Abstract
The transition of federal power from one presidential administration to the next can represent a dramatic change in how goals are set and how programs are implemented across the government. For incoming presidents, transitions represent their first opportunity to transform their policy priorities into practice, and to successfully manage this transformation, they must successfully direct the administrative apparatus. To aid in transition, a variety of scholars and research organizations issue treatises to support effective management of this transition. For example, the Partnership for Public Service (2018) issued a Presidential Transition Guide, which focuses broadly on the management of building a team, managing the appointment process so that all positions are filled, and planning for policy implementation. Similarly, during the most recent transition, the National Academy of Public Administration (2016) issued a report outlining several recommendations for the 2016 presidential transition, with a strong focus on budgetary and performance issues. Finally, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2016) issues a series of “Management Agenda” products outlining important areas of consideration during Congressional and Presidential transitions. These various management guides offer practical insights for establishing priorities, addressing critical issues, and laying the groundwork for successful performance throughout presidential transitions, but, due in part to the non-political nature of these organizations, they refrain from offering strategic advice on guiding the bureaucracy to pursue specific policy preferences.
One of the predominant methods for presidents to control the administrative state is the strategic use of their political appointment powers. Significant scholarship has explored these strategies and the complex relationships between political appointees and careerists. In The Strategic Presidency (1996), Pfiffner reviews both the Reagan and Carter administrations, and finds that both administrations initially adopted a practice of choosing department heads and allowing them to choose lower level appointees, and both reversed course after these layered appointees did not sufficiently support presidential policy preferences. Durant (1992) offers a stronger caution, explaining that unitary theories of top-down presidential control do not sufficiently consider the realities of bureaucratic characteristics, which are defined by service to multiple masters, information asymmetry, and organizational inertia. As such, even appointees who support presidential agendas may be limited in their ability to pursue these goals. This sentiment was later reinforced by Meier and O’Toole (2006), who find that bureaucratic values are likely to hold out against attempts for political control. Pfiffner (1999) suggests that negotiation and compromise may represent a partial solution to the quandary of political control, wherein a “cycle of accommodation” eventually leads to stronger shared goals between appointees and careerists. However, he warns, these shared goals may represent watered down versions of the original presidential priorities. Lewis (2008) offers the strongest warning against strict political control, showing how structural politicization can impact appointees’ ability to successfully build commitment to an administration’s goals. As such, attempts to exert policy influence through political appointments are often associated with reductions in agency performance. This finding is further examined by Fuenzalida and Riccucci (2018), who show that politicization can harm human resource management (HRM) in federal agencies, creating gaps in skills and experience needed to successfully pursue agency goals.
Bill Resh’s 2015 book, Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration builds upon this previous scholarship to demonstrate the importance of the dynamic relationships between political appointees and the careerists in their agencies. Resh shows that political appointees’ ability to build careerist trust is a critical precursor to their ability to identify and leverage the intellectual capital of the agency, in turn creating increased buy-in to political directives and increased effectiveness in achieving the administration’s goals. Throughout the text, Resh challenges the value and effectiveness of presidential strategies rooted in distrust of embedded public servants, and provides compelling evidence that, under President George W. Bush, strategies predicated on building trust and sharing knowledge resulted in greater success for both broad policy goals and narrow presidentially-driven interests. Most importantly, this work shows that strategies for politicization and trust building are not mutually exclusive, and have been leveraged differently across agencies, contingent on the President’s priorities, goals, and expectations for careerists in each agency.
Resh’s research relies on a mixed methods approach that combines insights from a case study of President George W. Bush’s preparations for the 2008 to 2009 presidential transition and a combination of quantitative analyses of survey data from two surveys of the Senior Executive Service (SES). Using these sources, Resh is able to offer an empirical operationalization of the concepts of trust and organizational intellectual capital and link these concepts to agency adoption of political priorities, implementation practices, and outcomes.
