Keys to a Successful Presidency

Chapter 4 - Turning the President's Agenda into Administration Policy

"We didn't do much policy development, and the reason was because the policy was already developed. ... When we got elected in the fall of 1980, we knew what he wanted to do, and our job was to figure out how to do it and when to do it, how to implement it, how to make happen what he wanted done."

--Martin Anderson

Presidents who have entered office with ambitious agendas often devised many of their policies over the course of their campaigns. Once elected, these types of Presidents find they must set a tone and an agenda for their administration and make sure that the arms of their executive branch agencies work together to carry out that agenda. For the most part, then, this is a process not of policy development but of policy implementation.

Perhaps the most profound transformations that the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War brought to the presidency was the increasing centralization of executive branch policy development within the White House. The increased participation of the White House staff in this area, however, brings the potential for conflict between a President and his Cabinet. Although many come into office promising a Cabinet government, every President has found that the classical version of Cabinet government is unworkable.

Yet by statute the Cabinet departments retain certain prescribed duties for which Congress and the public hold them accountable. This dichotomy between theory and practice explains why many Presidents and their advisers frequently voice frustration with their Cabinet officers. The administration expects the Cabinet officers to do the President's bidding but instead sees them as advocates for constituency groups and bureaucracies whose concerns do not parallel those of the administration. At the same time, Cabinet officers, who often are distinguished in their own right, resent that younger, often abrupt, and always unelected and "unconfirmed" White House aides could tell them what to do.

Given this tension, Presidents vary considerably in both the means they employ and the success they have in keeping their administrations functioning as a team. By all accounts, the Reagan Administration was more successful than most in having both its political appointees and the civil service carry out its directives.

DEVELOPING POLICY FOR THE PRESIDENT

The history of the presidency shows that the most successful Presidents made clear the direction they intended their administrations to follow prior to their election. Those who campaigned with a mixed or muddled message, or who ran with broad, general themes, had difficulty finding their stride once in office. In his memoirs, Samuel I. Rosenman, one of Franklin Roosevelt's principal advisers, traced the origins of at least a dozen New Deal programs to speeches FDR delivered in his first presidential campaign. The policy initiatives of other activist Presidents, such as Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, unfolded similarly. Ronald Reagan elucidated the policies his Administration would pursue not only as a candidate, but also in the nearly twenty years he spent in public life.

As Martin Anderson, Reagan's domestic and economic adviser, explains, the Reagan Administration's policy team was in the business of policy implementation, not policy development:

We didn't do much policy development, and the reason was because the policy was already developed. During the full five years of Reagan's campaign for the presidency and the 10 or 15 years before he became President, Ronald Reagan had been thinking about and talking about exactly what he would do if he ever became President. When we got elected in the fall of 1980, we knew what he wanted to do, and our job was to figure out how to do it and when to do it, how to implement it, how to make happen what he wanted done.

Later on, as the new challenges and problems arose, the task turned to developing ways to cope with them, but not in the beginning.

As George Mason University Professor of Public Policy Susan Tolchin notes, the well-prepared agenda that Reagan brought to the White House made it significantly different from the Carter Administration as well as the Clinton Administration:

Reagan hit the ground running. He had a few policies. He had them developed by think tanks such as [The Heritage Foundation]. He knew what he wanted to do, and it was very efficient, and it wasn't confusing to the public.

I think Carter would change his mind between breakfast and lunch, lunch to dinner. It wasn't that he wasn't very smart. It is just that he was thinking all the time, and he might have genuinely changed his mind, which is fine; it's what I do when I write books. But this is such a large and unwieldy and confusing country that it is much better politically for a President to have a simple message, to do it, than for a President to do seat-of-the-pants policy development, which we have seen really with Carter and Clinton versus Reagan.

If the role of the policy staff is to work out the details of a President's agenda, rather than to create an agenda, then these advisers need to determine how best to lay out implementation choices for the President. From his experience with the Reagan White House, Anderson offers practical advice on making the best decisions:

The key to effective policymaking in the White House [involves] two things. One is the information you have, and two is the access to the President. The President makes all the major decisions, and those decisions are made on the basis of what he knows and the information he receives.

