Page 35 - FCW, January/February 2021

The book is essentially a snapshot of government positions taken
right before an administration heads out the door,
so it can be difficult
to use it to draw conclusions about how many appointed positions there
were over the
past four years.
ber the Trump administration had to fill in 2016.
Terry Sullivan, executive director of the White House Transition Project, said about 230 of those positions are “stand-up critical” positions that had to be filled in order for the government to function as soon as President Joe Biden took office.
Filling Senate-confirmed positions has become an increasingly lengthy process, and the Trump administration in particu- lar struggled to fill them and keep them filled because of exceptionally high turn- over among senior-level leaders. As of Jan. 7, the Trump administration had people serving in only 539 of 757 key positions that require Senate confirma- tion, according to a tracker run by the Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service.
In a move that could have added a significant number of positions to the Plum Book, the Trump administration issued an executive order last year that sought to shift swaths of civil service positions into the excepted service, thereby removing them from civil ser- vice protections and making it easier to hire and fire people in those positions.
Lewis said Schedule F would have expanded the Plum Book by including a “broader class of positions that could
have some influence on policy or report directly to...policymakers.”
Its creation had sparked concerns about the potential to facilitate the “burrowing in” of political appointees at agencies after the president who appointed them had left office. Sched- ule F is “a political appointment in all respects other than the name,” Stier said. “My hope is that the Biden team gets rid of it as soon as possible.”
In fact, Biden revoked the Trump administration’s order on Jan. 22.
The growing influence of
political appointees
The number of appointments that don’t
require Senate confirmation has been relatively stable over the years, Lewis said. But non-career SES positions and Schedule C appointment numbers have varied. Those high-level adminis- trators play an influential role because they work closely with top appointees and other agency leaders. In 2012, the Obama administration had significantly fewer appointees in SES or Schedule C positions than are listed in the 2020 Plum Book, he added.
“I think that the Trump administra- tion has been pretty aggressive here in the middle using these appointees to try to influence policymaking in
the agencies,” he said, adding that the White House’s political influence over agencies increased during President Donald Trump’s tenure. “That is partly because of the ideological nature of the [appointees] who have been selected but also the [former] president’s willingness to use his flexibility under the Federal Vacancies [Reform] Act to personally select the kinds of people who will fill Senate-confirmed jobs when there’s not a Senate-confirmed appointee in those agencies.”
The Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows other officials to temporarily perform the duties of Senate-confirmed positions, essentially bypassing the need to go through a lengthy and possibly con- tentious Senate approval process.
Since the first Plum Book was released in 1952, the number of politi- cal appointees in the federal govern- ment has risen steadily. Stier said the growing reliance on political appoin- tees can present challenges for presi- dential transitions and governing in general.
“The very process of selection enables a president or his or her senior people to hire folks who are being hired on the basis of their loyalty to an individual rather than their loyalty to the Ameri- can public,” he said. ■
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