If some of Washington's better-known good-government advocates have their way this fall, President Clinton may leave a legacy for his successor designed to cure some of the excesses of the appointment-and-confirmation process faced by thousands of nominees to federal jobs.
The goal is to get the best and the brightest to say yes to federal posts and to win timely confirmation votes in the Senate, despite Washington's reputation for making the process seem more like a punishment than an honor.
The end of one administration and the anticipation of the next is a good time to take stock: Must nominees slog through duplicative written questions from the White House, Senate committees, and the Office of Government Ethics? How exhaustive should financial disclosure and divestiture really be? Should one Senator be allowed to hold up a nomination indefinitely? Can't the FBI accelerate those background checks? Are Clinton's ethics requirements-which were imposed on his top political appointees beginning in 1993 in response to Ross Perot's keening about Washington's revolving door-a boon to the cause of cleaner government, or merely a burdensome charade?
Even Republican candidate George W. Bush seeks relief: In his campaign package of government reforms proposed last month, he asked the Senate to vote on his nominees within 60 days if he is elected President. Bush understands why such a change could greatly benefit a President who's trying to get off to a speedy start in 2001, even if that President and the Senate's majority are of the same party.
According to a recent survey conducted under the auspices of the Brookings Institution's Presidential Appointee Initiative, 56 percent of appointees who won confirmation from 1984-99 waited five months or longer to take their posts. Forty-four percent of the nominees confirmed by the Senate during the Clinton Administration waited more than six months to get through the process (some waited years), compared with 25 percent of President Bush's nominees and 11 percent of Ronald Reagan's. What is impossible to quantify is how many qualified candidates declined to be considered because of the hassles of the nomination gantlet.
The reasons for the increasing delays in the appointments process run like stop lights up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Clinton's exit in January will not clear some of the hurdles that either dissuade candidates from stepping onto the federal appointments treadmill or make them sorry they did, say some of the academics who are urging Clinton to do what he can to improve the appointments process.
Among those making the case to the President and to White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta are Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, the co-chairs of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research's Transition to Governing Project, and Brookings Vice President and Director of Governmental Studies Paul C. Light, who is spearheading the Appointee Initiative survey (funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts) that underlies the most-recent arguments for remedies. They would like to see the White House organize a meeting of experts this fall.
Ideally, they want to build, prior to the Nov. 7 elections, a consensus that would give the President cover to use his executive authority to remove some of the kinks from the system. High on the list of ideas is streamlining the questions posed to potential appointees, said Ornstein, Mann, and Light in separate interviews. Podesta said in an interview that he agrees there are steps Clinton can take before he leaves office. The chief of staff knows the appointments bog better than most: He served on a Twentieth Century Fund task force that produced a 227-page report on the presidential appointments process in 1996 titled Obstacle Course. On May 30, Podesta met at the White House with Ornstein and Mann after Clinton received a letter of appeal from Ornstein. The group does not expect any White House action until after August, at the earliest.
Following a June 19 article in Legal Times and another a week later in The Washington Post, Clinton's 1993 executive order, which established post-employment lobbying restrictions on about 1,100 senior executive branch appointees, came under renewed focus. The order, more stringent than what is in statutes or is applied to Congress, requires top political appointees to agree that they will never lobby on behalf of foreign governments; will not advise foreign entities on matters before the U.S. government for five years after leaving a trade negotiating post; and will not lobby their former department, or any agency, on matters for which they had substantial responsibility, for five years.
As many of these same senior officials contemplate soft landings in the private sector in the next few months, the White House counsel's office is hearing complaints about ethics rules that, as written, tie the hands of Clinton appointees not only into the next Administration, but into the government of 2005. Podesta said that Clinton's ethics order is not high on the list of things the President hopes to change before he leaves office. He suggested that any talk of an overhaul was confined to the counsel's office, and may be originating among Republicans who smell job opportunities coming their way after November.
"Officially, it's not under formal review," said one senior White House official who would not rule out the possibility that Executive Order 12834 on lobbying might receive closer scrutiny later in the year. "Everyone knows the problems," the official said. "It's a pain in the neck."
Ornstein, of AEI, and Mann, senior fellow at Brookings, agree that Clinton's lobbying bans are not foremost on their lists of potential improvements. In part, their ambivalence is pragmatic. Any action Clinton takes that might appear to relax ethics rules he wrote in his Putting People First campaign manifesto would only invite the kind of partisan dart throwing the think-tankers are trying to avoid in their efforts to help future appointees. And second, no one is able to point to the lobbying bans as the threshold impediment to getting top-flight people interested in government posts (although some claim the problem is most severe in the case of Pentagon jobs, which can lead to lucrative defense contracting opportunities). On the contrary, both proponents and detractors agree that many talented people who have joined the Clinton Administration in the past eight years later found ways to lobby for or to advise clients on policies they helped craft without breaking the letter of the ethics pledges, or without suffering any penalties if they did.
If that's the case, what's the good-government argument for another look? Those who say Clinton should junk his restrictions entirely argue that he can take the political heat for helpfully clearing the decks, which an incoming President would find difficult to do. The rebuttal is that incoming Presidents these days are known for rescinding the executive orders of their predecessors, particularly when one party relinquishes the White House to another.
Some suggest that Clinton could tweak his lobbying bans in a way that would not appear to be self-serving. One idea, Light said, is to amend the executive order so that the restrictions continue to cover this Administration's senior appointees but expire on the day the next President takes the oath of office. Another idea is to reduce the number of years the bans are in place, beginning with this Administration's outgoing officials or the next. But the notion that any change to the ethics rules before Nov. 7 would not become a campaign distraction is probably wishful thinking.
"If George Bush wants to go, or Al Gore wants to go and make the case for why five years should be changed, they should take responsibility for it," said Meredith McGehee, senior vice president for Common Cause. "But if Clinton goes out at this point and says, `OK, I'm leaving office and I'm taking this with me,' that leaves us back at ground zero.... If he said five [years], then he shouldn't back away from it at this last minute."
Mickey Kantor, who served the Clinton Administration as U.S. Trade Representative and as Commerce Secretary, agrees. If the rules bind people, they do so in the best way, he argued, and any change by the President before he leaves office would be inconsistent with his 1992 campaign pledge. "It would cast some doubt on the sincerity of what he did, and I don't think it would be in the interest of those who serve in government," said Kantor, a Washington partner with the Chicago law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt. "They would be subject to some criticism as well, because some might believe they tried to get a change in order to take advantage of their position."
If someone does wring an advantageous change out of the President, "that would be their first great lobbying accomplishment and should qualify them for something," joked Jack Quinn, a former Gore chief of staff and former White House counsel. Currently a lobbyist with Quinn Gillespie & Associates, Quinn drafted the Clinton executive order he now openly disparages as "someone else's silly idea." The lifetime ban on representing foreign governments, he maintained, "makes little or no sense in an era of globalization."
Quinn said he honors his pledge not to contact the White House on behalf of clients, but vigorously disputes the notion that communicating with the people he used to work with is improper. And anyhow, what he can't do, his lieutenants can. "There are 19 people in my firm," he noted, "and the 18 here who are not subject to the pledge because they never signed anything shouldn't be themselves prevented from making a living just because I signed the pledge."