Guarding the Guardians: Oversight Appointees and the Search for Accountability in U.S. Federal Agencies

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 207-239

  Roberts, Patrick S ^a   Dull, Matthew ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85032069616     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030613000031     Document Type: Article

References (103)

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8. See also James P. Pfiffner, “Political Appointees and Career Executives: The Democracy-Bureaucracy Nexus in the Third Century,” Public Administration Review 47, no. 1 (January–February 1987): 57–65.
9. Kathleen Bawn, “Political Control versus Expertise: Congressional Choices about Administrative Procedures,” American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 62–73
10. Matthew Dull, Patrick S. Roberts, Michael S. Keeney, and Sang Ok Choi. 2012. “Appointee Confirmation and Tenure: The Succession of U.S. Federal Agency Appointees, 1989–2009.” Public Administration Review 72, no. 6 (November/December): 902–13; David E. Lewis, The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton, 2008).
11. Morris P. Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, 1989), 2nd ed. 36.
12. The trend was noted by Charles Clapp in extensive interviews with members of Congress and their staff. See Clapp, The Congressman: His Job as He Sees It (Washington, D.C. 1963).
13. Fiorina, Congress, 17-48.
14. Congress 41.
15. Christopher Hood, Colin Scott, Oliver James, George Jones, and Tony Travers, Regulation Inside Government: Waste Watchers, Quality Police, and Sleaze-Busters (New York, 1999).
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17. Paul C. Light, Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability (Washington, D.C. 1995).
18. Frederick C. Mosher, The GAO: The Quest for Accountability in American Government (Boulder, 1979); Clinton T. Brass, “General Management Laws” Paul Charles Light, The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945–1995 (New Haven, 1997).
19. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping a Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington, D.C. 1990), 98.
20. Mathew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (February 1984): 165-79.
21. Clark Kent Ervin, Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (New York, 2007).
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28. Government Printing Office, “Establishment of an Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,” in Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations and Human Resources of the House Government Operations Committee (Washington, D.C. 1976), 1; Light, Thickening Government, 40.
29. Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration in American Government (Washington, D.C. 1990), 126-27.
30. Light, Thickening Government; Kurt W. Muellenberg and Harvey Volzer, “Inspector General Act of 1978,” Temple Law Quarterly 53 (1980): 1049-66.
31. Jimmy Carter, “National Conference on Fraud, Abuse and Error Remarks at the Conference Sponsored by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,” Washington, D.C. 13 December 1978.
32. Light, Thickening Government, 11–22; Moore and Gates, Inspectors-General, Junkyard Dogs, or Man's Best Friend; Frederick Mosher, “Comment by Frederick C. Mosher,” in Improving the Accountability and Performance of Government, ed. Bruce L. R. Smith and James D. Carroll (Washington, D.C. 1982), 72
33. Francis E. Rourke, “Bureaucratic Autonomy and the Public Interest,” in Making Bureaucracies Work, ed. Carol H. Weiss and Allen H. Barton (Beverley Hills, 1980), 103.
34. Jill E. Kent, “Organization of the Agency Chief Financial Officer,” Government Accountants Journal 40 (1991): 26–33.
35. Hood Scott, James Jones, and Travers, Regulation Inside Government, 44–92.
36. Inspector General Act 1978; one example of the concern with performance is David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (New York, 1993).
37. Light, Thickening of Government, 35.
38. John H. Trattner, The 2000 Prune Book: How to Succeed in Washington's Top Jobs (Washington, D.C. 2000), 81.
39. The 2000 Prune Book: How to Succeed in Washington's Top Jobs 80.
40. Vanessa K. Burrows, “Statutory Offices of Inspectors General (IGs): Methods of Appointment and Legislative Proposals,” Congressional Research Service. November 6, 2009. R40675.
41. Frank Hodsoll, “Office of Management and Budget's Plans for Implementation of the Chief Financial Officers Act,” Government Accountants Journal 40 (1991): 12–18
42. Lawrence R. Jones and Jerry L. McCaffery, “Federal Financial Management Reform and the Chief Financial Officers Act,” Public Budgeting & Finance 12 (1992): 75–86
43. Lawrence R. Jones, “Counterpoint Essay: Nice Reasons Why the CFO Act May Not Achieve Its Objective,” Public Budgeting & Finance 13 (1993): 87–94
44. Lawrence R. Jones and Jerry L. McCaffery, “Implementation of the Federal Chief Financial Officers Act,” Public Budgeting & Finance 13 (1993): 68–76.
45. Hodsoll, “Office of Management and Budget's Plans for Implementation of the Chief Financial Officers Act.”
46. Daniel P. Carpenter and Gisella Sin, “Policy Tragedy and the Emergence of Regulation: The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (2007): 149-80.
47. CFO: Excellence in Transition, http://www.excellenceintransition.org/prune/prunedetail.cfm?ItemNumber=10572.
48. Jeffrey C. Steinhoff, “Challenges of the CFO Act,” Government Accountants Journal 40 (1991): 18–22
49. Harold I. Steinberg, “The CFO Act: A Look at Federal Accountability,” Journal of Accountancy 18 (1996): 55–57.
50. Julia Homer, “The Financial Frontier,” CFO Magazine, 1 May 2004.
51. GAO Letter, “Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998: Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice” (Washington, D.C. 2008).
52. Sarah Johnson, “CFO Act Agencies’ Reporting Lags,” CFO.com (2006); U.S. Congressional and Administrative News, “Government Management Reform Act of 1994,” Washington, D.C. 1994.
53. Homer, “The Financial Frontier.”
