Hiring Process a Presidential Pain

By LISA GIRION

Jan. 28, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

President Bush has about 6,000 jobs to fill, but a growing number of critics say the modern-day White House appointment process is no way to staff the offices of the leader of the free world.

Presidential hiring embraces few of the innovative recruitment techniques pioneered by today’s fast companies. And it probably isn’t what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he imagined the citizenry’s ascent to what he called America’s “posts of honor.”

“It’s time-consuming. It’s confusing. It’s burdensome. It’s ridiculous,” said Paul C. Light, vice president of the Brookings Institution and a senior advisor to the Presidential Appointee Initiative, a nonpartisan reform effort funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “It makes government look stupid. And it’s no way to present the government as the employer of choice.”

Bush supporter Tod A. Burnett is about to find that out for himself.

The Playa del Rey resident started his quest for a presidential appointment in December, contacting everyone he knew with a connection to Bush, including many of the paid staffers he met as volunteer campaign chairman for South Los Angeles.

Burnett, a former Los Angeles Public Works commissioner, has obtained letters of support from two congressmen and two local elected Republicans. He attended the inauguration, meeting with anyone who would talk to him about a post, and continues to work his campaign from home.

“When Bush was confirmed, I was gleeful,” Burnett said. “I decided I wanted to be a part of it. . . . I don’t even want to get too excited about it. I have worked hard over the last month and a half. But it’s a difficult process.”

By many accounts, Bush’s team is making the most of a process that’s been burdened by multiple disclosure mandates that often fail in their goal of scandal-proofing executive appointees.

Getting the blame for bogging down presidential hiring are the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the pace of FBI background investigations and the sometimes protracted Senate confirmation hearings.

The size of the presidential staff subject to Senate approval also has grown, adding to the hiring delays.

In 1961, President Kennedy filled 196 appointments requiring Senate confirmation in an average of just more than two months each. In 1993, President Clinton sought Senate confirmation for nearly 800 appointments, which on average took 8 1/2 months each from Inauguration Day.

“It gets worse and worse,” said G. Calvin Mackenzie, a professor at Colby College in Maine who has written four books on presidential appointments and served on several reform commissions in the 25 years he’s studied the subject.

“I did one [commission] in 1984 that concluded this was a horrid process and made all kinds of recommendations. Now I’d love to go back to what we had in ‘84,” he said. “No rational person would ever design a system like this. It’s evolved over time to one of the most colossal messes of all time.”

Clay Johnson, Bush’s director of presidential personnel, agreed with some of the criticism, saying that some nominees incur significant legal and accounting expenses in filling out disclosure forms, and that all the nominees must suffer the many forms’ repetitive questions.

“There’s a big issue of redundancy,” Johnson said. “How many times do you have to write out your Social Security number?”

Johnson said the Bush administration expects to ask the Senate to confirm more than 1,200 appointments and has taken steps, after getting a late start, to move the process along. One example, he said, is using former White House lawyers to grill nominees, to “challenge them to speak now or forever hold your peace” in an effort to learn of potential ethics problems so they can be dealt with or the candidates ruled out before full FBI checks are complete.

“We hope that it doesn’t take eight months,” Johnson said. “To fill out the forms can take a week. Some of the Cabinet secretaries took as long as two weeks. The background check can be completed in five weeks, they promise, maximum. That’s seven weeks.

“So anything beyond seven weeks is the time required for confirmation, and our hope is the Senate is as committed to change as we are and they will look at their processes and look for ways we can help expedite the process,” Johnson said. “I don’t hear anybody saying it’s good that it takes eight months, if that’s how long it takes. Nobody is for that.”

Johnson, who was Bush’s Texas chief of staff, said the presidential hiring process began early last summer, when he began filling boxes in his campaign office and at his home with names of people mentioned for their expertise in one area or another. And by the same time this summer, he expects to have a long way to go.

“Historically, by May 1 or so about 400 to 450 names are submitted to the Senate for consideration for confirmation. Well, we’re not halfway done at that point, so there’s still 700 or 800 more positions to present to the Senate,” Johnson said. “It for sure is a very, very intense effort for that first year.”

Les T. Csorba, a member of former President Bush’s personnel office and a partner in the Houston office of Heidrick & Struggles, an international executive search firm, said the real work begins after Cabinet members are in place.

“The Cabinet positions are the most critical appointments a president makes, but there are 12 or 13 or 14 of them,” Csorba said. “The other critical area, which is actually extremely tedious and difficult, is the 600 or so sub-Cabinet positions, U.S. ambassadors and U.S. attorneys, all of whom require Senate confirmation. It is an incredible task. This is nothing short of a herculean effort.”

Most hiring managers who have struggled to fill vacancies probably have little sympathy for the Bush team, which receives thousands of resumes. According to presidential scholars and former presidential personnel officials, it’s not as easy as matching the resumes to the jobs.

