Talents of Bush Staffers, Slow Hiring Pace Questioned

While President-elect George Bush and his senior advisers plow ahead with their effort to fill top positions in his Administration, other Republicans--including some close to the White House and to Bush--are expressing impatience with the pace of his staff work and raising questions about the talents of some of those chosen.

Bush’s decisions on Cabinet members have been announced in fits and starts. On Friday, six weeks before Inauguration Day, sources close to the transition staff and to the President-elect indicated that there are front-runners for most of the Cabinet jobs, although it remains uncertain when Bush will complete the drawn-out personnel process.

For his part, Bush has appeared upbeat and confident in public, prompting one Republican office-holder to remark that while the President-elect “is doing super, and that’s what’s sustaining him,” his staff has not been able to keep up.

Relaxed, In Command

Thus, while Bush has seemed relaxed and in command--conducting nearly daily encounters with reporters and jaunts about town to restaurants and theaters--there are potential storm clouds building:

--More than a month after the election, Bush has not signed on a deputy chief of staff. Robert Teeter, his long-time poll-taker and political adviser, is debating whether to take the job, and on Friday he was said by Republican sources to be less certain about uprooting his family in Michigan and moving to Washington than he had appeared earlier in the transition.

--For weeks, it has been clear that former Sen. John G. Tower (R-Tex.) is the first choice to be secretary of defense, but the delay in announcing that decision--or in reversing it and naming someone else--has become a sharp embarrassment for Tower and has prompted a series of defensive statements by the President-elect’s senior aides.

--Gov. John H. Sununu of New Hampshire, Bush’s White House chief of staff, raised eyebrows with the suggestion that he might decide to run for the Senate at some point in the future, forcing his aides to quickly point out that he intends to serve as the staff chief for eight years--if Bush serves two terms and wants him to remain on the job.

As a result, the upbeat impression that the very public Bush has left is in contrast to the undercurrent of questions about his staff and the progress he is making in filling key positions.

“George Bush is doing all the right things public relations-wise, but in terms of governing, I’m not sure they’ve chosen the right people,” one Republican said, questioning the experience of some of those on the still-limited staff.

A number of senior Republicans keeping close tabs on the transition have been dismayed by the time it has taken to finish naming the senior White House staff, noting that new staff members must quit current jobs, hire assistants, and be ready to hit the ground running at noon on Jan. 20.

On Friday, Bush met with Benjamin L. Hooks, head of the NAACP, and with a group of 13 conservative leaders. Hooks emerged from the meeting with a public reminder to Bush that he has pledged to put a black in his Cabinet. The President-elect, during a photo session, repeated his promise to make his Cabinet representative of women and minorities, telling reporters, “stay tuned.”

According to a number of sources close to the transition, progress is being made on several Cabinet posts.

Clayton K. Yeutter, the U.S. trade representative, was called “the front runner” for secretary of agriculture.

For the new post of secretary of veterans affairs, Everett Alvarez, former deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration and the longest-held American prisoner of war in Vietnam, remains “in the mix,” although a decision is not said to be close. Also mentioned for the post is Pete Dawkins, a retired Army brigadier general and unsuccessful Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey.

Suggestions that Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) might end up as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development are “definitely realistic,” one transition official said.

He said it is “less certain” whether former Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who quit the Reagan Cabinet to work on the unsuccessful presidential campaign of her husband, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), would end up in the Bush Administration, although she has been mentioned as a possible secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Constance Horner, director of the Office of Personnel Management, remains a front runner, one source said, for secretary of labor, and former Rep. Tom Loeffler (R-Tex.) is under consideration to be Bush’s assistant for congressional relations.