04 December 2008
Personnel Is Policy
An Interview With Stuart Holliday
When a new president heads to Washington, he has campaign promises to fulfill and an agenda to begin. But first, he needs to hire a cadre of people who will help him undertake that work as part of his administration. A new president has discretion to fill some 8,000 to 10,000 positions out of an entire federal government workforce of almost three million people, including both civilian and military workers. So the newly elected leader must choose carefully those people who will help him fulfill his vision.
Stuart Holliday served as a special assistant to President George W. Bush as a member of the transition team and associate director of presidential personnel at the White House from 2000-2001. He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs from 2003-2005. Today he is president of Meridian International Center, a Washington-based public diplomacy organization. He talked with eJournal USA associate editor Charlene Porter about the personnel selection process.
Question: A newly elected president has to get a new government up and running in a short time and needs to hire thousands of people. It’s a big job that needs to be done very quickly. What were some of the first priorities when you stepped into this process?
Holliday: First of all, there are really two major tasks. One is to put into place the new administration, starting with the cabinet and the senior White House advisers. And the second is to ensure continuity of government, so that you have a smooth transition in the functions of government that have to operate on an ongoing basis. This is a very, important issue, especially in the post 9-11 [September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks] environment.
Q: Personnel are a key element to ensure that continuity is maintained?
Holliday: Exactly. In some positions, you have to ensure that you are ready to go on Day One with a slate of people that you want to call upon for public service. Typically, new presidents have started with the cabinet, usually starting with the secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury as the senior cabinet posts. Then you move on through the transition with the rest of the cabinet.
Then the transition team works closely with the new incoming cabinet secretaries to select qualified people for the Senate-confirmed undersecretary and assistant secretary positions.
Q: This process can take a year or more fully to fill the thousands of jobs involved, but are you also saying that in an uncertain world, there are some chairs a new president doesn’t want to leave empty for a day?
Holliday: That’s correct, particularly in homeland security, defense, the intelligence community, and diplomatic postings. There are many such positions that must be very carefully transitioned.
Q: Another contributor to this publication writes that a new President must be mindful of “three p’s” – personnel, process and policy. How do the personnel selected in the first few harried months of a transition influence what is to come for the next several years?
Holliday: There’s an old adage that “personnel is policy” in the first year of an administration, and I think that is very true. Obviously, the incoming president has campaigned on a set of priorities and issues that he believes in and would like to see implemented. Number one is to understand what is the job to be done, and that drives the kinds of people you are looking for for these positions. The policies have to be implemented and refined along the way. Working with the new cabinet secretaries, a new president will outline an agenda for the first 100 days of office, things that he or she wants to achieve. Usually, a president won’t have the whole team in place or even half the team during that first 100-day period. So a lot of it is working with the Congress and the White House staff to move his agenda forward.
Q: You served in the White House personnel office through 2001. Were most of those 8,000 to 10,000 jobs filled in that time?
Holliday: By the end of the first year, almost all the jobs had been filled, but the September 11 terrorist attacks accelerated confirmations. There had been a very slow process of confirmations throughout the spring and summer of 2001. The process of selections, background investigations, and confirmations is one that can stretch out over several months. But by the end of the first year, all the Senate-confirmed jobs were filled.
Q: That’s around 500 individuals at ranks that require confirmation by the U.S. Senate. So when those higher-level appointees are in place, don’t they have a lot of discretion in filling lower-level positions, such that some of this hiring moves out of the White House?
Holliday: It’s really a team effort, and obviously the people who are going to be on the cabinet secretary’s team must be people that the cabinet secretary wants on the team. But it’s very important that the White House retains a process that allows for the best quality people to be recruited and to serve in the administration overall. It would be a team effort.
Q: To what degree are politics involved in the decisions, satisfying this wing of the party with a certain appointment, for example, or placating a disgruntled faction with another?
Holliday: Going back to the Founding Fathers, there’s always been an issue in the balance between patronage and qualifications. In recent years, it’s become very important that the highest quality people serve in positions of responsibility. There are always going to be recommendations on hiring from constituents, members of Congress and the Senate, governors, and political campaigns. But they all have to be meritorious appointments and should be meritorious appointments at the end of the day. The best way the president can be served is by having qualified people in those jobs.
Q: How do you ascertain that? What kind of questions do you ask?
Holliday: The best advice I ever received was that past performance is the predictor of future performance. In looking for qualified candidates, it’s not just a matter of asking what would they do if they were in a certain circumstance. It becomes what have they done that is similar to what you are trying to achieve in that particular position. So first and foremost, merit is really assessed by what the candidate has done that lines up with what you hope to accomplish with that position.