54. Association of Government Accountants, “Annual CFO Survey: Financial Management, Providing a Foundation for Transition,” Alexandria, 2008, 13.
55. Michael Herz notes that the relationship of the general counsel to the agency head “parallels that between the president and attorney general.” See Michael Herz, “The Attorney Particular: The Governmental Role of the Agency General Counsel,” in Government Lawyers: The Federal Legal Bureaucracy and Presidential Politics, ed. Cornell W. Clayton (Lawrence, Kans. 1995), 143-180(143).
56. Herz, “The Attorney Particular,” 143–80.
57. The Attorney Particular 147.
58. The Attorney Particular
59. Lawrence Lessig, “Readings by Our Unitary Executive,” Cardozo Law Review 15 (1993): 175-99.
60. Griffin Bell, “The Attorney General: The Federal Government's Chief Lawyer and Chief Litigator, or One Among Many?” Fordham Law Review 46 (1978): 1049-59, 1050.
61. David E. Lewis, The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton, 2008).
62. Hugh Heclo, “OMB and the Presidency: The Problem of ‘Neutral Competence,’” Public Interest 38 (Winter 1975): 80–98(81).
63. Kaufman, “Emerging Conflicts in the Doctrines of Public Administration,” American Political Science Review 50, no. 4 (December 1956): 1057-73
64. Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman, “Civil Servants and Policymakers: Neutral or Responsive Competence?” Governance 7, no. 4 (1994): 461-69.
65. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy Politics (New York, 1984).
66. Morris Fiorina, “Legislative Choice of Regulatory Forms: Legal Process or Administrative Process?” Public Choice 39 (1982): 33–61.
67. Barbara Sinclair, Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking: The U.S. House of Representatives in the Postreform Era (Baltimore, 1998), 8–44, 213
68. David W. Rhode, “Committee and Policy Formulation,” in The Legislative Branch, ed. Paul Quirk and Sarah Binder (New York, 2005), 201-23.
69. Randall B. Ripley, Party Leadership in the House of Representatives (Washington, D.C. 1967). 6.
70. Fiorina, “Legislative Choice of Regulatory Forms,” 35.
71. Matthew Dull, “Why PART? The Institutional Politics of Presidential Budget Reform,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 16 (2006): 187–215.
72. Paul Gronke, James Hicks, and Timothy E. Cook, “Trust in Government and in Social Institutions,” in Understanding Public Opinion, ed. Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox (Washington, D.C. 2009).
73. Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York, 1994)
74. Paul Starobin, “A Generation of Vipers,” Columbia Journalism Review 40 (2001): 118-20.
75. Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping a Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington, D.C. 1990)
76. Aberbach, “What's Happened to the Watchful Eye?” Congress and the Presidency (2002): 3–23.
77. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (New York, 2006)
78. Barbara Sinclair, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman, Okla. 2006).
79. David Lewis, “Political Appointees and the Competence of Federal Program Management,” American Politics Research 34 (2006): 22–50
80. David C. W. Parker and Matthew Dull, “Divided We Quarrel: The Politics of Congressional Investigations,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 34 (2009): 319-45.
81. Terry Moe, “An Assessment of the Positive Theory of Congressional Dominance,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 12 (1987): 475–520 (489); Richard P. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency.
82. See Lewis, “Political Appointees and the Competence of Federal Program Management,” 2006.
83. Anthony Bertelli and Sven Feldman, “Strategic Appointments,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 17 (2007): 19–38
84. David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers (New York, 1999)
85. Gary Miller, “The Political Evolution of Principal-Agent Models,” Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005): 203–225.
86. Eliot Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (London, 2001), 34.
87. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, When Formality Works: Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organizations (Chicago, 2001), 41.
88. One famous claim that organizations adopt professional rules because they seek legitimacy and status can be found in: John Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 340-63
89. see also Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, 1986), for, among other things, a provocative analysis of the differences between American and French wine appellations.
90. Daniel Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010).
91. Frederick Mosher, “Comment by Frederick C. Mosher,” in Improving the Accountability and Performance of Government, ed. Bruce L. R. Smith and James D. Carroll (Washington, D.C. 1982).
92. We include only confirmed appointees, not service in an acting capacity. We are interested in whether a position is filled with someone who holds the full authority of the office. When a position is vacant, other appointees or careerists may be given some of the duties of the vacant position temporarily, but these substitutes do not exercise these duties with the full authority of the position. For a measure of vacancy duration, we adopted an established method: the number of days from the departure of an appointee until the Senate confirmation of the replacement. We follow previous work on appointees, with some modifications. See David C. Nixon and Roisin M. Bentley, “Appointment Delay and the Policy Environment of the National Transportation Safety Board,” Administration and Society 37 (2006): 679-94
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100. Anne Joseph O’Connell, “Vacant Offices,” Southern California Law Review 89 (2009): 913–1000.
101. Paul Kane, “The Fastest Gavel in the Senate,” Washington Post, 31 December 2007.
102. Lisa Yoon, “A CFO for Katrina?” CFO.com (2005).
103. U.S. Senate, “Governmentwide Intelligence Community Management Reforms,” in Senate Hearing 110-431, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Washington, D.C. 2008).