To make a compelling case, a policy adviser has to have good, timely information. It must be relevant to the issue at hand. It must be comprehensive, and it must be accurate. And it should be presented in a balanced way, because it is important for a President to know what the downside is as well as the upside of all of the policies.

Policy information comes from a myriad of sources. It must be collected, judged, sorted, and reassembled to make a coherent, compelling case. But all of the best information in the world is worthless until and unless it is conveyed to the President. There are three basic ways to do this.

The best way is in person. The best and most effective way is to talk to him privately and directly. But that is an option that is available to only a very few people in the White House. During the Reagan years, one of those people was Ed Meese. There were a lot of times when he could just sit down with President Reagan and talk to him directly. But usually, those people are also extremely busy, and they don't have time to collect and process the extraordinary amount of policy information that has to be done.

The second way is by written memos. You can carefully write down everything and send it in. But the time a President has to read memos is limited, and the written word does have limitations. My own personal view is that written memos are usually not very effective.

That leaves the third one: meetings. I think the most practical way to convey information to a President is through meetings, through Cabinet meetings, through sub-Cabinet meetings, ad hoc staff meetings, meetings with outside advisory groups. A meeting attended by a President affords an excellent opportunity to present lots of information in a balanced way, subject to the cross-examination of all the other people that are in the meeting.

THE CABINET AS AN EFFECTIVE POLICYMAKING TOOL

The Cabinet can be a powerful instrument in enabling a President to implement an agenda--provided that its members are selected, organized, and utilized in the manner most conducive to unity and teamwork. Some Presidents voice frustration at their Cabinet officers' tendency to voice the concerns and protect the interests of their department's constituencies. To circumvent this obstacle, some Cabinet officers have disregarded, sometimes to their later regret, the statutory obligations they were required to fulfill.

Of the postwar Presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan had the greatest succees in having the Cabinet and the White House working in unison. For both Presidents, creative organization and careful use of staff members allowed them to synchronize the efforts of the Cabinet and the White House. Both spent a great deal of time in meetings with Cabinet members. Eisenhower met with his officers in Cabinet meetings, while Reagan met with Cabinet officers grouped in specially selected councils around a certain issue. Reagan and his advisers created these Cabinet Councils as vehicles through which policy could win acceptance and achieve implementation throughout the executive branch, according to Anderson:

Most national policy issues cut across many, if not all, Cabinet departments, and a full Cabinet meeting is not appropriate. So what to do? In the Reagan Administration, on the foreign policy and defense side, the traditional National Security Council was used to organize and implement national security policy, and Richard Allen was the National Security Adviser. But on the economic and domestic side, a new strategy was developed to deal with the complexity of all of those domestic issues that face any President.

The Reagan Administration based this strategy on a refined version of the Cabinet Councils first introduced in the Nixon Administration. Anderson describes the structure under Reagan as follows:

A Cabinet Council is really a smaller, tailor-made version of the Cabinet. Each council was designed to deal with specific issues of national policy. The Cabinet members, who comprised the councils, represented those departments that were most involved in the issue under discussion, but each Cabinet Council, like the Cabinet itself, was chaired by the President. In addition, each Cabinet Council also had a designated chair, another member of the Cabinet, who could act in the absence of the President.

This gave these councils one special advantage over the Cabinet. A council could meet and discuss policy matters without the President being at the meeting. No decisions were made when the President was absent, but it was a powerful way to have preliminary discussion and distill the key issues to present to the President when he did attend.

In fact, if you look back over the first couple of years, the President actually attended and chaired about one-fifth of all of those Cabinet Council meetings. Usually, they were meetings that were dealing with an especially important issue or meetings that had come to the point where a decision had to be made.

Anderson argues that the Cabinet Council system was central to making President Reagan's Cabinet operate effectively:

During the early years of the Reagan Administration, we had six of those Cabinet Councils: one on economic affairs, one on natural resources and the environment, one on commerce and trade, one on human resources, the fifth one on food and agriculture, and a final one on legal policy. All economic and domestic policy was funneled through those Cabinet Councils, and I think, the Cabinet Councils were a fairly elegant solution to the problem of how to effectively use Cabinet members in the development and implementation of the President's national policy goals.

