to execute," said Paul Light, who researches federal bureaucracy as a public service professor at New York University. After all key OMB players are on board, Light expects a plan to slowly take shape, but making downward shifts will be "a real problem." The administration may reclassify someone as on the front line, but stripping away higher pay is a cumbersome process. "The most efficient way is to remove the occupant or take advantage of the occupant's retirement and recreate the position on the lower level," he said.

Reclassifying instead of eliminating jobs is what undermined Clinton's plan, Light said. The initiative to cut management layers and do away with superfluous positions, around 252,000 in all, morphed into creation of new de facto middle managers under different titles. Clinton's "Reinventing Government" program made the mistake of proposing personnel cuts across the board, Shea said. The cuts "weren't done strategically, so programs that needed more employees probably lost some," he said. "Doing anything like this across the board is a bad idea."

The Clinton plan also came under fire for applying the private sector's manager-employee and supervisory ratios, something Darryl Perkinson, national president of the Federal Managers Association, dismissed as a poor replacement for conversations with middle managers about their place and potential in government affairs.

"In my 29 years, I have worked with only a handful of people that had no business being employed in the government," he said. "I have seen people in the wrong jobs at times, but if they were properly placed they could function and be useful." Referring to Obama's promise to eliminate redundant federal programs by evaluating each and every one of them, Perkinson said the examination "will in most cases highlight the inefficiency is due to the incomplete or misdirected policy of the program, not the effort of the manager."

Bush never took up his promise to reduce the ranks of middle managers by 40,000 though attrition. But Shea said OMB "always had a challenge keeping all positions filled, and we could have used more people in certain areas, but we never made the case."

Light estimated that 14 percent of full-time civil servants in the federal government -- 200,000 to 250,000 people -- are managers of some kind. Depending on what definition of a middle manager guided Obama's promise, the administration might have to fire a number of them to actually reduce spending on salaries while increasing frontline help. That's "easy and very painful to do," Light said. "It's a terrible economy in which to dump... however many middle managers into a Washington economy or a regional economy."

While speculation about Obama's exact plans is premature before his 2010 budget is released in February, specialists agree the administration is unlikely to repeat past mistakes.

Light said the first indication of progress might be a decrease in jobs classified as managerial, which "will take a little bit of time." Shea, however, was less optimistic about obvious signs of the promise's implementation.

"We may not know when or if it is fulfilled," he said.

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