Bush Nominees Wrestle With Clearance

“When I saw the marijuana question,” the potential President Bush appointee said, “I thought, ‘Oh, great. It only asks about using it within the past five years. I’m safe.’ But then I saw the added instructions on using it back to age 18. Big trouble.”

Another potential appointee, getting his first look at the dreaded SF-86, Questionnaire for Sensitive Positions, looked at the question about whether the applicant has had psychological treatment and made a quick decision. “I decided that going to a psychiatrist twice was not ‘treatment,’ ” he said, angry about what he envisioned would be “some guy in the White House reading about the trouble I was having with my marriage eight years ago.”

Welcome to what White House counsel C. Boyden Gray calls “the current climate.” It requires candidates for senior posts that require confirmation to fill out several forms, including the SF-86, Supplemental Instructions for Completing Standard Form 86, Supplement to Standard Form 86, the tax check waiver, the Executive Personnel Finance Disclosure Report, the Conflict of Interest form and the White House Personal Data Statement. And that is before FBI agents knock on the door.

Confront Questions

It requires that the President and his aides for the first time wrestle with questions affecting an entire government, such as: Should occasional, college-age use of marijuana disqualify a nominee from serving in the government? (The Bush White House says no.) And must a candidate order a psychologist visited years ago to open the nominee’s personal life to FBI agents? (Probably yes.)

Under fire because it has filled key posts slowly, the Bush team, frustrated and on the defensive, blames much of the lag on the increasingly complex clearance process, what Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) recently called “jumping higher through a more time-consuming series of hoops.”

Available evidence suggests it is taking increasingly longer to get a candidate into the job. An extensive study of the appointment process by Colby College political scientist C. Calvin MacKenzie found that in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration it took seven weeks from selection to confirmation. It jumped a week or two in each succeeding Administration, with Ronald Reagan’s appointees taking 14 weeks in 1981.

MacKenzie, blaming the delay in large measure on a clearance process that has grown from minimal in the John F. Kennedy Administration to an “incredibly elaborate one” under Reagan, estimates that Bush appointees will spend on average four months waiting for clearance.

Gray said last week that he intends to build a case that the added level of questions and detail now required by the FBI takes longer and adds virtually no disqualifying information. “If I can have six months and build a record and get the evidence, then I think you can cut this off,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of guinea pigs will have gone through this by then.”

Ginsburg Aftermath

The “guinea pigs” are Bush appointees who face the expanded, lengthened FBI procedure that evolved in late 1987 after Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg withdrew from consideration after his past marijuana use was revealed before the start of his confirmation hearings.

The drug question on the prior FBI form asked about drug use during the last five years. Instructions added last year require answers to reveal drug use back to age 18, and both the past and current administrations knew its potential for, as one official said, “disqualifying most of an entire generation” if occasional, college-age drug use meant no job.

However, according to several Administration officials, word was quietly passed that “experimental use in college” or its equivalent was acceptable.