Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T01:49:30.279Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Appointee vacancies in US executive branch agencies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

William G. Resh*
Affiliation:
Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Gary E. Hollibaugh Jr.
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Patrick S. Roberts
Affiliation:
School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA, USA
Matthew M. Dull
Affiliation:
School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

We analyse United States presidential appointee positions subject to Senate confirmation without a confirmed appointee in office. These “vacant” positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel dataset, we analyse appointee vacancies across executive branch departments and single-headed agencies from 1989 to 2013. We develop a theoretical model that uncovers the dynamics of vacancy onset and length. We then specify an empirical model and report results highlighting both position and principal–agent relations as critical to the politics of appointee vacancies. Conditional on high status positions reducing the frequency and duration of vacancies, we find important principal–agent considerations from a separation of powers perspective. Appointee positions in agencies ideologically divergent from the relevant Senate committee chair are vacant for less time than in ideologically proximal agencies. Importantly, this relationship strengthens as agency ideology diverges away from the chair and towards the chair’s party extreme.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aberbach, JD and Rockman, BA (2000) In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Adler, ES and Lapinski, JS (1997) Demand-Side Theory and Congressional Committee Composition: A Constituency Characteristics Approach. American Journal of Political Science, 41(3): 895918.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asmussen, N (2011) Female and Minority Judicial Nominees: President’s Delight and Senators’ Dismay? Legislative Studies Quarterly, 36(4): 591619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, LC (2002) Senatorial Discourtesy: The Senate’s Use of Delay to Shape the Federal Judiciary. Political Research Quarterly, 55(3): 589608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertelli, AM and Feldmann, SE (2007) Strategic Appointments. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 17(1): 1938.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertelli, AM and Grose, CR (2011) The Lengthened Shadow of Another Institution? Ideal Point Estimates for the Executive Branch and Congress. American Journal of Political Science, 55(4): 767781.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertelli, AM and Lynn, LE Jr. (2006) Madison’s Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Binder, SA and Maltzman, F (2002) Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998. American Journal of Political Science, 46(1): 190199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, JR, Richard, F and Krutz, GS (2009) Malign Neglect: Evidence That Delay Has Become the Primary Method of Defeating Presidential Appointments. Congress & the Presidency, 36(3): 226243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonica, A, Chen, J and Johnson, T (2015) Senate Gate-Keeping, Presidential Staffing of ‘Inferior Offices,’ and the Ideological Composition of Appointments to the Public Bureaucracy. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 10(1): 540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, J and Johnson, T (2015) Federal employee unionization and presidential control of the bureaucracy: Estimating and explaining ideological change in executive agencies. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 27(1): 151174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiou, F-Y and Rothenberg, LS (2014) Executive Appointments: Duration, Ideology, and Hierarchy. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 26(3): 496517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dull, M and Roberts, PS (2009) Continuity, Competence, and the Succession of Senate-Confirmed Agency Appointees, 1989-2009. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 39(3): 432453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dull, M, Roberts, PS, Keeney, MS and Choi, SO (2012) Appointee Confirmation and Tenure: The Succession of U.S. Federal Agency Appointees, 1989-2009. Public Administration Review, 72(6): 902913.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, D (1997) An Informational Rationale for Committee Gatekeeping Power. Public Choice, 91(1): 271299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilligan, TW and Krehbiel, K (1990) Organization of Informative Committees by a Rational Legislature. American Journal of Political Science, 34(2): 531564 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haglund, ET and Lewis, DE (2013) Politicization and Compliance with the Law: The Case of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998. Presentation at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April.Google Scholar
Hollibaugh, GE Jr. (2015) Vacancies, Vetting, and Votes: A Unified Dynamic Model of the Appointments Process. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 27(2): 206236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollibaugh, GE Jr. and Rothenberg, LS (2017) The When and Why of Nominations: Determinants of Presidential Appointments. American Politics Research, 45(2): 280303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollibaugh, GE Jr. and Rothenberg, LS (2018) The Who, When, and Where of Executive Nominations: Integrating Agency Independence and Appointee Ideology. American Journal of Political Science, 62(2): 296311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, G (1990) Sub-governments, policy communities and networks: refilling the old bottles? Journal of theoretical politics, 2(3): 319338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinane, CM (2019) Control without Confirmation: The Politics of Vacancies in Presidential Appointments. Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Krause, GA and O’Connell, AJ (2016) Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S Federal Bureaucracy: Logic and Evidence from Agency Leadership Appointments. American Journal of Political Science, 60(4): 914931.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krehbiel, K (1991) Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krehbiel, K (1998) Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krutz, GS, Richard, F and Bond, JR (1998) From Abe Fortas to Zöe Baird: Why Some Presidential Nominations Fail in the Senate. American Political Science Review, 92(4): 871881.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, DE (2008) The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, JA and McGrath, RJ (2016) Retrospective Congressional Oversight and the Dynamics of Legislative Influence over the Bureaucracy. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 41(4): 899934.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mashaw, JL (1997) Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
