Vetting

Amy Harder has a good post up at FedBlog's sister blog, Lost In Transition, on some of the controversy surrounding Obama's issue czars. Harder writes:

n the Washington Post this week, Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman went a step further, arguing that czars should in fact undergo Senate confirmation. Ackerman noted that if Tom Daschle had been appointed only to the health czar post and not as Health and Human Services secretary, his tax problems might never have surfaced and he would be well on his way to leading the charge for health care reform.

And that reminded me that I've been wanting to delve into the contradictions and failures of Obama's vetting process so far. It's been fascinating to me that a team that's so publicly committed to ethics, and that dealt with lapses in ethics or decorum during the campaign (see Samantha Power's "Monster" slip, Jim Johnson's resignation from the vice presidential search team, etc.) has become so publicly bogged down of finding qualified candidates without ethics problems to serve in the administration. Some commenters here have ascribed those problems to a deliberate and willful disregard for ethics concerns. But I don't really think that's the case. Obama himself comes across as fairly personally conservative. No one's ever been able to really pin a true ethical violation on him. I don't think ethics are irrelevant to him.

But I think demanding the same from everyone you appoint to serve in your administration creates a real problem for an administration. First, as of 2005, there were 1,640 Schedule C political appointees in the federal government. That's a lot of people to have to find to serve in your administration. The chances that you can find 1,640 people who have never made a mistake on their taxes (for the record, when I was examining my 2007 tax filings this year, I found an error. I take back everything I ever said about how easy it is to do your taxes. At least I overpaid the government by a couple of dollars, rather than underpaying by tens of thousands!), who have avoided conflicts of interest to the absolute highest standard their entire lives, and whose families and friends have avoided all the same problems, are extremely small. In fact, it's probably fairly naive to assume that there are that many extremely qualified people who are completely ethically unscathed, or self-righteous to assume that everyone's been trying to live up to those same standards in anticipation of the day their ship comes in and the president comes calling.

I don't think that excuses folks who don't pay their taxes correctly, or who take work from contractors without paying them promptly, or whatever. Pay the government the money you owe. Think carefully about conflicts of interest. Do the right thing. Tax complexity aside, it's not that hard.

But the Obama administration set the rules for judging nominees, and then picked this slate of people. And either they knew about their tax, and contractor, and other kinds of problems, and they went ahead with them anyway, or they didn't know. If the first case, they badly miscalculated how the nominations and accompanying reveals would play. And if the second, their vetting process was a disaster--these are basic things that should have shown up. Either way, the Obama team set the rules that are now forcing nominees to drop out, and have produced a souped-up process that's leading other potential nominees to back out because the process is too exhausting or they can't face the media scrutiny. The Obama team isn't in trouble because it doesn't care enough about ethics. The administration's in trouble because it cares a lot about ethics, but it hasn't found a way to transform that concern into a viable enforcement regime that weeds out genuine wrong-doers, and finds a way to move forward with folks who are guilty of nothing more than mistakes.