Bush Criticized for Failing to Fill More Than 100 High-Level Jobs

Republicans and Democrats alike are growing concerned that the Bush Administration, after nearly a year in office, has yet to fill scores of senior government positions that are critical to the formulation and implementation of federal policies.

“The Bush Administration has been the slowest in history to fill its top jobs,” said Paul C. Light, associate dean of the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. “It has been profoundly late.”

The Congressional Research Service says only 258 of the 439 decision-makers requiring appointment by the President and confirmation by the Senate were in place as of Nov. 22, when Congress adjourned for the year. Of the 181 unfilled positions, the Senate had failed to act on 64 Bush nominees, and the President had failed to nominate anyone to fill the other 117 slots.

Analysts say the vacancies, although not affecting the Administration’s ability to make its most high-profile decisions, has snarled the process of making the hundreds of department-level policies that never reach the White House.

The delays “without question hampered the formulation of new policy initiatives,” said a holdover appointee at the Defense Department who has only recently been replaced. “This has been the longest transition I have ever experienced. I’ve been in this city since 1945, and I’ve never seen anything to match it.”

Republicans and Democrats blame each other.

In a letter last month to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu implied that the Democratic Senate was responsible. If the Senate did not get busy, he said, the Administration would go over its head and install its nominees unilaterally.

That letter sent Mitchell to the Senate floor, where he held Bush himself responsible. Noting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had no director, deputy director or inspector general during the San Francisco earthquake or Hurricane Hugo’s pounding of South Carolina, he asked: “How many more disasters must occur before the President nominates someone to fill those three high offices?

“If the White House can criticize the Senate for taking more than one month to confirm a nomination,” Mitchell demanded, “what can be said of a White House which takes more than 10 months to make a nomination?”

Democrats, pointing to the high vacancy rate, have dubbed the Bush Administration “the Swiss cheese government.” Light and other scholars say there is no modern precedent for 181 vacancies so late in a President’s first year.

The Administration’s defenders argue that Bush, the first chief executive in 60 years to succeed a President of the same party through an election, has been able to rely on the temporary services of holdovers from Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

“There is a much lower sense of urgency because it is a Republican Administration replacing a Republican Administration,” said G. Calvin Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Me. Unlike its most recent predecessors, the Bush Administration was not confronted with the immediate need “to get the bad guys out,” Mackenzie said.

White House Personnel Director Charles G. (Chase) Untermeyer, who has taken much of the heat for the delays, says the numbers are misleading because the most critical policy-making officials are in place.

“We never viewed it as a numbers game,” Untermeyer said. “You go in order of what the government needs to run . . . . Policy formulation is done by a very small group of people, nearly every one of whom was in place by Jan. 20.”

That assessment is strongly disputed not only by Mitchell and other Democrats but also by a number of officials within the departments and agencies affected by the delays.

“The vacancies include an awful lot of significant jobs, among them administrators at some of the smaller agencies and assistant secretaries and middle-management people throughout government,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute here. “Middle management is a key level because that’s where policies are implemented.”

There is “no question” that the delay in getting people into place has created serious management problems, conceded John C. Tuck, who was nominated and confirmed last April as undersecretary of energy. “If you don’t have the political leadership of the department confirmed by the Senate and aligned and picked in conjunction with the top guy, the department program suffers,” he said.

Another Administration official, who requested anonymity, said vacancies among assistant secretaries and other second-level political appointees has sometimes cut off the top career bureaucrats from their departments’ political leadership.

“In the absence of people between the working level and the Cabinet level,” he said, “it has become very difficult to gain access and get decisions made because the necessary links to the top are not there or were late in being added in many cases.”

The effect of missing so many key links in the administrative chain of command is masked to some degree by the fact that government has its own momentum, with career civil servants keeping the bureaucratic machinery turning on a day-to-day basis.

“It’s not that things are grinding to a halt. It’s that they’re not moving forward fast enough,” said Scott Lilly, executive director of the Democratic Study Group, the research arm of the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives.

“Programs become outdated and irrelevant if they’re not changed from time to time, and in this case the people who make the recommendations and feed them through to the White House are not there. The modernizations and revisions that are supposed to take place on a periodic basis are being skipped.”

One of the areas cited by Democrats is the Defense Department, where, in Lilly’s words, there is a “screaming need . . . to totally rethink our defense force structure” at a time when sweeping changes are taking place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

“There is still no deputy undersecretary for acquisition, which is a key job,” he said.