McCarty, N and Razaghian, R (1999) Advice and Consent: Senate Responses to Executive Branch Nominations 1885-1996. American Journal of Political Science, 43(4): 11221143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGarity, TO (1991) The Internal Structure of EPA Rulemaking. Law & Contemporary Problems, 54(4): 57111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelson, NA (2011) Rulemaking, Democracy, and Torrents of E-Mail. George Washington Law Review, 79(5): 13431380.Google Scholar
Moe, TM (1993) Presidents, Institutions, and Theory. In Edwards, G. C., Kessel, J.H. and Rockman, B.A. (eds.), Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 337385.Google Scholar
Moraski, BJ and Shipan, CR (1999) The Politics of Supreme Court Nominations: A Theory of Institutional Constraints and Choices. American Journal of Political Science, 43(4): 10691095.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nathan, RP (1983) The Administrative Presidency. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Nixon, DC (2001) Appointment Delay for Vacancies on the Federal Communications Commission. Public Administration Review, 61(4): 483492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connell, AJ (2009) Vacant Offices: Delays in Staffing Top Agency Positions. Southern California Law Review, 82: 9131000.Google Scholar
O’Connell, AJ (2020) Actings. Columbia Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3535182.Google Scholar
Ostrander, I (2016) The Logic of Collective Inaction: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations. American Journal of Political Science, 60(4): 10631076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, MA (1993) Political Influence in the 1990s: From Iron Triangles to Policy Networks. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 18(2): 395438.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Resh, WG (2014) Appointee–Careerist Relations in the Presidential Transition of 2008-2009. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 44(4): 697723.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Resh, WG (2015) Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, MD, Clinton, JD and Lewis, DE (2018). Elite perceptions of agency ideology and workforce skill. The Journal of Politics, 80 (1), 303308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romer, T and Rosenthal, H (1978) Political Resource Allocation, Controlled Agendas, and the Status Quo. Public Choice, 33(1): 2743.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, R (2005) Giving Direction to Government in Comparative Perspective. In Aberbach, J. D. and Peterson, J. D. (eds.), The Executive Branch. New York: Oxford University Press, 7299.Google Scholar
Rossiter, C (1961) The Federalist Papers. New York: Mentor.Google Scholar
Selin, JL (2015) What Makes an Agency Independent? American Journal of Political Science, 59(4): 971987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, M and Spaniel, W (2017) How Uncertainty about Judicial Nominees Can Distort the Confirmation Process. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 29(1): 2247. https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629815603830.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shipan, CR and Shannon, ML (2003) Delaying Justice(s): A Duration Analysis of Supreme Court Confirmations. American Journal of Political Science, 47(4): 654668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, JM Jr. (1992) Committee Power, Structure-Induced Equilibria, and Roll Call Votes. American Journal of Political Science, 36(1): 130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprague, M (2008) The Effects of Measurement and Methods Decisions on Committee Preference Outlier Results. Political Research Quarterly, 61(2): 309318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stayn, JL (2001) Vacant Reform: Why the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 Is Unconstitutional. Duke Law Journal, 50(5): 15111539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephenson, MC (2013) Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote? Yale Law Journal, 122(4): 940979.Google Scholar
Union of Concerned Scientists (2020) Presidential Recommendations for 2020: A Blueprint for Defending Science and Protecting the Public. Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (Carter, Jacob, Taryn MacKinney, Genna Reed, and Gretchen Goldman). URL: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/presidential-recommendations-for-2020_0.pdf.Google Scholar
United States General Accounting Office (2001) Presidential Appointments: Agencies’ Compliance with Provisions of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998.Google Scholar
Untermeyer, C (2000) Interview by James Sterling Young, Sidney Milkis, and George C. Edwards III, George H. W. Bush Oral History Project, College Station, TX, July 27-28.Google Scholar
Weingast, BR and Marshall, WJ (1988) The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets. Journal of Political Economy, 96(1): 132163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Resh et al. Dataset

Link
Supplementary material: File

Resh et al. supplementary material

Resh et al. supplementary material 1

Download Resh et al. supplementary material(File)
File 1 MB
Supplementary material: File

Resh et al. supplementary material

Resh et al. supplementary material 2

Download Resh et al. supplementary material(File)
File 131.3 KB