Building a Loyal Cabinet Team

The Cabinet Council system also recognizes the importance of divorcing the President's top-level team members from their bureaucracies so that they can remain focused on the President's agenda.

As Gettysburg College Professor of Political Science Shirley Anne Warshaw explains:

The problem is you have an enormous bureaucracy, 99 percent of which is civil service. It is very easy for Cabinet officers and sub-Cabinet officers, the deputy secretaries, the undersecretaries, the assistant secretaries, and those very few political appointees, to be co-opted by their own bureaucracy. They easily become attuned to the problems that their departments are concerned about.

Although the President of the United States may say this budget deficit is a very serious problem, the issues in your department overwhelm you. When the President says to the Secretary of Agriculture, "I want to cut agricultural subsidies," but all of the farmers' groups and the Grange groups come to the Secretary of Agriculture and say, "We can't live without the subsidies," what does the Secretary of Agriculture do? Cabinet secretaries historically side with their departments, their clientele, the old iron triangle.

In a process that Nixon's top aide John Ehrlichman referred to as "marrying the natives," Cabinet officers often align with their departments rather the White House staff. As Warshaw says:

The problem is, the President too often brings people from the campaign into the White House, often younger people. Then he brings in Cabinet officers who the White House staff don't know, and those Cabinet officers immediately ally with their departments rather than with the White House staff.

The Reagan White House team refined the Nixon system of Cabinet Councils. Under the Reagan system, Cabinet Councils were not just an efficient policymaking tool; they were also seen as a way of resisting the centrifugal forces on Cabinet officers--thereby galvanizing Cabinet support for the President's agenda. For example, they recognized how important it was that senior agency officials be physically present in the White House when critical decisions were made--and not in their own departments--so that they could pursue the President's agenda rather than their agency's.

As Martin Anderson explains, this necessitated that Cabinet Council meetings--not just full Cabinet meetings--be held at the White House to build a team around the President and his policies:

We often heard that when you are talking about real estate, location is the key factor, and in meetings on national policy, the locations of the meetings can be a key factor. All meetings of the Cabinet Councils took place in the West Wing of the White House, usually in the Roosevelt Room, which is just outside the Oval Office, or in the Cabinet Room.

In fact, during Reagan's first year in office, there were 112 Cabinet Council meetings, all held in the White House. The practical consequences of this were that on 112 occasions, a half a dozen or so Cabinet heads left their departments, climbed in the back seat of their chauffeured cars, and made their way over to the White House. This is an extraordinary number of times for a Cabinet head to come to the White House--far more than would have occurred if he or she were just going to Cabinet meetings or to other meetings called for a special purpose.

The 10 and 15 minutes before the Cabinet Council meeting began, and the time after the Cabinet Council meeting had occurred, was a special time that Cabinet heads could interact closely with the senior White House staff to exchange views. They settled other business and generally got to know each other personally. In fact, sometimes I think that more business was done before the meeting and just after the meeting than during the meeting.

This may seem like a small thing, but it can turn out--and I think it did--to be a crucial factor in providing and facilitating the policy process. These meetings provided an unusual degree of harmony between two normally antagonistic groups, the White House senior staff and the Cabinet. It also enhanced the status and prestige of the Cabinet heads within their own departments.

Every time you had one of those 112 council meetings, the Cabinet head could say truthfully that he would personally go to the White House to meet with the President and the senior White House staff. It was an important symbolic act. All major policy discussions took place in the White House, far from the fiefdoms of the Cabinet. Every meeting re-emphasized that this was the President's business. It was his policy agenda.

Shirley Warshaw explains the effect that the top Reagan team desired with this Cabinet Council structure:

[They] wanted all of these Cabinet officers and these deputy secretaries to come into the White House, [and] if you were a reporter and said "Who are you?" to a Cabinet officer, they would say, "I am President Reagan's Secretary of Agriculture." It was important that the first thing they thought is that I am President Reagan's, and everything I do is President Reagan's. If you say I am simply the Secretary of Agriculture, it implies that your first loyalty is to the Department of Agriculture.