Defense Department officials respond that the vacancies have had no effect on existing policies or day-to-day management. “This department has a huge permanent bureaucracy to keep the basic wheels turning,” Pentagon spokesman Fred Hoffman said. “Budget action and studies go forward. Things have not ground to a halt.”

But one Pentagon official, acknowledging that it took “an awfully long time to get all our key people into place,” said the delays “slowed down whatever innovations could have been expected.”

The Bush Administration’s slow start also appears to have had a damaging effect on morale and eroded some of the esteem in which government institutions, especially those engaged in scientific research, are held.

Robert C. Gallo, a prominent scientist with the National Cancer Institute, recalled how an Australian colleague approached him at a scientific conference in Dallas last month to express his dismay over the fact that the prestigious director’s job at the National Institutes of Health had not yet been filled.

“He spoke to me with great passion,” Gallo said. “He said: ‘Why hasn’t someone taken the job? To all the world, it is the most important position in biomedical research. Each week that goes by without a director tarnishes the luster of the NIH.’ ”

Gallo, the co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, said he too thought that NIH’s reputation had been “diminished” by the Administration’s failure to find a new director. “It has been a bit demoralizing on the staff.”

Among those whose morale has suffered the most are the many Reagan Administration appointees on whom the Bush Administration has relied heavily despite its intention to eventually replace them.

“I know of a lot of people who are just hanging out there, still twisting in the wind, a year later, waiting to know what’s going to happen to them,” the departing Pentagon official said. “It’s not a happy situation. It’s created a lot of personal anguish, and the way it’s been handled has been very cruel.”

Although Untermeyer insists that his critics exaggerate the problem, other White House officials admit privately that the delay in filling key slots has frustrated them. “Sununu continues to be exasperated by the whole thing,” said one White House official, who added that Sununu meets daily with Untermeyer to review candidates.

Untermeyer acknowledges that he is under White House pressure to fill the vacancies but blames factors beyond the Administration’s control.

One of them is the much closer scrutiny that the Senate is giving to nominations as a result of a series of ethics scandals and the increasingly thorough and time-consuming background checks that candidates must consequently undergo.

“The President and the chief of staff are constantly asking me, ‘Where is the nomination?’ The response is often that it is still being investigated by the FBI,” Untermeyer said.

Ethics laws, tighter restrictions on post-government employment and the growing disparity between public and private sector salaries, particularly for specialist positions, have created a shortage of experienced, qualified people willing to work for the government.

Candidates “tend to be at two poles,” those in their 20s and 30s who are just starting out and those who are in or near retirement and are more financially secure, Untermeyer said. “What’s missing,” he added, “is half a generation, those in their 40s and 50s, who are at a critical juncture in their careers with big mortgages and kids in college. It is in this category that we find it’s hard to get people.”

Although Untermeyer’s office has not released any figures, the number of people who have turned down jobs in the Bush Administration is believed to be much higher than those who have accepted them.

Energy Secretary James D. Watkins, testifying at a confirmation hearing last month for Victor Stello Jr., his nominee to head the nation’s troubled nuclear weapons program, illuminated that problem when he disclosed that Stello was the Administration’s fifth choice for the job. Four others had turned it down, and Stello was the only candidate who had “not whined to me about pay,” Watkins said.

A Defense Department official, conceding that the Pentagon faced a similar problem, said that “more than 20 people were interviewed” for the critical position of undersecretary for acquisition before John Betti, who was nominated last July and confirmed in August, took the job.

“It took a long time to fill that job,” the official said, ‘in part because no one wanted it.”

In many instances it is not only reservations about pay or ethics restrictions that deter candidates from accepting top government jobs. In the case of NIH, for instance, several candidates for the directorship were said to have been scared off by reports that they would be grilled about their views on abortion.

Critics also pin much of blame on what they contend is Bush’s lack of leadership.

“A big part of the problem is that the President himself has not laid out much of a call to action yet,” said Lilly, the Democratic Study Group director. “The Bush agenda is not something that has gotten very many people excited.”

Lilly also singled out Untermeyer’s personnel office. “The bottom line is that the problem is just not being handled very well at that office,” he said. “They don’t seem to be on top of things.”

That assessment was shared by a Reagan Administration official leaving his job with some bitterness after waiting nearly a year to see if he would be replaced. He said the Bush Administration’s progress in putting its own people into place could be summed up in five words: “Slow, slow, slow, terribly slow.”

Staff writer Marlene Cimons contributed to this story.