Transcript
MICHAEL ARMACOST: I'm Mike Armacost. It's my distinct pleasure to welcome you this morning to this briefing by the Presidential Appointee Initiative.
This is a project that has been going on for many months. I see many familiar faces, so you are knowledgeable about the project. It was born out of the conviction that this process of selecting people for some of the most important executive branch jobs has become far too costly and time-consuming, inefficient, and most particularly, pretty grueling for many individuals and thereby serves potentially to discourage our most talented citizens from thinking about — contemplating — and accepting these very important duties.
As I say, this is a project that was designed to deal with the executive branch process of selecting and confirming senior appointees. And our objective has been to help the next batch of these appointees through a pretty harrowing process, and to offer recommendations for simplifying and improving it.
We saw just yesterday the process has claimed yet another victim. And whether you feel that this is another case of the politics of personal destruction or a case of an appointee not having provided adequate and timely warning of a potential difficulty is not the subject for debate here. It simply reminds us that this is a process that's deeply embedded in the contemporary political mores of Washington and therefore, to fix it, will require cooperative work across the aisle on the Hill and between parties, between the branches.
It was for that reason that we commenced our work many months ago by creating an advisory committee chaired by two very distinguished Americans: Frank Raines, a Democrat, chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae, former OMB director; and Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Republican who served with distinction for many years as a senator from Kansas in the Senate. And we looked to them to help us figure out ways of fixing the process that can elicit the cooperation from people in both parties on the Hill and throughout the country.
It's our standard operating procedure, moreover, at Brookings to believe that good policy recommendations must be grounded in thoughtful research. And it's for that reason that we're gathered today to brief the results of survey work that we've undertaken with Princeton Survey Research Associates.
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But before doing that, I would like to say how grateful we are to The Pew Charitable Trusts for the financial support and intellectual help that we received on this project. Dr. Rimel's been a collaborator from the very outset. Indeed, in a way, this project was hatched at The Pew Charitable Trusts, where Paul previously worked as a program officer. And this has been a very fruitful collaboration, for which we're grateful.
Let me therefore invite Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts to say a word before our briefing commences.
REBECCA RIMEL: Michael, thank you for those kind remarks, but it's really you that we should thank. Three times your country called you to serve, and three times you answered that call. And for that, I think everyone in this room is grateful.
There are many words that can be used to describe public service — arduous, exhausting, time-consuming on the one hand, and perhaps on the other hand, professionally rewarding, intellectually exciting, and personally very gratifying. Citizens understand these demands, yet we need them more than ever to heed the call to public service. The problems that we're dealing with on our home front are ever more complex. Our international situation is more compelling and complicated. Indeed, we're in an era where it seems that partisanship always trumps partnership. And in fact, cynicism is often looked at as the word that describes our public life instead of civic spirit.
And indeed, certainly everyone that lives in this town, and everyone in this country, knows that we've come through one of the most demanding and complicated, and some say contentious, elections in our history. So we're going to be looking for leaders who can be bold and thoughtful and can emphasize the ties that bind us rather than the divisions that divide us.
Since the very early days of the Republic, our founding fathers understood that key appointments and leadership were absolutely critical to their success and the success of the country. They knew they needed talented, principled citizen-patriots, as they called them. Jefferson said, "There is nothing I am so anxious about as good nominations. No duty is more difficult to fulfill."
In fact, I think some of us ask ourselves, if the founding fathers were here today under these circumstances, would they serve? But some of the satisfactions are very much the same. I had a recent opportunity to talk with Madeleine Albright and also with John Whitehead, and both of them said the same thing: the most gratifying part of their career had been the chance to serve their country.
There's bipartisan agreement on the fact that public services is indeed important and we need our most talented individuals willing to serve. And there is agreement as well that civic service brings satisfaction. But if we want our most gifted citizens, our best and brightest if you will, to serve, we must make the appointment process — yes, diligent and deliberative, but we also must make it inviting and invigorating. I think some would argue that it resembles much more a hazing process now or setting ever-higher hurdles over which we ask our recruits to jump. And yes, we are recruiting people. Let's remember that.
Well, you know, they've given up hazing on most college campuses around the country, and so maybe we ought to ban it as part of the appointment process as well.
The Pew Charitable Trusts and its founders were deeply committed to what makes America great. And they believed that engaging and informing citizens in the public policy process was going to keep the country strong. And that's exactly the work we're about at The Pew Trusts and why we're so pleased to partner on this initiative.
This room is filled with people who answered the call to public service and we're indeed grateful. You have a commitment to civic service and to the public stewardship. We are hopeful that, with the hard work that's been done on this project, that more people will be willing to follow in your footsteps. I offer my deep appreciation to the co-chairs and to the co -authors. A lot of hard work has gone into this and the lending of their time and talents will benefit us all.
And so it with great appreciation that I turn to my colleague, Paul Light, somebody who has been deeply committed personally to public service through his research, through his own professional career, and through his advocacy. Paul.
