Political apointees and competences

Gilmour, Politics Research AmericanLewis / Federal Program Management 10.1177/1532673X04271905

Political Appointees and the Competence of Federal Program Management
John B. Gilmour
College of William & Mary

American Politics Research Volume 34 Number 1 January 2006 22-50 © 2006 Sage Publications 10.1177/1532673X04271905 http://apr.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

David E. Lewis
Princeton University

In this article, we use the Bush administration’s management grades to analyze whether programs administered by senior executives are better managed than those administered by political appointees requiring Senate confirmation. We explain the administration’s management grading scheme and how it can be informative for evaluating comparative management quality. We explain why senior-executive-run programs should be better managed than appointee-run programs and test our claim with data on 234 federal programs. We find that political-appointee-run programs earn systematically lower grades in most management areas. We conclude that a systematic review of the proper role of political appointees in federal program management should be considered. Keywords: public administration; political appointees; Senior Executive Service (SES); government management; Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART); executive branch

he implementation of public policies is a complex process with numerous potential failures along the way from articulation of goals to the delivery of a product. Slippage between what politicians want and what administrative agencies actually deliver can be caused by a variety of factors, including resource constraints, political disagreements, difficulty observing outcomes, task size, and the complexity of joint action (e.g., Bardach, 1977; Pressman & Wildavsky, 1974; Tendler, 1997; Wilson, 1989). Management

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Authors’ Note: The authors thank Steve Balla, Mike Cassidy, Shigeo Hirano, Greg Huber, and Nolan McCarty for helpful