What Presidents Never Find Out

What if Jack Welch had begun his job as CEO at GE without the power to fire any employee at all? What if he had no idea—and no real way of finding out—what all the divisions of GE actually did? Would he be deemed a business Guru today? Would he have a column in Business Week?
That’s exactly the situation Barack Obama will walk into next January. It’s the situation Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Ike, Truman, FDR all walked into. A little known secret is that the president has no real control over the civilian side of government.
The one branch he does not run is the executive branch. A president can threaten, cajole and sometimes influence individual congressmen. He can appoint Supreme Court justices that agree with his policies. He can wage war. But he has had no effective way of influencing the executive wing—or even figuring out what it’s up to—since the Hatch Act was passed in 1939.
That’s the law that protects civil servants from politics. In other words, no Democratic president can make a civil servant follow his policies or program any more than George Bush could have made them follow his directives. They are insulated. They cannot be fired.
This gives them enormous power. When I worked in the bowels of the bureaucracy the saying was, “Presidents come and go, we stay.” Presidents—and cabinet officers—are never allowed to realize their impotence. Senior bureaucrats can be slavish in their expressions of deference and obedience.
The president hears them, becomes used to their obsequiousness, possibly even believes them and then goes back to his Oval Office. They go back to their offices and do exactly what they have planned all along to do, whichever president is in power.
I recall having a fairly high ranking bureaucrat open a drawer and show me plans for an expensive new project his program was planning to build. He freely admitted Congress had no idea, nor did the secretary of the department. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said—and put it back in its file.
This came as no shock to me. I was second in command of a small program that had no legal budget whatsoever. We had powerful backers. They bludgeoned and dragooned funds (that had been appropriated for something else) out of various bureaus and divisions until we had enough to fly around the country and run our program.
Go through the 1965-67 federal budget and you will find no trace of my program. We had no authorization whatsoever. Believe me, we were not alone. Had an auditor made any sort of fuss, the worst that would have happened to us is reassignment. The Hatch Act protected us.
I don’t think Clinton or Bush were aware of this reality—or that they are to this day. I am sure president-elect Obama hasn’t a clue. The civilian bureaucracy is huge; it is located in every city in the nation. It is essentially faceless.
(I do not in the least mean to put down the millions of civil servants who work long hours to protect our health, our safety and watch over the products we use. They keep our job sites safe, they fund vital medical research, they send me my social security cheque on precisely the same day of every month. They land our planes safely and they battle terrorists and crime. All I am saying, is that the president has very little to say about what they do. He doesn’t even fully realize the fact that he doesn’t. Bureaucrats are also very good at insulating presidents and cabinet officers.)
President-elect Obama has been a senator. I’ll bet he has never roamed the halls of an executive department asking what they do. Bush and Clinton have been governors. None of them ever had the eye view of the executive department I had—because I worked there. I was one of them.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last forty years figuring out what a president could do to get some handle on the departments he is constitutionally required to run. I’ll share some of my thoughts—for what they may be worth—over the next day or two.
It may sound arrogant to suggest I know something our government that presidents don’t. But I do.