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PAUL LIGHT: The basic question of our event today is what if you held an administration and nobody wanted to come? What are the attitudes of the kinds of people who we want to serve, America's civic and corporate leaders? And we have done a survey of 580 of America's most talented citizens to ask them what they think about the process, would they serve, what do they see as the costs and benefits of service, would they take the call if the president asked them, and would they say yes? And the answers here are mixed. There's good news and bad news in this survey.
Before we get started, two quick points about Linda Chavez that I want to make. It's going to come up in the conversation today, and I'll make two quick points.
Number one, she really should have read "The Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees.
[Laughter.]
This is a wonderful book that is a true collaboration between the Council for Excellence in Government and the Presidential Appointee Initiative. It was published by the Presidential Appointee Initiative. It is free. There's no copyright on it. It can be downloaded at our web site: http://www.appointee.brookings.org.
And it's very clear in this Survivor's Guide that one of the most important things a nominee can do is reveal everything. It's kind of the golden rule of the modern appointments process: reveal unto others before others reveal unto the media. I don't believe that her withdrawal yesterday is likely to reduce the willingness to serve among potential nominees, and we can have a little bit of a conversation today about that. But that's, in part, because the willingness to serve, in this survey, is rooted in a belief in the honor of service. The readiness to serve is conditioned, I think, on the notion that people can make a difference through their work at all levels of government and, in specific, in the presidential appointments — through presidential appointments.
I would also say, unfortunately, that the attitudes towards the current process among potential nominees are already so troubled that it's not clear to me that a single instance of withdrawal yesterday will make much of an impact on these attitudes, and Ginni and I will certainly talk about that.
This event is built around what we believe to be a unique survey of America's best and brightest, the kind of people we hope will serve. There were 580 respondents in this survey — 100 executives from the Fortune 500, 100 presidents of America's top 300 colleges and universities, 85 executive directors from America's largest 300 non-profits, 95 think tank scholars, 100 registered lobbyists at the nation's largest lobbying firms, and 100 state and local government officials.
They were interviewed last summer and fall by Princeton Survey Research Associates, which is our survey partner in all of this, a wonderful firm. The survey was directed and led by Mary McIntosh, who's here with us today and also ably assisted on our team by Judith Labiner, who is the deputy director of the Center for Public Service.
Before we go into the event, I want to thank the staff at the Presidential Appointee Initiative who have worked on this — Sandy Stencel, our executive director; Carole Plowfield, our associate director; Erin Murphy, Suzanne Morse, Michael Hafken. The survey will be available immediately on our web site, downloadable. And that's thanks to Gary Harding, who is at Brookings as our web liaison.
The event will occur in two parts — first, a presentation by Ginni and myself about the survey and then discussion of the implications of the survey, what it means, by our co-chairs, Frank Raines and Nancy Kassebaum Baker.
So without ado, Ginni, will you talk about the first piece of the survey?
VIRGINIA THOMAS: Thank you very much, Paul. It is a pleasure to work with Paul Light and Brookings on this. This was a worthy cause and one that's near and dear to my heart. Some of you may or may not know that my husband is Clarence Thomas, and so we have a little bit of familiarity with the rough-and-tumble of this town and things that happen in a confirmation process.
But it was a pleasure to do this, and my job is to focus on a couple of parts of the survey research that was done under Heritage and Brookings name as we went out to the best and brightest in the country.
And first of all, on the history and what people knew about public service, we did find three things I wanted to bring to your attention. First, there's quite a bias that favors people in the Washington, D.C. area. Over a third of those surveyed tended to be in government previously and half of them were in non-Senate confirmed positions. And half of them lived in the D.C. area. And so those who are close to Washington know how contacts — know about the forms, know about the process, and they tend to keep coming back to service, which may or may not be consistent with what the founding fathers intended originally.
Secondly, for those that don't have the proximity to the D.C. area, we found that the media becomes a very important lens on the process to those who are seeking to serve their country in this way. We found that 60 percent of the corporate CEOs thought that the media had a great deal or a significant amount of influence on what they thought about the appointment process, and even a higher percentage of lawyers and lobbyists and think tankers in Washington thought the media played a tremendous role in deciding what the appointment was going to be like.
And thirdly — I think this is an important point — almost one in every two people pulled back from the process once they got a little taste of it. Whether they pulled back or whether they dropped out, one out of every two people pulled away from the process. And that's a troubling statistic that I hope we all think about, and that's why Paul and Rebecca and a number of people have us studying this process and have us hoping to solve some of the problems that keep people from turning away from it.
Some of it — you'll see in the report — was because of bad timing. Some of it was because of financial or family problems. Some of it was because of the concern over the process that we saw witnessed in the papers today, some things like that. And some of it was they just weren't fit for the particular job that came their way. When you look at the readiness to serve question, it is encouraging and inspiring. I think it's part of the good news Paul was mentioning that's in this survey. A great number of people are ready to serve for all the right reasons.
We measured readiness to serve by asking people their first impressions of serving in the federal government for a president. And 84 percent had a very or somewhat favorable impression of serving their country in this way. Younger people in particular had a more enthusiastic response, as did people who had a very positive reaction about what government can do in this country.
Their initial impression is positive, but then it comes down to this process of weighing the cost and the benefits of serving in one of these posts. And really, when it comes down to a lot of people think right away when they're moving between jobs,