8. Fire all White House holdovers -- and do it fast.
The Bush administration's experience was decidedly mixed when it came to holdovers. Rand Beers was a career civil servant who was held over from President Bill Clinton's years as an assistant secretary of state and then brought over to the White House as an NSC senior director in 2002. In 2003, he resigned and immediately joined the Kerry campaign as the candidate's national security advisor. Richard Clarke was held over from the Clinton team as the top NSC counterterrorism official, but after resigning in 2003, he repeatedly attacked the president and other former colleagues. On the other hand, many of Condi Rice's top staffers at the NSC were career people who served with such loyalty and distinction that she took them with her to the State Department.
Those exceptions aside, the NSC staff does change, and it should -- what is the point of elections if the same people hold the same important jobs? White House staff must be responsive to the new president they serve, not some platonic ideal of the presidency. Career people won't be likely to share all the president's views, and if they have not gotten their new jobs from him, they will also be unlikely to feel a deep sense of loyalty to him.
These people need to go, and fast. This isn't only a partisan issue: When George H.W. Bush replaced Reagan, there was nearly as broad a changing of the guard as there would have been had Michael Dukakis won -- and rightly so. Putting aside serious issues like fatigue and burnout, the new president wanted people who understood and were loyal to him, not to his predecessor.
When putting his team in place, the president should aim to do it in one fell swoop, at the beginning of his term, rather than let holdovers linger. Once again, Machiavelli understood why this is so. "[I]n seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily," he wrote. "[T]hus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits."
Former diplomat Richard Haass takes a more nuanced view, arguing that keeping some holdovers around can augment a new administration's institutional memory. My experience, however, suggests that very few if any people should be kept. The decisions of any one staffer will rebound around the bureaucracy and the international arena; thus a president must pick his team with the utmost care. "You make only one decision -- whether to hire or keep an individual," Haass explained in The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur. "[O]nce on board, that person will make thousands of decisions that will affect your reputation, impact, and effectiveness."
Think of it this way: When staff members are holdovers, the new president did not even choose them at all. What kind of impression will that make on the rest of the bureaucracy? And how can such holdovers really understand the thoughts, goals, and desires of the new president as well as they understood those of the previous incumbent, who did them the honor of selecting them for higher office? Continuity and experience are important, but the career services at the cabinet agencies, not the White House team, can supply them.
SUBJECTS:
