The Presidential Appointments Process:
Computer Software to Help Appointees

Thursday, January 25, 2001

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Introduction:	Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute
	Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution
	Paul Light, Presidential Appointee Initiative, Brookings Institution
Panelists:	Hon. Richard Thornburgh, former governor (R-Pa.) and U.S. attorney general
	Hon. Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Presentation of Software:	Terry Sullivan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Proceedings:

MR. ORNSTEIN: I'm joined by my co-director Tom Mann, and this is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Transition to Governing Project was created a couple of years ago to try and do several things: In the era of the permanent campaign, tilt us a little bit away from the campaign focus and more toward a focus on governing as we approached an important set of elections in the Year 2000; also, to focus on governing as soon as the election was over, which turned out to be 36 days later than we'd anticipated, and to create a better transition and also to do something about making sure that we could get the best people serving in government coming in and in place and ready to go as soon as possible.

This panel is designed both to look at the broader notion of the appointments process but also to show you one of the products that we have been working to create, a product that originated, I think, in the mind of one of our panelists, Paul Light, who was at Pew at the genesis of this project and is also now at the Brookings Institution and running the Presidential Appointee Initiative, a project of the Brookings Institution funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and one that has worked hand-in-glove with us in this process, and we will talk shortly about the software itself and get a demonstration from Terry Sullivan on what it's going to do and how it will work and also what we can do to make this process better; possibly to make such software much simpler to create and change every four years.

I'd like to acknowledge John Fortier, the director of the Transition to Governing Project sitting here in the front row, and let me turn briefly to my colleague, Tom Mann, for an introduction, and then, we'll begin the first part of our discussion.

MR. MANN: Thank you very much, Norm. Just a word this morning from me of welcome and thanks to Norm for what has been a very productive and enjoyable collaboration over the last couple of years in trying to improve transitions and governance more generally. As I said at our last meeting, if the quality of transition and governance is directly related to the number of groups that have been working to produce useful reports, to distill past knowledge, to provide really useful advice, then, we should be in for a fabulous time, but alas, we have had a truncated transition period due to the extraordinary 36-day counting process after the election, which has put a lot of pressure on the Bush team and certainly complicated the task of staffing this new administration.

There is plenty to disagree about in this town on policy, on politics, but I think there is broad agreement on the need to reduce the barriers to public service, particularly for those who would come as political appointees of this new administration. So I am delighted that we have an opportunity now to unveil the software that will assist those who are willing to serve in this administration; navigate their way through a very complex set of forms, and I'm especially thankful to Donna Shalala and Dick Thornburgh for joining us this morning.

Norm?

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thanks, Tom. Let me turn just for brief words of introduction to Paul Light.

MR. LIGHT: Well, I was involved in the decisions on the funding of this with Elaine Casey, who is here today from Pew. She's now the program officer for government performance in the Pew public policy program.

I have to admit that Terry Sullivan is not the first grantee on this particular project. The original grant went to another organization to do this software. When the organization that we had granted to actually looked at the difficulties involved, they said we'd rather not do it, and so, we began a search for somebody, anybody out there who was foolish and brave enough to take on this assignment not only to create the software but to actually penetrate the forms and understand them at a level of detail, and we have him here, Terry Sullivan. He warmed to the task.

I think you're doing okay. I think you're doing okay. I think we should have put some hazard funding in this for Terry for post-software recovery, but it's a delight to see the software coming along, and of course, we're going to consume it at the Presidential Appointee Initiative. We have given a small subgrant, again with Pew funding, to, as Terry says burn 600 CD-ROM copies of this that can be given to appointees, and we hope that will make the process if not--it's kind of like climbing Mount Everest. Terry has not changed the slope of the climb, but it's like giving the climbers oxygen.

It's made the climb easier, we hope, and it's a delight to be at this point of the process, and my thanks to Terry for taking it on.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Paul.