“They’re mostly kids who worked in campaigns, retired people and a great assortment of nut cases,” said Colby College’s Mackenzie. “It’s a very long shot that any of those resumes are going to end up in this administration.”

Mackenzie said some presidential transition teams have handled the truckloads of unsolicited resumes in one office and done the real business of recruiting and hiring in another. Actual value aside, incoming resumes are still scanned to “look for who is politically connected so even if they aren’t qualified, they treat them right,” Mackenzie said.

Managing the sheer volume of resumes is “like drinking water out of a fire hose,” said Nels Olson, a member of former President Bush’s presidential personnel office who is now a partner with the Houston office of Korn/Ferry International Inc., an executive search firm.

For would-be presidential appointees, the hiring gantlet is no easier. The application process can be bewildering, the disclosure forms invasive and grueling, and the vetting often embarrassing. To help, the Brookings Institution has produced the book “The Survivor’s Guide for Nominees,” which opens with this less-than-encouraging suggestion: “If you decide to pursue the job, you need to engage in a time-honored Washington tradition: Create a fallback strategy in case the job falls through.”

The pursuit of a White House post can be an almost full-time endeavor that can last for months.

Candidates must complete a series of disclosure forms that until recently had to be filled out on a typewriter. At a Washington conference Thursday on the increasing complexity of White House transitions, a consortium of public interest groups, Transition to Governing Project, unveiled a software package developed to assist nominees. The software works something like TurboTax, allowing a nominee to enter a piece of information, say his or her birthplace, once and then have it automatically inserted on any number of forms.

In all, the average candidate must answer 233 questions. The forms seek such esoteric facts as the birthplaces of candidates’ mothers- and fathers-in-law, details of trips abroad--even weekend jaunts to Baja. Candidates must report brushes with the law and alcohol and drug use.

The forms alone run 60 pages, and the disclosure of the source and categories of value of all income, property investments, assets and liabilities of the candidate, his or her spouse and dependent children can get quite voluminous. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill’s finances, for instance, took more than 90 pages to report.

The process favors people who have been through it before and is often eased for nominees to higher posts by volunteer legal and financial advisors and political supporters, who help them navigate the Senate confirmation process.

“It may not be so easy going when you get to the second and third levels, where you’re bringing in new people who have never done this before and never filled out these awful forms before,” former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray said at an American Enterprise Institute conference assessing the Bush transition.

“Even [Labor secretary nominee] Elaine Chao has been through it before,” Gray said. “She and her husband [spent] the entire weekend with paper just strewn all over the floor in every conceivable room. Poor Mitch McConnell. He’s been an I-don’t-know-how-many-term senator he is. He’s filling out more forms as the spouse-to-be than he’s ever filled out.”

Despite the rigors on the road to the White House, presidential appointments still beckon thousands of Americans.

“I can certainly understand why there are so many people vying for those positions. You may take a salary cut in the short term, but you can come back and parlay that into something both on your resume and in the contacts you make,” said Jane Howze, managing director of the Alexander Group, a Houston executive search firm.

Burnett, who holds a master’s in business administration from USC and has experience developing and running companies, said he believes in public service and is willing to serve in any capacity--”in the guard shack if that’s where they want me.”

And he is prepared to wait.

“With 6,000 new positions, with a brand-new administration, with a late start, they’ve got a lot to do,” Burnett said. “There is no one way to get a job. In many respects, it’s a black hole. It’s still early.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Feds: No Fast Company

President Bush will have the opportunity to make about 6,000 full- and part-time appointments. About 1,200 of them will require full FBI background checks and Senate confirmation, a process that is increasingly criticized as unnecessarily difficult and labor-intensive:

1. The White House Office of Presidential Personnel narrows the list of candidates, checks references and makes a recommendation to the president.

2. The candidate completes a battery of forms in preparation for a background check.

3. The Office of the Counsel to the President oversees the background check through the FBI, IRS, Office of Government Ethics and the relevant agency’s ethics official.

4. If conflicts are found, the office of Government Ethics and the agency’s ethics official work with the candidate to address potential problems or conflicts. I no conflicts are found, counsel clears the candidate.

5. The Office of Presidential Personnel submits the nomination to the Senate through the Office of the Executive Clerk.

6. A Senate committee holds a confirmation hearing and then votes.

7. The confirmation moves to the full Senate for a vote and the nomination is approved or disapproved.

8. The president signs the employment commission.

9. The official is sworn in.

Sources: The Presidential Appointee Initiative, the Brookings Institution

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Hiring at the Speed of Red Tape

Average number of months from inauguration to confirmation for initial presidential appointees, by administration

Kennedy: 2.38

Nixon: 3.39

Carter: 4.55