The book begins by orienting the reader to the concept of the “administrative presidency,” and highlighting the role of appointee-careerist relationship as a central focus of the text. In the first three chapters, Resh reviews the scholarship on presidential use of the administrative state to support specific policy agendas and the use of political appointees as a central strategy for achieving this goal. In the first chapter, he explores research on presidential appointee strategies, trust, and organizational outcomes. Here, he introduces a central argument of the text: Presidents can adopt contingent management strategies that employ “jigsaw management” intended to separate careerists from policy formulation, or they can “build joists” with careerists to access their institutional and political knowledge. Chapter 2 further elaborates on the concept of trust, showing that the dyadic relationship between appointee and SES and the socially embedded trust across the agency are impacted by these management strategies, and serve as a precursor to successfully marshalling the intellectual capital of the organization. In the third chapter, Resh offers a more detailed examination of trust within the structure of the executive branch, and develops an empirical framework for assessing dyadic, generalized, and stratified trust in organizations. This analysis demonstrates that these types of trust are positively correlated, that each is conditioned on traits embedded within agency characteristics, and that increased trust is associated with increased perceptions of access to an organization’s intellectual capital.
Chapter 4 expands on these definitions of trust to consider a layered, multilevel conception of appointees within an organization and their ability to gain access to an organization’s intellectual capital. This model of organizational trust and intellectual capital suggests that trust between career executives and political appointees can have a trickle-down effect throughout the organization, and serves as an antecedent to effectively leveraging intellectual capital throughout the organization. These findings demonstrate that relationships between appointees and career SESers has implications for the entire organization, and that the dynamics of these relationships are an important determinant for organizational outcomes.
In Chapter 5, Resh examines the preparations for the presidential transition of 2008 to 2009, in which President George W. Bush’s White House explicitly directed appointees to work with career SESers to plan the transition. He reviews career executives’ responses about their relationships with political appointees, as well as their knowledge and participation in transition activities, and shows increased trust was associated with higher awareness and involvement in these activities. This finding reinforces the importance of trust-building in successfully marshalling organizational intellectual capital, but also suggests that presidential directives to work together may not be sufficient to overcome the use of “jigsaw management” techniques.
The concluding chapter of the book highlights the myriad implications of these findings on the effectiveness and limitations of president’s attempts to exert political control over the administrative state in pursuit of their specific policy agendas. In particular, the book highlights the critical importance of building trust between political appointees and career executives in order to both leverage their expertise into the pursuit of policy preference, and to develop trust through the lower levels of the organization. Moreover, in demonstrating that “old habits” of jigsaw management are difficult to reverse, Resh offers a compelling reason for incoming presidents to consider trust building early in their administrations.
Resh’s work makes a fundamental contribution to the study of the administrative presidency by advancing the nuance of our understanding of political control through the presidential appointment power and highlighting the need for further study of the interpersonal aspects of the appointee-careerist relationship. Overall, Rethinking the Administrative Presidency is an outstanding analysis of the relational dynamics between political appointees and career public servants, and provides rich theoretical and empirical insight into the political and managerial value of trust in this relationship. While Resh contrasts his work with previous scholarship largely rooted in the study of the Reagan administration, and provides some initial observations on the incoming Obama administration, he acknowledges that the findings of the book could be strengthened with some additional empirical comparisons of his framework to other transitions, to mid-term appointments, and to late-tenure presidential actions similar to the transition planning studied in this book. I agree, as I could not resist making comparisons to the 2016 to 2017 presidential transition the first time I read the text, noting areas of similarities and differences, and wondering which strategies were currently being pursued. As we approach the 2020 election, rereading the book has led to further reflection. By most reports, the federal bureaucracy has not, over the past 4 years, seen much of the kind of trust building demonstrated in Resh’s book. Many news outlets have reported that this has led to a hollowing out of federal HRM similar to that described by Fuenzalida and Riccucci (2018), and some have even suggested that such a reduction in the capacity of the bureaucracy is part of a longer term strategy to create obstacles to the ability for future administrations to implement their own priorities.
Readers of this text will gain important insights in considering the strengths and limitations of the approaches employed by other presidents, those being employed by the current administration, and considerations for the next transition period. Hopefully, these insights will inspire further study of the link between strategies for presidential control of the administrative state, for building trust and leveraging organizational intellectual capital, and the relative success of efforts to advance specific presidential policy agendas effectively, efficiently, and equitably.