If we were to gather together some of the best minds in the nation and ask them to devise a system designed to discourage in every possible way the best and brightest in the society from government service, I'm not sure we could do much better than what we have right now. And it's been very interesting to chat with some of the cabinet nominees, and that's pretty much all we have right now, along with a few top sub-cabinet appointees, in the new Bush administration, who are almost, to an individual, stunned by what they have seen with the paperwork that's required and the other elements of this process, many of them having served in previous administrations going back a few years, where it was tough enough, but it has gotten that much worse.

We have created a web that is extraordinarily difficult. Now, it's not likely to discourage many people from considering cabinet posts, but we have 1,000 or so Senate-confirmable nominees along with several thousand others coming into the top policy-making positions in government who do not get the prestige or public acclaim that comes with a cabinet who will soon confront some of these realities and almost certainly, we know from surveys conducted under the auspices of the Presidential Appointments Initiative and elsewhere, that the obstacles are going to discourage very good people.

We're trying, with this first step, to move in an appropriate direction. We're delighted to be joined by two of the most significant role models in American society for public service, two of the best public servants we have had in modern times. Donna Shalala to my left is the longest-serving Secretary of Health and Human Services, having completed just a couple of days ago the full two terms, eight years, through the Clinton administration and now is out on the street--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: --at large. The good news is we no longer have nearly--at least for the next few months--nearly the same problems working out our timing on our weekend tennis games but now returning to the academic world and another form of service and Dick Thornburgh, who served as Governor of Pennsylvania and as Attorney General of the United States among other positions in the Federal and state government, both an elected official and an appointed official and enormous distinguished service as well.

Let me turn to the two of them to talk about their own experiences coming into government and some reflections on the Presidential appointments process and this problem, first to Donna.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Thank you very much, Norm. Thanks to you and Tom and Paul Light.

I haven't thought a lot about the initial appointments process, because what I remember more than anything else is being numb, and that's, in part, because it happened so quickly. It's not like--well, I suppose there are some people who plan their whole lives on being cabinet officers. If you ever calculate the probability, it's kind of ridiculous to do that, but between the time when you're contacted and the time that the President makes the announcement, there's not a lot of conversation about the paperwork. There is a lot of conversation about are there any ethical things they have to worry about, but most of those are oral.

Nobody ever really put in front of me some kind of a form to give me some sense of what they were going to go through. It was a quick vet, and the President was going to make the announcement. Just before we left office, Madeline Albright had all the women who are members of the cabinet to dinner, and we went around the room, and everybody told their own experience with the appointments process initially, and everybody had a funnier story than the next person. It was a comedy of errors in terms of the information they were given and what the President actually said or didn't say.

A number of them, for instance, the President never actually said I want you to do this post. I showed up for my press conference without having the President actually saying I want you to be Secretary of HHS. It turned out the reason he didn't actually say it was because someone else thought they were going to get the job, and he had to talk to them before he talked to me.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: But I had the press release in my hand before I actually went in to see the President, and he said you're going to be the HHS Secretary.

I saw Tommy Thompson the other day. He had the same kind of numb look that I had.

Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: But here's what I remember: what I remember that--and I think this is true of probably at least half, given the percentages of people who do their own taxes. For us, it was not only that we were stunned; our accountants were stunned, the people who do our taxes. And sometimes, we forget that while many of the sub-cabinet people may fill out these forms on our own, many of us actually use accountants and lawyers to fill out the forms.
I had had an accountant in Washington since I was an assistant secretary, which actually served me in good stead, because that person had all of my taxes on tape, and it was actually relatively easy for them to translate that material. What wasn't easy for them was the questions about everything I had ever written, and as an academic, these forms were not set up for an academic with a 30-year career, because they wanted a copy of every--it wasn't just the publications in refereed.

When I said to them refereed, they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. No, they wanted every publication. So they wanted every op-ed piece, and many of us just didn't keep, you know, absolutely everything. Now, we do, because we have disks and things that we can keep them on. But it was just tracking down, going through boxes, all of the information that they needed. In the end, the accountants and lawyers cost me $20,000 in 1992 just for the part they did.

