Since former FEMA Director Mike Brown’s background came to public light, there’s been considerable discussion about cronyism in the Bush administration — the only people who seem to get jobs are those who are reliable political allies, and they’re given jobs whether they deserve them or not.
Since the Brown example, critics have not hurt for examples. David Safavian and Julie Myers made headlines shortly thereafter for the same reason.
Time magazine moves the ball forward this week — asking “How many more Mike Browns are out there?” — explaining that cronyism dominates the executive branch at nearly every level.
The Office of Personnel Management’s Plum Book, published at the start of each presidential Administration, shows that there are more than 3,000 positions a President can fill without consideration for civil service rules. And Bush has gone further than most Presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you’ve never heard of, and to give them genuine power over the bureaucracy. “These folks are really good at using the instruments of government to promote the President’s political agenda,” says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University and a well-known expert on the machinery of government. “And I think that takes you well into the gray zone where few Presidents have dared to go in the past. It’s the coordination and centralization that’s important here.”
It’s an important point. Every president is going to fill sought-after vacancies with political allies and generous contributors. Bush not only does it more than his predecessors, he also, apparently, sees this as integral to how the executive branch should function. Loyalty above competence, allegiance to ideology over commitment to public service. We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not what you know; it’s who you know,” but with the Bush White House, it’s reached a ridiculous level.
If Bush were simply filling ambassadorial posts with high-donor “Rangers,” I doubt anyone would be terribly surprised or outraged. But the real scandal here is the specific jobs, with important public responsibilities, being filled with those who have little or no qualifications in their field.
Mike Brown, unfortunately, was just the beginning. Meet Scott Gottlieb.
Internal e-mail messages obtained by Time show that scientists’ drug-safety decisions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are being second-guessed by a 33-year-old doctor turned stock picker.
The FDA’s deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs is not exactly some random bureaucrat. When Gottlieb was given the job, he was burdened with the responsibility of reviewing accuracy in medical research on, as Time put it, “everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and hair dye.” It’s the kind of job in which Americans need to rely that a qualified specialist, free of influences from politics and special interests, has their best interests in mind.
And while the 33-year-old Gottlieb does have a medical degree, his bio raises a few eyebrows considering his high-ranking post.
What the bio omits is that his most recent job was as editor of a popular Wall Street newsletter, the Forbes/Gottlieb Medical Technology Investor, in which he offered such tips as “Three Biotech Stocks to Buy Now.” In declaring Gottlieb a “noted authority” who had written more than 300 policy and medical articles, the biography neglects the fact that many of those articles criticized the FDA for being too slow to approve new drugs and too quick to issue warning letters when it suspects ones already on the market might be unsafe. […]
[Donald Kennedy, Jimmy Carter-era FDA Commissioner, a former Stanford University president and now executive editor-in-chief of the journal Science said]Gottlieb breaks the mold of appointees at that level who are generally career FDA scientists or experts well known in their field. “The appointment comes out of nowhere. I’ve never seen anything like that,” says Kennedy.
OK, so there are questions about Gottlieb’s qualifications. But has he proven himself on the job?
Behind the scenes, however, Gottlieb has shown an interest in precisely those kinds of [scientific and medical] deliberations. One instance took place on Sept. 15, when the FDA decided to stop the trial of a drug for multiple sclerosis during which three people had developed an unusual disorder in which their bodies eliminated their blood platelets and one died of intracerebral bleeding as a result. In an e-mail obtained by Time, Gottlieb speculated that the complication might have been the result of the disease and not the drug. “Just seems like an overreaction to place a clinical hold” on the trial, he wrote. An FDA scientist rejected his analysis and replied that the complication “seems very clearly a drug-related event.” Two days prior, when word broke that the FDA had sent a “non-approvable” letter to Pfizer Inc., formally rejecting its Oporia drug for osteoporosis, senior officials at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research received copies of an e-mail from Gottlieb expressing his surprise that what he thought would be a routine approval had been turned down. Gottlieb asked for an explanation.
The administration is filled with Scott Gottliebs, in offices most people have never heard of, running the executive branch (usually) free of intense public scrutiny.
So, for every high-profile controversy over a Bush nomination (Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales), remember there are many more mundane presidential appointments that may be doing just as much damage, if not more.