The Cabinet secretaries' attitudes were critical to the success of the Reagan Administration, says Warshaw:

[The Reagan team] didn't have that many major policies, but the list that they said they were going to do, they did. And they did that largely because of this issue of governance and the ability of Martin Anderson and the White House staff to bring those Cabinet officers on board. "This is what we are going to do, and you are behind me, right?" And they all said, "Absolutely."

That Cabinet Council structure was brilliant. It worked, and every single President since then has modeled after it.

THE VITAL ROLE OF PROPER STAFFING

Central to the success of the Reagan Cabinet Councils was the way they were staffed and organized. As Reagan's chief domestic policy assistant Martin Anderson explains:

The key to making the Cabinet Councils work was staffing. We had to figure out the best way to conduct and distribute the detailed policy studies and analyses that the Cabinet members would use to make intelligent recommendations to the President. Then you get to handle the logistic work necessary to keep the system running smoothly. We had to set the agenda for council meetings, set the times and the dates of those meetings, notify everyone in a timely fashion, take minutes of those meetings, and keep records.

The administrative support for the Cabinet Councils came out of Ed Meese's office. At the time, [National Security Adviser] Dick Allen on the foreign policy and defense side and myself on the economic and domestic policy side both reported directly to Ed, who then had the title of Counsel to the President.

On the domestic and economic policy side, the office which I headed, which was called the Office of Policy Development, was basically responsible for reviewing economic and domestic policy. In retrospect, I think it really should have been called the Office of Policy Implementation, because that is what we did.

Anderson points to the beneficial impact of this arrangement on Reagan's top domestic priority, economic policy:

[The staff] saw our job as keeping the policy effort focused on those things that President Reagan wanted done. We needed to control and channel and monitor a whole truckload of policies that we had already developed, and we had to do it in such a way that things got done in the order that Reagan wanted them done. We had to avoid starting new initiatives in sensitive, politically difficult policy areas.

We could choke off less important ideas and less relevant ideas that would have used up valuable time and manpower and prevented the President from achieving his key policy goals. That meant, for all practical purposes, at least during the first year or so, that we were focused tightly on economic policy and all other policies took a temporary back seat.

The Staff as Coordinators

The staffing of Reagan's Cabinet Councils, says Anderson, was carefully designed to keep the councils in sync with the President's objectives:

Each Cabinet Council was provided with a special support staff called a secretariat, and that secretariat had an executive secretary who ran it. Every Cabinet member of a council got to appoint one member, usually from his or her department, to the secretariat of the council.

This did a couple of things. When the secretariat met, it ensured that each Cabinet member would be fully informed of all actions taking place in their Cabinet councils. It also meant that the secretariat had a reliable, fast way to get information back to the Cabinet members. The executive secretaries of each Cabinet Council also all worked for the White House. In fact, they were all members of my staff, and they reported directly to me. So they had a dual role; they worked closely with the Cabinet members on the council, but they reported to me.

In addition, I appointed one or two, depending on the council, other White House staff members to each of the Cabinet Council secretariats. That was to ensure that there was a strong White House presence in all their deliberations. I had one main goal: to make sure that President Reagan's views were accurately and fully represented. And finally, as we developed these Cabinet Councils, a number of senior White House staff were named by the President to be actual members of each Cabinet Council. They included Ed Meese, Jim Baker, Michael Deaver, Vice President [George] Bush, and myself.

... So now you get the six Cabinet Councils, six secretariats, six executive secretaries. The executive secretaries, working through my office and Ed Meese's office, set the agenda of each Cabinet Council meeting, the time and the day of each meeting, and the place where the meetings would take place. And overseeing the whole thing were White House aides, senior aides. It was a management system that allowed them to shape and direct the course of policy discussion. They could place items on the agenda of the Cabinet Councils. They could remove items from the agenda of the Cabinet Councils. Or they could park items by sending them back for further review and discussion.

