Clinton White House Will Take Strong Role in Hiring

President-elect Bill Clinton has decided on a personnel recruitment process intended to guarantee the White House a dominant role in staffing decisions--and thus over future policy--not only for the Cabinet but deep into the ranks of all major government agencies.

Sources say that, in one of its first key determinations, Clinton’s transition team has decided not to give Cabinet officers a free hand in selecting their own subordinates.

Instead, Clinton officials have committed to what one termed a “negative checkoff” system. Under this approach, neither the White House personnel operation nor the Cabinet officers will be able to force an appointee on the other side, sources in the transition effort said.

The process, a compromise between the almost hands-off approach of the Jimmy Carter Administration and the almost total control exercised by the Ronald Reagan White House, is meant to assure that the incoming Administration is staffed with individuals committed to the new President’s policies, while maintaining a collegial atmosphere.

“There is no way we are going to give the secretaries choices without Clinton and Vice President-elect Al Gore being involved,” one Clinton adviser said. “But they will sit down with the personnel team and they can both nix each other’s ideas.”

It is not yet clear whether such negotiations will extend to the very bottom of the political appointee list in every agency, or focus mainly on positions that exert major influence on policy-making.

The determination of some members of the Clinton team to retain a strong White House voice in the personnel process springs in part from a belief that Carter’s laissez-faire approach allowed the development of independent power centers across government agencies staffed by appointees whose first loyalty was not to the President.

Among those known to hold that view is Warren Christopher, the transition team director, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Carter Administration.

To further ensure that officials throughout the bureaucracy follow the White House’s direction, some advisers are urging on Clinton an unusually interdisciplinary approach to the appointment process. Rather than simply making his decisions department by department, Clinton is being counseled by these advisers to look at broad clusters of policy--the economy or foreign affairs, for example--and appoint his entire team at once. Such an approach would aim to ensure that the appointees hold compatible views and offer a mix of complementary skills.

“The idea is not to look at the bureaus and departments on a vertical basis, but to look at it horizontally--to see who in the various departments and the White House are going to be working together on a regular basis . . . and staff up with that in mind,” one source familiar with the conversations said.

All of these discussions in the Clinton camp point toward the conclusion that the incoming Administration intends the White House to exert a strong centralizing influence over policy. A similar intent appears to be an element in Clinton’s plan to create an Economic Security Council in the White House that would coordinate economic policy as the National Security Council does foreign policy.

“It is presidential government,” one adviser urging the cluster approach to appointments said. “What you want is coordination from the White House, final big decisions by the President and implementation by the department and Cabinet heads.”

One week after the election, the system to fill the 3,000 or more government jobs available to Clinton is still in an embryonic stage.

Before appointments can begin, aides say, Clinton has to make final decisions on some questions of government structure, particularly how the Economic Security Council will operate and what positions will be cut to fulfill his promise of a 25% reduction in the White House staff.

And, although an appointment is expected soon, Clinton still has not named a personnel director for his transition team. Some veterans of the transition process warn that a significant delay in filling that post could create problems for Clinton by giving contending factions within his coalition time to rally around their favorite candidates for important jobs.

“He is going to make a basic mistake unless he grabs hold of the appointment process right away,” says E. Pendleton James, who directed the personnel operation for Reagan’s transition in 1980.

Still, the Clinton transition team has made tangible progress.

To channel the deluge of resumes flowing into Little Rock, the transition staff has acquired advanced optical scanners that input resumes into a computer without the need for a typist. They have built a databank that allows them to sort the applicants not only by experience, but also by demographic characteristics--and the name of their political sponsor.

And they have decided to divide the appointment process into two tiers with a different procedure for each.

Appointments in the first tier, about the top 25 to 30 positions in the government--will be handled by the transition team itself. That team is led by Washington attorney Vernon E. Jordan Jr., its chairman, and Christopher.

For these top jobs, Christopher has signaled that he intends to conduct searches comparable to the exhaustive process that led to the selection of Gore as Clinton’s running mate. That recruitment process--which Christopher also directed--involved dozens of names and, eventually, extensive collection of financial and medical records on the top contenders.

Once the top Cabinet officials are in place, sources say, they will work with the personnel operation to name their subordinates.

In filling these key positions, the President-elect faces choices that involve more than whose ambitions to satisfy. To a large extent, experts say, his major personnel decisions will define the character and policy direction of his Administration.

“If you want to control policy, you’ve got to control the appointments . . . because policy is people, it’s not programs off the shelf,” James said. “If you don’t get the right people in, it’s not going to be your policy.”

That may be especially true for a candidate who sent signals as diverse as Clinton did during his long march to the White House. After a campaign in which he frequently called for Democrats to move beyond traditional liberal approaches on issues like welfare and education--and yet drew support from unions and other groups skeptical of those departures--Clinton’s appointments will be closely watched to see where his true intentions lie.

Liberals, for example, have been talking up Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund and a close friend of Hillary Clinton, as a potential secretary of health and human services. Centrists associated with the Democratic Leadership Council believe that someone like Joycelyn Elders, director of the Arkansas state Health Department, might prove more sympathetic to the kind of welfare reform Clinton promised.

DLC officials tout Vincent Lane, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, as someone committed to empowering the poor through new initiatives at the Housing and Urban Development Department. Urban leaders may feel more comfortable with one of their own, like Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn.

Advocates of party reform see these decisions as the first test of Clinton’s commitment to shaking up the government and his party. “What’s at stake is the ability to carry forward a bold agenda, one that departs from business as usual,” one Clinton adviser in the DLC camp said.

Leaders in the party’s liberal wing are watching with equal anxiety but the opposite perspective. “We know when it comes to campaigning Clinton feels comfortable reaching out to the left wing of the party. Now it’s time for governing, and there’s real concern that a lot of the groups he reached out to are going to be jettisoned,” one liberal activist said.

Beyond these ideological choices, Clinton must balance his desire to appoint outsiders not tainted by association with the Washington gridlock of the past decade and the need for officials who understand how the capital works. He must decide how heavily to rely on members of Congress and former officials from the Carter Administration, many of whom are already maneuvering to pick up where they left off.

Promising to avoid an Administration of the usual suspects, transition officials say they intend to conduct an aggressive search for candidates who do not submit their resumes. That effort, officials said, could be particularly important to fulfilling Clinton’s campaign promise to appoint a government that is “the most fully integrated by gender and race this country has ever seen.”

Such outreach may also be necessary to find appointees in tune with Clinton’s call for new directions in social policy, DLC President Al From said. “I think those people are out there, but it’s going to take some time to find them,” he said. “Most of them aren’t sitting on K Street in Washington.”

In fact, many in Clinton’s camp believe that a significant number of Washington veterans working as lawyers or lobbyists on K Street may be dissuaded from joining the Administration by the new ethics guidelines the President-elect has promised. Key among them is requiring all officials to refrain from lobbying their former departments for five years after they leave government.

“That will change the flow of people applying for jobs,” one Clinton aide monitoring Washington’s reaction to the incoming Administration predicted. “It will mean a lot of young people and people from the Hill, rather than the kind of appointees who would just be taking a little time off from their careers to serve.”

With all of these considerations at work, it could be many months before Clinton has his government fully in place. That would not be unprecedented: Every President since John F. Kennedy has taken successively longer to fill his top positions, said Paul C. Light, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota.

The rush of Democratic applicants waiting for their chance after 12 years of Republican rule gives Clinton an opportunity to break that trend. But he would have to overcome not only his transition team’s relatively slow start, but also his own aversion to quick decisions.

“As much time as he likes to spend on things,” one Democrat who has counseled Clinton said, “this could be a drawn-out process.”