Reducing the Adversarial Burden on Presidential Appointees: Feasible Strategies for Fixing the Presidential Appointments Process

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Sullivan, Terry
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-3352
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6210.2009.02070.x
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 1124-1135
• 关键词: Recommendations; TRANSITION

摘要

Can the current presidential appointments process be improved? This essay highlights three kinds of problems: inexperienced appointees, a lengthening process, and tedious and adversarial inquiry. While the essay side-steps trying to affect the prerogatives of institutions involved in the tussle over appointments, it concentrates on improving the support of presidential personnel operations and the process of inquiry that nominees face, and it identifies patterns of repetitiveness among the roughly 2,800 details that a nominee must provide in responding to some 295 individual questions in nine categories. The most adversarial and tedious categories of inquiry include identifying personal background, reporting on criminal entanglements, and assaying potential conflicts of interest. Five strategies are identified for better matching the needed experience in the White House to the demands of presidential personnel. These changes would indirectly shorten the nomination and confirmation process, and the author makes three important recommendations for structuring inquiry that could reduce the adversarial burden on nominees by nearly a third.