Former appointee calls for more top jobs for career executives

Career civil servants should have more opportunities to work in government's top positions, according to a veteran political appointee. The glut of political appointments in the executive branch hinders career executives from aspiring to top government positions, said Roger Porter, who served in the Ford, Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and is now the IBM professor of business and government at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The thicker the layer of political appointees, the fewer top positions are available to career civil servants," Porter said Monday during the Senior Executives Association's annual leadership conference in Washington. The dramatic increase in the number of political appointees in the federal government over the past 40 years has resulted in a lengthy confirmation process and made it difficult for an administration to get its team in place, Porter said. Both Republican and Democratic administrations should make fewer political appointments, and rely more on civil servants, he said. According to the Brookings Institution's Presidential Appointee Initiative, only 121 of the 498 appointments to full-time, Senate-confirmed posts in the Cabinet departments and independent executive agencies have been confirmed as of Monday. "We need to elevate public service," said Porter. "The more often public figures elevate public service, the more we will attract good people to government." Porter, who favors increasing the number of top positions for senior executives in the federal government, said the rise in the number of political appointees, particularly within the Executive Office of the President (EOP), is one of six trends that has shaped the leadership style of presidents and their administrations since 1960. "When the Executive Office of the President was created in 1939, there was one political appointee," he said. "The intent was to surround the President with career civil servants with institutional knowledge." Porter said that currently, most groups included in the EOP, outside of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, are staffed primarily with political appointees. The number of political appointments has ballooned, in part, because of the expectation that campaign contributors will be given a place in the new administration, Porter said. Presidential campaigns are longer, more expensive, and more focused on the primary season than they were 40 years ago, he noted. Other factors affecting the operating style of recent presidential administrations include the rise of divided government, the influence of think tanks and research organizations focused on policy-making, and the pressures associated with the news media's round-the-clock appetite for news, Porter said.