Commerce Department Dismisses 40 Clinton Appointees

The long-awaited ax fell Friday at the Commerce Department, as about 40 Clinton administration appointees were dismissed in accordance with Secretary William M. Daley’s promise to slash the department’s political staff and restore its tattered reputation.

Daley’s chief of staff, Paul Donovan, said he delivered the bad news to the appointees, who were asked to leave no later than Sept. 30. “This was difficult, but it was necessary,” Donovan said.

The dismissals, Donovan said, mean that Daley has “essentially completed the required personnel reductions” to fulfill a pledge made at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, when he said he would reduce the number of politically filled positions by 100 as part of an initiative to purge the agency of partisan taint.

Many of the remaining political posts are already vacant and, Donovan said, “we anticipate no further significant layoffs” to reach the goal of cutting [down] to 156 political positions by the end of the year, down from the current 256. Political positions are those filled by appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president, rather than by career civil service employees.

The move is a key step in Daley’s efforts to rehabilitate the department’s image after a barrage of allegations that his predecessor, the late Ronald H. Brown, ran the department with a political agenda and filled its ranks with Clinton partisans. The best-known political appointee under Brown, John Huang, a former principal deputy assistant secretary for international economic policy, is a central figure in the investigations of Democratic fund-raising practices.

The department long has been viewed as an unusually politicized agency and “dumping ground” for political appointees in both Republican and Democratic administrations. But critics--notably congressional Republicans--contend that Brown, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, took the practice to new heights, by launching a series of highly publicized foreign trade missions and awarding many slots on the trips to business executives who had donated generously to the Democratic Party.

Although the allegations of impropriety remain unproved--the department points out that the trade missions included many GOP donors--they have hurt enough that Daley vowed to eliminate political considerations in the process of selecting mission participants.

Names of the people dismissed Friday were not being released. Donovan said they included one assistant secretary and “a handful of” deputy undersecretaries and deputy assistant secretaries.