The most interesting aspect of Ronald Reagan’s appointments to the Cabinet and to the top 300 federal positions is not whom he appointed, but how he appointed them. He has followed a process quite different from that of all preceding Presidents.
During the campaign, his chief aide Edwin Meese III told those who probed about the Reagan policy on future federal appointments, “Ronald Reagan will not take the people who worked on his campaign into office with him. That was his record in California, and that will be the pattern if he is elected President.” It is a safe bet that not many people believed that prediction because it is so contrary to all political expectations.
It is now clear what Meese meant by that declaration. It meant that he and about four others of the Reagan inner circle would go into high office, but that all others responsible for Reagan’s nomination and election would be excluded from the appointment process. Within two weeks after the November election, the question most frequently asked around the transition office was, “Why are the authentic Reagan supporters being blacklisted from all personnel operations?”
Those acting on behalf of Ronald Reagan were following a fundamental tactic of political-machine-building. Don’t let anyone advance whom Reagan owes; only let those advance who owe their job to Reagan. Put more bluntly, this means that no one may be appointed who has a constituency of his own; all appointees must be politically, financially, and psychologically dependent on the Reagan Administration itself.
The code word for this maneuver is to proclaim that every appointee must be a “team player.” That’s just deceptive jargon. As it is used here, the “team player” concept is fundamentally opposed to the coalition concept under which people of different motivations and associations are welcomed to work for a specific goal (such as the election of Ronald Reagan as President, or a change in government policies from liberal to conservative).
Of course, it would be impolitic to explain candidly that political-machine-building has been assigned a higher priority than gratitude to the coalitions which nominated and elected Ronald Reagan, so a rationale was developed to justify the process. A prestigious professional “head-hunter” named Pendleton James was hired and given the assignment to staff the upper echelons of the new Administration. James has made a career of the specialty of locating and hiring executives for important positions in business and industry, where “head-hunting” is a proven technique and a recognized skill.
Those who are engaged in this process sincerely believe that they are applying proven criteria to the new government and that they are ushering in a new era of conservative business management to replace party and patronage politics. It all sounds so businesslike.
The first defect in this approach is that the government is not a business and anyone who thinks it can be run like a business is doomed to frustration and defeat. Government deals with people not products, policy not profits. It lacks the controls of the marketplace to keep it from foolishness.
Most successful businessmen and professional men who have been lured into government service have not adapted well to the Washington environment. The business executives do not know how to deal with a staff of bureaucrats who cannot be fired. Businessmen are often impatient in dealing with the press, and they do not cope well with the lack of privacy and goldfish-bowl life that government service requires. Many professional men are not well equipped to deal with 20 problems at the same time, as an executive must.
But even if all the Reagan Administration appointees were the country’s greatest business executives, that would not do the job. The American people on November 4 did not vote to have businessmen run the government, or simply to have our existing government run more efficiently.
The voters asked for a change in the ideology of government, and that cannot be brought about when the selection process excludes all those to whom Reagan owes his election and then searches for government officials only among an elite group of successful businessmen, plus a little tokenism to placate certain minorities.
A change in the ideology of government can come about only if the primary criteria for appointments are authentic support of Ronald Reagan’s nomination and election, and support of the Platform on which he ran.
