The vast majority of the employees at the various cabinet agencies are career staffers. Their tenures have nothing to do with which president or party has power; they are, in the non-pejorative sense, professional bureaucrats. They make much of the executive branch function.
For nearly all of the agencies, staffers can and do work under different presidents. But the Department of Homeland Security isn’t like the other agencies. It was created by the Bush administration and, as GovEexc explained, its top employees were chosen by the Bush administration, for the usual Bush reasons. Given what we know of this gang, that’s not exactly encouraging. (via scout prime)
The predicament in which the department now finds itself is almost entirely of its own and the White House’s making. President Bush, who initially opposed creating a different domestic security bureaucracy after 9/11, ultimately assented amid mounting evidence about what clues the administration missed in the run-up to the attacks. Indeed, the White House changed its stance at the same time that Congress held hearings into pre-9/11 intelligence failures, in the summer of 2002. Before the year was out, Bush signed legislation to establish the department, which opened officially in January 2003.
From its inception, Homeland Security was run by political appointees or by other officials on loan to headquarters from the various agencies the department had absorbed. There wasn’t a lot of time to post job notices and staff the ranks with career employees, who take much longer to hire, former officials say.
DHS had to be fully operational on day one. So, the White House and then-Secretary Tom Ridge largely handpicked their leadership team from the ranks of Bush loyalists. Before the 2004 election, Ridge’s deputy secretary, his chief of staff, and almost all of his assistant and undersecretaries and their deputies were political appointees, people who by design would not stay long.
Former officials and experts recognize that haste dictated those early decisions. The problem, they say, is that the trend toward political appointees never subsided.
This may sound like bureaucratic inside-pool — well, maybe it is — but come January 2009, all of this will likely matter quite a bit.
January 2009 has current and former officials particularly worried, because it marks the first time since 9/11 that the reins of national and domestic security will be handed off to a completely new team. At the Pentagon, this changeover doesn’t matter as much. It has an entire joint staff of senior military officers who oversee worldwide operations, as well as regional military commands whose senior leadership stays in place. The Homeland Security Department, however, is another story. It is still run almost entirely by political appointees and stands to be the most weakened during the transition.
“Any of the other main Cabinet departments have civil servants that step in” as acting officials during a transition, says Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a leading expert on the department and its history. “Homeland Security doesn’t have any of those…. And that’s extremely unusual.”
In the four and a half years since the department opened for business, few career officials have been promoted into positions of senior or even middle management. As a result, most of the responsibility for running the department, and its plethora of critical missions, is still in the hands of people who will be walking out the door as the Bush administration wanes or leaves en masse after the election. “The department virtually has no backbench,” Flynn says.
It’s possible that this is only interesting to me, but the GovExec piece paints a disconcerting picture. Practically the entire management structure of the Department of Homeland Security are loyal Bushies — the DHS is “political by design,” the article explains — who will walk away from the agency in early 2009.
“Early on, there was a sense that the administration wanted mostly political people,” Beardsworth says. “They were very much concerned about loyalty and shaping the department where they wanted it to go.” He says he always believed that his boss, Asa Hutchinson, the first undersecretary for border and transportation security, as well as Ridge “had the good of the country at heart…. I never had the feeling that we were making partisan decisions.”
But after the 2004 election, when Bush announced that he “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” things changed. Under the new DHS secretary, Michael Chertoff, former officials say that the tone and tenor of political appointments took a turn. Personal connections and political fealty became litmus tests, these ex-officials say. Faithfully shepherding administration policy was to be expected, but the department’s leaders seemed more beholden to individuals with close ties to the White House.
“Does the department have the right political and career mix to ensure a smooth transition?” asks Randy Beardsworth, the former assistant secretary, sounding like a frustrated yet hopeful parent. “No. They’ve likely missed that opportunity.”