AGAINST APPOINTMENTS?

The New York Times offers up some specifics on the unfilled appointments that have turned Tim Geithner's time at Treasury into a particularly dull Home Alone sequel:

Mr. Geithner, as a result, has been pulled in many directions at once and remains virtually the only public face of the Treasury. He is the sole person who can go before Congress to promote and defend the department’s decisions to provide billions of dollars for General Motors, Chrysler, the nation’s banks or the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure.

“The problem is not with policy development and implementation,” said one senior official who is among the many aides to Mr. Geithner awaiting nomination. “The problem is with getting out there in the world and talking about it. Other than Geithner, there’s nobody else to make the case in public for these policies.”

My understanding is that this is not a case of PR overwhelming good sense: The Treasury Department has certain positions that are authorized to speak in public and those positions are unfilled. You can't send a Counselor to do an Assistant Secretary's job. But you can send the Secretary to do an Assistant Secretary's job. And that, so far, has been our strategy. The only problem is it means the Secretary isn't doing his job.

Over at Fedblog, Alyssa Rosenberg thinks this whole fiasco underscores the problem with relying so heavily on appointments in general:

It's hard to argue that it's in any way a good thing that Obama hasn't filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn't have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That's what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

The counterargument here is that administrations enter office with radically different agendas -- agendas that often have to be imposed on bureaucracies that have spent the last few years doing the opposite thing, and may have liked doing that thing. That's a lot of inertia for one appointee to overcome. So you fan them throughout the bureaucracy to make sure the various departments align with the administration's agenda.

But that sort of strategic appointing is not always necessary. It's hard to imagine the Treasury Department hid a lot of functionaries bitterly opposed to crafting a bank rescue plan. And there's a middle ground between removing an administration's flexibility to appoint new people into these positions and actually having them scour the earth every few years for fresh faced appointees. You could envision a culture wherein elevating civil servants to appointed positions is the norm rather than the exception. Appointing outside people ten becomes the exception, and only happens in cases of acute need. In this case, Geithner obviously doesn't have a long list of trusted lieutenants he means -- or is able -- to install. Rather than searching the globe for the perfect candidate, he could be elevating a well-regarded bureaucrat with less reputation but more experience navigating the department, Indeed, this is much the approach Obama took in his appointments. Rahm, Geithner, Orszag, Biden, and others were not new names. Rather, they were the experienced hands at the agencies and institutions they'd been asked to oversee.