According to Anderson, the Reagan White House developed a layer below the Cabinet Councils to "hone policy and feed into the discussions of the Cabinet Council." These were referred to as "working groups":

These were all special groups established by the Cabinet Councils in conjunction with the Office of Policy Development and the council secretariats.

Whereas the secretariat of the council represented basically the Cabinet members, the working groups were essentially composed of experts in particular policy areas. For example, in economic policy or in the agricultural working group, whatever it was, the members of the working group could be drawn from any department throughout the government, any agency. And in some cases, these were private citizens. The criterion for membership in a working group was expertise in the policies under consideration.

Once these working groups were formed, at least one member of my White House staff in the Office of Policy Development was assigned to each and every working group to make sure once again that the views of President Reagan were represented faithfully. During the first year or so of the Reagan Administration, we used to have dozens of these working groups. I think the final total was 70 or 80, and the working groups reported to their respective Cabinet Councils and through the councils directly to the President.

During the first year or two of the Reagan Administration, they were particularly useful in diverting political attention away from dozens of issues clamoring for attention. It is surprising how many people who were on Reagan's White House staff initially had a whole bunch of new ideas they wanted to develop, and we were working on the economic policy. They had new ideas. We said fine. We set up a working group, and they went to work on it, and that allowed us to concentrate on completing what Reagan wanted done, which was the economic policy agenda.

Strong staff involvement and direction was essential for success. As veteran political reporter Bob Franken observes:

Martin Anderson [was] the man who wielded the two-by-four, the one who brought in the Cabinet members and said, "Here are your choices. Do as we say, or I am going to use this two-by-four on you." Tension is good, of course. I think everybody would agree that it is one of the underlying good things about our government, that you don't have people marching in lockstep. But I think any administration would feel that too much tension is not a good thing, and that is where Martin came in.

Although the senior staff played a critical "enforcer" role in keeping Cabinet government on track, Anderson is quick to point out that, as Reagan's chief domestic policy adviser, he was successful only because he conveyed the President's explicit wishes:

I would never tell a Cabinet person what to do. What I would do is say, "Here is what the President has said." In fact, one of the things we did during the transition is that we provided a nice looseleaf notebook, which was a summary of everything that President Reagan had said during the campaign, and in fact his whole life, on any issue that was going to come before them. They were called the "holy scrolls."

That was their marching orders. They weren't coming from me. They were coming from the President.

POLICYMAKING VEERING OFF TRACK

There are many ways that executive branch policymaking can get off track. White House drift, pressure from Congress, naiveté about the Cabinet, losing the big picture, and weak staffing can all contribute to a loss of momentum and lack of direction.

White House Drift

Even with a strong policymaking team in place, a President will encounter skepticism and policy disagreements from within his own White House, and this can undermine momentum and focus. According to Martin Anderson, the top Reagan aides sought to avoid such policy drift on economic issues by assembling a powerful group of outside experts, free from day-to-day political pressures, to bolster the President:

We had a group of outside experts. At the time, we called it the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board. George Shultz was the chairman. Other members were Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Arthur Burns, Paul McCracken, and Bill Simon. It was a "Who's Who" of extraordinary people with backgrounds in economics, had been in the government, who for one reason or another were not an official part of the Reagan Administration.

Five times during that first year, when things got a little sticky inside, I put in a call to George Shultz, and George would call a meeting of the board. They would come in to town, and they would meet in the Roosevelt Room, and they would discuss economic policy. Then, at about 11 o'clock in the morning, the door would open up and President Reagan would walk in. He would look at them and smile, and go over and wink at Milton Friedman and pat Alan Greenspan on the shoulder and talk with Arthur Burns and joke with Shultz and then sit down.

Don Regan was sitting there, and Murray Weidenbaum, and David Stockman, all very quiet. Basically [the outsiders] would tell Reagan two things. First of all, he was probably the greatest President since Abraham Lincoln; and second, what he was doing was absolutely correct, and he should continue doing it. It was a very important thing to happen, because it straightened out the internal part of the White House staff also.

