Bush’s Broom Stirs Up Cloud of Job Seekers

A high Pentagon official appointed by President Reagan recently inquired about his chances of becoming secretary of the Navy in the Bush Administration.

“Forget it,” he said he was told by a member of the Bush transition team. “We’ve got lots of applicants for that job and they all say they played baseball with Bush at Yale.”

The official’s next move is uncertain, but with President-elect George Bush threatening to sweep out more than 90% of the 5,700 Reagan political appointees, many are looking elsewhere for work.

More than 200, including at least one unidentified Cabinet officer, already have contacted a private firm that charges up to $6,000 to help prospective business executives sharpen their interviewing style and other self-marketing skills.

‘Headhunter’ Is Swamped

And a “headhunter” for corporations seeking talented government officials said that he has been swamped with calls from Reagan appointees who want to make their availability known to the business world.

“I’m hearing from a lot of people who thought they had a better chance of staying on before the election than perhaps they do now,” said Ron Walker of Korn-Ferry International, an executive-search firm. “There is a serious feeling that the Bush Administration needs a lot of new talent to invigorate the next four years.”

The mounting exodus is the frantic and often gloomy flip-side of a presidential transition process propelled by the ambitions of thousands of job hopefuls awaiting their call to government service. For everyone on the way in, there must be someone on the way out.

Even as Bush brandishes his broom, though, reality is slow to take hold in some corners of the bureaucracy.

“I don’t foresee any slaughter,” said a mid-level Interior Department appointee, who is calmly counting on staying put. “We’re all Republicans. If you’ve done a good job under Reagan, how can that disqualify you under Bush?”

Some of the more confident incumbents who want to remain have taken direct action, sending resumes to Charles G. Untermeyer, director of personnel for the Bush transition team.

Reagan appointees with higher anxiety levels are pursuing more devious ploys to hang on.

One official who has been a top aide to an outgoing Cabinet member said that he has heard that incoming Cabinet chiefs and division heads will have considerable leeway in choosing their own subordinates. So his aim is to identify those most likely to succeed and establish contact with them. He is trying for three separate jobs in hopes that one will come through.

Civil Service Jobs

Others are looking for ways to slip into career Civil Service jobs, which supposedly are competitive. Although congressional Democrats have substantially curbed this time-honored practice by getting the General Accounting Office to track the moves of every political appointee, attempts to make the switch are still being made.

“A half-dozen (political appointees) I’ve talked to in the last couple of months expressed a desire to career-in,” said Patrick S. Korten, former chief spokesman at both the Justice Department and Office of Personnel Management, the Civil Service agency.

Korten said that his advice generally is “don’t do it. Political appointees perform the valuable function of providing yeast for the policy-making machinery, but they are expected to leave at the end of an Administration. They are not there to provide continuity.”

However, Korten, now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that he agreed to help a couple of appointees switch to career jobs because they had serious personal problems and “needed a time for stability.”

“I’d say it’s quite easy to do one or two conversions in an agency, but it’s real hard now to do big numbers,” said an aide to Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who instituted the GAO’s monitoring of political appointees.

At a recent cocktail party of several hundred past and present Reagan Administration officials, the main topic of conversation was keeping your job, according to former personnel director Donald Devine. For now, though, there is not a whole lot that people can do, he said.

“There’s some ability to jockey and work with favorable congressmen and senators, but that’s limited,” Devine said. In particular, he noted, members of Congress cannot exert much influence until they have somebody to influence--many Cabinet appointments are yet to be made.

Anticipating that waves of Reaganites would be departing, a local firm called Executive Transitions sent out letters to 1,800 appointees three months ago, offering to help polish their images and place them in high-paying business jobs.

Career Evaluations

George Bensema, a former Labor Department official who runs the program, said that “we’ve been getting 20 to 25 calls a day” from interested persons. For $4,000 to $6,000, the firm puts clients through career evaluations, personality tests, skills workshops and videotaped mock interviews before lining them up with potential employers.

“They don’t know how to relate their experience in government to a P-and-L (profit and loss) conversation,” Bensema said of the Administration appointees. “It takes about a month before they’re ready to go into the market.”

He declined to name any clients.

Executive headhunter Walker, who directed the 1985 Reagan inaugural activities, estimated that 100 Reagan appointees, including three Cabinet officers, had sought his help since the Nov. 8 election.

“They may have real problems because a lot of them came into the Administration at a young age and the private sector looks for business experience, not government experience,” Walker said.

“More importantly, in contrast with 8 or 15 years ago when people went back to where they came from, many people want to stay in Washington because it’s become a neat city. But there aren’t that many jobs here paying $100,000 and $150,000, so a lot of people are going to be disappointed.”

Staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.