WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is expected to sign legislation, as early as this week, that is designed to facilitate transitions at the White House, making it easier for future presidents to install their allies in office and set up a government.
The legislation would allow Obama - if he wins reelection - to replace federal managers during his second term with less congressional interference. It would also make it easier for a victorious Republican opponent to seat his preferences across the federal bureaucracy - a task former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has already started to study.
Things would also get easier for the future commissioners of the Office of Navajo and Hopi Relocation,for the future deputy directors of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and for the director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau.
The bill eliminates Senate approval requirement for those jobs and about 166 other presidentially appointed federal positions. It would also eliminate Senate approval for about 3,000 nonpresidential appointments and seeks to minimize the mountains of paperwork required of presidential picks as they wade through the vetting process.
Thomas “Mack” McLarty, who served as former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and advised Presidents George W. Bush and Obama on their transitions, said the pending legislation represents a shift in attitude toward handing over the levers of power that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Since then, he said, both parties have stressed the need for an orderly transition for national security purposes.
“You’ve got to get a team on the field in order to play the game,” McLarty said.
That, said Chase Untermeyer, who served as George H.W. Bush’s director of personnel, is why Romney tapped former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to develop a formal transition plan well before the parties’ presidential conventions.
It may also explain why the Obama campaign isn’t attacking Leavitt’s role, said Untermeyer.
“That’s a sign of progress that these efforts are known and are not subject to attack by the other party as being presumptuous or arrogant or measuring the drapes,” said Untermeyer, who appeared with McLarty on a panel discussion of the topic Thursday at the Brookings Institution, a centrist research group in Washington.
Untermeyer said that when he was in charge of filling the ranks during the 1988 campaign, the process was closely guarded.
“It was secret just so it wouldn’t become the subject of political ballyhoo and frankly so it wouldn’t draw attention to my efforts,” he said.
Upon being elected in November 2008, Obama formally named his transition team. But he and his advisers had announced months earlier, in May, an informal board that began vetting potential political appointees.
Untermeyer said the Romney campaign should immediately start giving potential picks “two horrendous forms” - the federal SF86 form, which screens candidates for national security purposes, and the SF278 financial disclosure form.
The financial form requires potential appointees to disclose income, assets, property, and liabilities for themselves, their spouses and dependent children during the preceding calendar year. Filers are required to disclose any gifts worth more than $250 and list their financial liabilities and creditors.
The 21-page national security questionnaire is much more involved.
The disclosure asks applicants for the addresses for their past three residences, and for names of people who knew them at each address. It asks for school and employment information, including whether the applicant has ever been fired from or quit a job, or been reprimanded, suspended or disciplined.
Names and Social Security numbers for spouses, former spouses and cohabitants “with whom you share bonds of affection, obligation or other commitment,” are all requested, as is information on whether the applicant has used cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana or heroin.
If Romney gets elected and waits until after the election to start this process, he will have a scant 11 weeks until the Jan. 20 inauguration to vet his choices. Finding the time to collect completed forms and vet them after the election will be made more difficult by the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday breaks.
The bill sent to Obama’s desk would require a federal working group to come up with a plan to create an electronic filing system for federal appointees, aimed at reducing paperwork and shortening the filing process.
When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, his administration required 850 Senate confirmations. Under George W. Bush, the number grew to 1,143, and climbed to 1,215 under Obama. During Obama’s first 18 months in office, only 25 percent of his “major” picks had gone through the confirmation process, according to Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, who pushed for the bill.
Lieberman did not characterize what he meant by “major,” but McLarty said the term generally refers to about 400 of the top appointed officials.
But government growth and congressional sluggishness are not the only reasons for delays in installing presidential picks, according to Brookings fellows E.J. Dionne and William Galston, who wrote on the subject in 2010.
“Presidents have become complicit in the problem,” they wrote. “They have deployed their own vetting processes in ways that greatly delay their own appointments out of an at times crippling anxiety of an admittedly difficult political and media environment in which every nominee’s smallest flaw might be magnified into a major - or at least, much televised and blogged about - scandal.” P.J. Crowley, a professor at George Washington University who served as assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S.Department of State, said that early in Obama’s administration, the president seemed to hesitate after Tom Daschle, his initial pick to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, withdrew from consideration. When it was discovered that Daschle had past tax debts, “the process slowed down a lot” after that, Crowley said.
He said he could see why Romney has started the vetting process long before the election.
“People get superstitious about it but this is precisely what administrations have to do to hit the ground running,” he said. “The president or Cabinet secretary is dealing with the real world on day one” of an administration.
The Arkansas congressional delegation split along party lines on the legislation, which passed in the Senate in June of 2011 on a 79-20 vote and in the House on Tuesday in a 261-116 vote.
Sen. Mark Pryor and Rep. Mike Ross, both Democrats, voted for it, and the other delegation members, all Republicans, voted against it.
Sen. John Boozman sees problems in the current system, his spokesman Patrick Creamer said, but did not want to give up the Senate’s power to oversee the process.
“The current process is time-consuming and flawed, but removing the Senate’s constitutional duty and transferring that power to the president for several hundred offices that currently require Senate consent is not the way to correct it,” Creamer said.
Rep. Tim Griffin said the “logjam” in confirmations should be unstuck by “curbing the ever-expanding number of agency and board positions. This bill would simply cede to the president Congress’ constitutionally prescribed duty.”
McLarty said he wanted the legislation to go further and require that nominations receive a vote within 90 days. But he didn’t think such a change was in the works.
“It’s unlikely the Senate will give up that prerogative,” McLarty said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/06/2012