Pressure from Congress

The difficulty of keeping the President's Cabinet and senior agency team on track is not simply due to direct pressure from the bureaucracy and interest groups. Behind-the-scenes pressure from Members of Congress, often representing those same interests, can also thwart efforts to keep the Cabinet operating as a team. The strength of that pressure may reflect the balance of power in Washington. President Bush's Counsel, Boyden Gray, who also had served with Bush in the Reagan White House, saw the result of changes in congressional control:

[We must remember] the iron triangle, the relationship of the various regulatory agencies and departments and the Congress, and how this triad plays out against the President. It was especially bad, I think, for President Bush when he faced a Democratic House and Senate. President Reagan had the luck, in part because he ran a good campaign in 1980, of having a Republican Senate for six of the first eight years. It is not a total coincidence that after he lost that Republican Senate, Iran-Contra again took over. That is a point which I think shouldn't get lost here.

Trying to block back-channel pressure is no easy task, as Gray found out:

One of the initiatives that President Bush tried was to have the federal agencies, regulatory agencies, report ex parte contacts from Congressmen and their staff, just as they were required by informal precedent to report ex parte contacts by the business community or environmental groups at EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency]. And we suggested, merely suggested, that we would require the EPA or the Interior Department or this department or that department to report ex parte contacts by congressional staff. You have never seen such an explosion, and, of course, the policy wasn't implemented.

Naiveté about the Cabinet

Success also requires the President to be realistic about his own Cabinet officers if he and the White House staff are to keep the Cabinet focused on his agenda. As Warshaw describes this process:

Jimmy Carter is such a nice guy. He couldn't believe that his Cabinet officers weren't with him. He couldn't believe that his Cabinet officers would in any way turn to their departments and not inwards towards the White House staff.

He had Stu Eizenstat handle the Domestic [Policy] Council system, and they did an okay job, not very aggressive. They really believed their Cabinet officers were okay. Well, as you remember, two years into that administration, Jimmy Carter fired half of his Cabinet officers because they were off in never-never land, going in their own direction. Bob Bergland would go over in the halls of Congress and lobby against the President. Can you imagine a Cabinet Secretary lobbying against the President of the United States?

According to Warshaw, George Bush exhibited a similar naiveté:

George Bush put a lot of his friends into the Cabinet. And he couldn't believe that his friends would betray him, so he gave his friends lots of leeway in managing their own departments. There are a lot of problems with this.

Lack of a Clear Big Picture

More recently, President Clinton also lost the opportunity to have focused decision-making in his Cabinet. According to Warshaw, however, this had a rather different cause:

Clinton very clearly realized that you need to deal with this co-option problem. You need to deal with the marrying-the-natives problem. So rather than having these constant regular sort of formal meetings with his Cabinet, what Bill Clinton has done is have these so-called advocacy groups.

He brings them in, little groups of people, two and three here and there, based on issues, very tiny little issues. So if they are dealing with the Boston subway problem, the MTA, then he brings in a few people that may be familiar with that. It doesn't become a broad issue. He doesn't deal with things as the Reagan Administration did: Everything they did, this is part of the big picture; and they kept reinforcing to the Cabinet officers, this is the big picture, and everything you and the departments do has to fit around it.

Bill Clinton never did that, partly because, like George Bush, he had some faith in his Cabinet officers, but there is a lot of pressure on the Cabinet officers. So the Cabinet Council structure that was created by John Ehrlichman, and a little bit by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the Nixon Administration was really brought to its highest level in the Reagan Administration, where you constantly bring in the Cabinet officers and reinforce them and tell them they are part of the presidential orbit: "We like you."

... The Clinton people haven't quite figured out--and that is one of the problems--that you need to not only network your own people. Washington is a big place. Hugh Hecklo once called it a government of strangers. It is still a government of strangers. Cabinet officers are often strangers. We need in the White House to find ways to mitigate the problems of being strangers, and the Cabinet Council system did that

So it was a brilliant system, and every administration has followed it in some way, shape, or form. But it is really Martin Anderson that perfected it.