The vetting process is something a little bit different. Are they people whose views are compatible with the overall agenda of the administration? Are they confirmable? Are they suitable in terms of temperament for the job? Did they have anything in their background that would disqualify them from serving? This is where the line is drawn between the White House personnel office and the White House counsel and the clearance process.
Q: Elaborate on that.
Holliday: There’s a big legal team at the White House that works with the Office of Government Ethics and the cabinet agencies’ legal departments to perform background investigations and prepare candidates for confirmation.
Q: So it becomes a two-step process. The personnel office identifies good candidates, and then passes them on to the legal team for further review?
Holliday: Exactly. Then there are very, very thorough financial divestiture requirements and ethical requirements that make coming into government an expensive proposition for certain folks. It is not a nonintrusive process by any means.
Q: Those candidates who must be confirmed by the Senate undergo a full hearing process with a bank of photographers in front of them, television lights, the whole treatment. How do you prepare somebody for that?
Holliday: The first thing is to make sure they understand the process and what they’ll be going through. Then you prepare them for confirmation hearings and murder boards [mock hearings where candidates are confronted with challenging questions]. Making sure they are on top of their issues is very important. It’s also very important for a candidate not to presume too much about their job prior to confirmation in terms of articulating what they are going to do.
The best thing a candidate can do when put up for Senate confirmation is to listen to the views of the committee that has jurisdiction over that agency. They are going to have a lot to say about the issues the candidate will be dealing with, and you don’t want to start off your tenure with a dispute with your committee of jurisdiction.
Q: Are there any formulas involved in this process? For instance, would a president decide he wants X percentage of his people to have experience on Capitol Hill, another percentage with campaign experience?
Holliday: I think that in most cases, the incoming administration wants to cast a wide net nationally, look for talent wherever it is, and make sure there is a diversity of experience, ethnicity, background, and gender that would be representative of the country. As you get into specific jobs, that becomes more challenging because it’s no longer a general question. It becomes a specific question of finding those individuals. There is general guidance in terms of the kinds of high-quality experience you’re seeking, and then it has to be applied practically in the selection process. That can be a challenge, particularly in certain sectors.
People from Capitol Hill have policy expertise, and they are there in Washington and readily accessible. You can assume that those people are going to be natural candidates, so the challenge is to look beyond Washington. But inevitably people operating within the fabric of the government decision-making process have a head start in certain areas of expertise, especially those that require highly specialized attributes.
Q: Historically, how much does a president’s success through his term rest on how well these decisions are made, the quality of the picks that are made in these very early days?
Holliday: I think it is absolutely crucial. You can look at most of the issues that define a presidency and then walk them back to personnel decisions.
Q: That’s a pretty sweeping statement.
Holliday: Yes. Handling a crisis well or poorly is a process of relying on the leadership of your administration and the persons you have put in these jobs. It may not seem a challenge today, but it could become so later. For example, when you look at the financial crisis [in the United States in late 2008], jobs at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation didn’t seem hugely high profile five or six years ago, but by the final months of 2008, those jobs and the people in them became very, very important.
Q: There is a tendency for some presidents to select people who come from where they come from, particularly those who rise to the presidency from governorships. They’ve worked in state capitals with a set of people, and then bring many of them to Washington. Do they do that because these are absolutely the best candidates or because the new president has a history with them?
Holliday: If they’ve been successful as a governor, they believe that the team that’s been around them has contributed to that success and they feel comfortable with those people around them. Again, what’s important is that somebody who has performed at a certain level may not perform at the same capacity at a different level. There’s not a general rule here. There are people who have been great mayors, fire chiefs, city council members, and county commissioners who have served with great distinction in Washington. There have also been people who have a rude awakening when the pressure of huge budgets, oversight, and the relations with Congress exceeds anything they’ve experienced before.
Q: After a tough election there might be some nasty political grudges. How do the outgoing and incoming administrations have to set those aside and ensure a smooth process?
Holliday: During any transition, there are some critical issues that need to be handed off from one administration to the next. I would say that, regardless of party and partisanship, it’s important that these two teams work together. It’s just as important for an outgoing administration to finish strong and hand off a clear set of current, pending, hot issues to the new team. There’s an obligation, a patriotic obligation, to do so. There’s also an obligation of the new team to avoid the hubris that would make them dismiss what they are hearing from the outgoing administration.
In that sense, I think it’s very important that people work together to ensure a smooth transition, not only on the personnel front, but on the issues that those people are working on.
The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