The wear and tear on the people in Wisconsin just to track down all the other stuff they needed was enormous, and were we told ahead of time? Of course, we weren't told ahead of time. Would it have made a difference? I don't think it would have made that much of a difference. Was it a horrendous experience? It was not a cheerful, happy experience to go through that. It was too intense.

The second thing that happens is the vetting process itself, and it's very ad hoc, because they haul in whatever Washington lawyers they can find to do the vetting. My problem was that everybody who was doing my vetting was hinting to me that they wanted a job. Now, if that's not unethical, and if that doesn't make you uncomfortable as part of the vetting process; I hadn't particularly had a controversial career, but it did make me uncomfortable that the people who were asking the questions that were going around doing the interviews were simultaneously throwing out that they might be interested in a position.

Third, you just never know what your friends and neighbors are going to say. Most of them have been questioned by the FBI before. I found the FBI to be the most professional going through the process. They actually had done it before. They knew how to check people out, and they did it quite quickly once they started. But the horrendous part of it was the paperwork: different forms for different committees; different forms for the White House, and I had hearings in two committees: both the Labor Committee as well as Senate Finance, and they each wanted different forms or different configurations of the information, which took an enormous amount of time.

So it was not what I would describe as a happy experience. It was uphill from there.
The second point I would make is about sub-cabinet people, which I don't think any White House is prepared for. It's not that the personnel director isn't professional, but they hire a bunch of people who don't have a resume themselves; have never hired people; cannot read a resume at that level. And so, you're trying to hire people at the sub-cabinet level who are leaders in their fields, and you're having trouble explaining to them why you need this particular person.

The Democratic Party happens to be 10 deep, so I had some pools. They sent over a set of resumes that were totally inappropriate for the positions. My only strategy to deal with that was to make sure the resumes I wanted were in their pool, and so, I at least could pick off their pool, because I had arranged to put resumes in their pool. But for the sub-cabinet people, it was a shock to see the forms and what they had to go through.

Many of them were held up because the White House was bogged down, and the FBI finally got bogged down. Many of them--most of them were really held up by the Hill, because a combination of they couldn't get organized, or they would trade off our appointments for some other politics that was going on.

So, the first year was just--and I had two-thirds of my people in place by March 1, so you could imagine what everybody else was suffering through, and I moved fast, before the White House personnel process got into place. I had to sign off on almost all of my sub-cabinet people from the President before the White House personnel process got in place, and that turned out to be very important.

The final point that I would make is that it's very--we can talk about individual appointments, but if you're trying to manage a large, complex agency, you're trying to put teams together. And explaining to a White House personnel office this person won't work because they may be brilliant, but their reputation is that they can't work as a team is very difficult.

And so, while we're trying to build integrated teams at the top to manage very complex and top agencies, they're simply looking at individual resumes never as part of a team and don't understand what you're talking about in terms of managing complex agencies. So the nature of the process does not lend itself to high quality governance, and the speed with which you have to do this and how it interrupts people's careers and how they're on hold is a well-known story.
But I would simply say to you that the forms are critical, and letting people get exposed to what the process is going to look like is very important. But trying to figure out a way to explain to the people who are going to help make the decisions about who you can hire and who you can't hire; that you're not simply, you know, looking for individuals that have geographical and racial distribution; perfectly willing to do that, but you're trying to put together high level management teams, and this will work, and this won't work is extremely difficult, and it's particularly difficult when you're working with groups of people who have not hired, who don't have resumes themselves, who don't have the backgrounds in the fields.

I'll tell one story: it's a story about trying to hire, since there are science people here, the director of the National Institutes of Health, in which I actually convinced the White House to put together an outside advisory team made up mostly of people from the National Academy of Sciences and from the major scientific institutions. We had a very good pool.

They wanted to put other people in the pool. When I suggested to them that they were not scientists at the same level, they said what do you mean? And I talked a little bit about the articles, the publications and where they ranked in the field. The person I was talking to actually said to me but this person has three publications, and doesn't that count for something? And I was balancing two Nobel laureates, you know, against three publications.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: It's very difficult. They had never heard of the person who was eventually nominated, and they wanted to know, you know, what the reaction was going to be. The President didn't have any problem. I finally ended up going to the President for the nomination.