Too Many Staff, Too Many Priorities

Other administrations' experiences demonstrate that firm staff leadership and a hardheaded presidential attitude are necessary if the Cabinet and Cabinet Councils are to be effective tools for turning the President's agenda into policy. President Ford, for example, suffered from weak staff control over the Domestic Council. Explains Shirley Warshaw:

Jerry Ford came in, and [Vice President Nelson Rockefeller named] Jim Cannon from Time magazine [to handle] the Domestic [Policy] Council. Well, Jim wasn't really a politician, and he had Rockefeller fighting with [Deputy Chief of Staff, and later Chief of Staff, Richard] Cheney and Cheney aligned with Ford, and poor Rockefeller and Cannon got lost. So the Ford Administration never really moved forward, although they tried to, on the Domestic Council concept.

Although the White House staff is critical to successful policy development, it does not follow that it is better. In fact, suggests Brookings Institution government expert Paul Light, the mushrooming of eager staff and working groups in recent years may have reduced both the quality and quantity of major policy initiatives:

Why is it that, in the domestic policy process, Presidents have never had more help, the process itself is more formalized and structured than it has ever been in history, yet we are producing less and less by way of significant presidential policy.... [There is] the possibility that the more help we give the President inside the White House to make policy decisions, the smaller the decisions are.

I'll give you just three little facts about the White House policy process today. Number one, there have never been more titled White House staffers in history. By that, I mean that the number of "free radical" staffers with no title except special assistant or counselor has declined dramatically over the last 30 years, so that everybody not only is a special assistant, but is a special assistant for. That is an interesting phenomenon.

Number two, we have never had more units within the White House. Shirley [Warshaw] has done this wonderful work. If you read her book, The Domestic Presidency, it is one chart after another, and over time, the charts become denser and denser with new units. This administration added the new unit, the National Economic
Council.

Congress just approved, last year, a chief financial officer for the White House--for the White House, not for government generally....We have more and more accretion of offices within the White House to which a President can turn.

Finally, we have more layers of help in the White House. When you were in the White House in 1976, 1980, you had an OMB director and a deputy director, and then you could get right down into the agency. Today at OMB, you have a director, a deputy director, a deputy director for management, and a set of associate directors, a set of assistant associate directors, deputy associate directors. You go all the way down through OMB, and it is more and more people who are doing stuff with titles, layers, and so forth.

Is this a puzzle, then, that we can solve: more help for the President, more structure, more rules, more procedures, tinier and tinier policies? I just offer that as a provoking causal hypothesis. It could be that, actually, the reason we have tinier policies and the reason we have more help for the President is that in fact there is a third hand working here.

Contrasting the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Warshaw elaborates on Light's hypothesis by arguing that the fatal step for a White House is to combine too many "priorities" with too many staff members:

The Reagan Administration was successful because it had phenomenal people, people that worked very, very well with President Reagan. They knew President Reagan. They understood his goals and objectives. You cannot overestimate the power of that, of these personal relationships.

They also had a limited agenda, and moving a limited agenda forward is always easier than moving a broad agenda forward. The Clinton Administration has layer after layer, this broad number of policies. It is, of course, hurting them.

The last time I counted, the Clinton Administration had 26 senior staff people with the title Assistant to the President. As you all know, "Assistant to the President" means those key people that came out of the Roosevelt Administration, when they were called administrative assistants, those six original people. They lost the word "administrative" and call them assistants to the President now. So if you have the title assistant to the President, you are a bigwig in the White House.

Well, all of those people have staffs under them. So what we have seen, obviously, is the proliferation of the White House staff.

When Martin Anderson was there, I remember he had about 11 senior staff people with the title Assistant to the President. So we have almost tripled. It is a huge increase. This increases the access points for all of these interest groups into the White House, and when you increase the access points, you increase the number of policies that are going to be considered.

And Anderson was able to limit the number of people that had access to him, to limit the issues that came before senior staff meetings. That is much more difficult when you have 26 senior staff people, an untold number of special assistants who are also access points into the White House. You see this proliferation of ideas into the White House policy development structure, and that has been a big problem with this White House.