Page 15 - FCW, March/April 2018
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                                Commentary|BY ALAN P. BALUTIS isaseniordirectorand distinguished fellow in Cisco Systems’ U.S. Public Sector.
A hollow administration?
Hundreds of top agency positions remain un lled in the Trump administration, but maybe some should stay that way
  ALAN P. BALUTIS
 After more than a year in of ce, the Trump administration is maintaining a very slow pace for  lling top government jobs. The appointments tracker run by the Partnership for Public Service and the Washington Post shows that President Donald Trump is “months behind his predecessors in staf ng up political leadership.”
Only 267 of 636 key Senate- approved positions had been  lled as of mid-February — far fewer than the previous four presidents at this point in their presidencies.
The State Department has the most openings — 65 positions.
Might this re ect the alleged tension between the White House and the secretary of State? Or policy and personnel tensions over who should  ll key jobs? It’s a startling number of vacancies, and it would be good to understand the cause.
These departments face a better staf ng picture: Justice (17 positions), Treasury (16), Energy (11) and Transportation (10). All other departments and agencies have vacancies in the single digits.
A good bit of attention has focused, as it should, on the
open positions at the top of key agencies. Speci cally, there are no permanent directors of the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; no undersecretary for health or bene ts at the Department of Veterans Affairs; no director for the Of ce of Science and Technology Policy at the White House; and
no commissioner for the Social Security Administration.
Equal weight should be given to the openings in the administration’s top management ranks, including chief  nancial of cers, CIOs, chief operating of cers, inspectors general and administrator of the Of ce of Federal Procurement Policy. I have counted at least 17 positions that would fall into that
We need to get more information to determine whether the government is suffering because of the number of unfilled roles.
category, and a good number of them have a direct impact on the federal IT community.
There is, however, another side
to the appointments/con rmation coin. I counted at least 60 openings on various boards, commissions, foundations, endowments, administrations and authorities. One would think I’d heard of everything after a 30-year career in government, but the roles and responsibilities of the International Joint Commission or the Northern Border Regional Commission stumped me.
And should such positions be
presidential appointments requiring Senate con rmation?
A similar issue of concern: Of
the 65 State Department vacancies, 31 are ambassador positions and
11 are representatives to various international bodies, such as the United Nations and the European Union. Clearly, some are important and should be  lled soon (e.g., the ambassadors for Egypt and South Korea). For others, the bigger deadline pressure might be that nominees risk being stuck here for the remainder of the winter season and miss out on the warmer weather in Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago. As for Mongolia, I don’t know much about the best time of year to be there.
My point is not to demean or diminish any of the openings or vacancies. Instead, my argument
is that we need to get more information to determine whether the government is suffering in any way because of the number of roles that have yet to be  lled.
Finally, I encourage readers to take a look and suggest two or
three positions that might better
be dropped from the list of those that require Senate con rmation. I nominate the following: assistant secretary for economic development at the Commerce Department, director of the Of ce of Economic Impact and Diversity at the Energy Department and special counsel
for immigration-related unfair employment practices at the Justice Department. n
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