But the President, too, had heard from a number of people who were lobbying on behalf of candidates, so he basically said I trust you on this; you go ahead with Harold Varmas. And then, he got wonderful response, of course, afterwards. But again, it's a difficult process. The forms are critical to show people ahead of time. I don't think I would go through the process again knowing what I know now, but there are lots of people who wouldn't and wouldn't when we confronted them with what they had to do to come into the process.

But fundamentally, the structure of it, in my judgment, is flawed, because of where the interactions are and what you need for governance versus what the political system needs. I'll tell you one quick story, and that is the advice I gave to Tommy Thompson. That is that the campaigns always want you to take people from the campaigns, and I did. My first hires were two dozen kids under 25 who had degrees from good universities, which meant that the White House's perception of me was that I was really playing ball and was hiring people out of the campaign.

But I specifically hired the younger people to put them into younger people's jobs, because I was scared to death that they were going to give me a set of people for senior positions who really wouldn't fit into the agency. So I said to Tommy Thompson you ought to go out and get every kid you can find in this campaign that's got a good degree. There are lots of jobs in departments--advance, scheduling--for these kinds of people, and it looks like you're on board immediately but also gives you the freedom to work on the other positions.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Donna. We should note that your experience of getting two-thirds of your people in place by the end of March is extremely unusual. We know that the average for both the last Bush and the Clinton administration in getting the Senate-confirmable people in place took about nine months, and this time, we will certainly push a year and probably even a little bit more.

And we're left with the great dilemma that we're going to have a number of these departments for months, maybe even for the first quarter of the administration, with one or two people who are Presidential appointees in policy making positions in their positions, and because the law requires that every Senate-confirmable appointee go through a full field investigation by the FBI, imagine what's going to happen now after this delay, when we get a huge number of nominations occurring all at once, and the FBI is going to be faced with hundreds and hundreds of these full field investigations, all at the same time? We better hope that there aren't more fugitives running around the West to take up additional resources.

Dick Thornburgh.

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Thanks, Norm.

I have to note parenthetically that I, too, am impressed with the speed, alacrity and guile which allowed you to get your team in place at such an early date. You could probably write a whole book about the guerilla warfare that went on in that aspect.

Let me see if I can try to extrude the anecdotes and war stories into some semblance of order in discussing this area. One of the things is that when you talk about this process of appointment, it covers a wide variety of positions, everything from the cabinet members themselves down to the chairpersons in the department. Somebody has to appoint everybody who serves in government.

The principal focus, understandably, is on the confirmable positions, the process that begins with the nomination by the President and ends with the confirmation or otherwise by the Senate. And I needn't rehearse, I'm sure for this audience, the familiar obstacles that are lamented in this process, many of them of recent vintage. Certainly, the post-Bork era, where particularly controversial nominees are subjected to all the rigors of a political campaign, replete with television advertisements and full-page newspaper ads, something that is a phenomenon that occurred during my lifetime, and the second hazard, if you will, for these confirmable positions is the kind of off-the-wall questions that inevitably arise totally unanticipated by the nominee or his or her handlers, the best example, of course, being the post-Zoe Baird phenomenon, where again, this kind of examination of domestic employment problems was really unheard of up until that time and now has become de rigueur for the entire process. And who knows what's next in terms of the issue du jour that may be fastened on by particular Senators in the process?

The forms problem is an intriguing and challenging one, and I quite agree with those who make a plaintive plea for some kind of uniformity. The notion that you have to fill out different forms for different folks simply doesn't make any sense at all, and that should be an easy thing to tackle, even for Brookings and AEI, I think, and that's kind of ABCs.

The forms thing is kind of ludicrous at times. I had served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania before I became attorney general, and one of the questions on the form was had I ever been sued in a civil action? And I had been sued 300 or 400 times, I'm sure.

[Laughter.]

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: But common sense prevailed, and my answer to the question was simply no, except in my official capacity, and that passed muster. Whether that's something that would apply across the board, I don't know, but sometimes, a little common sense can prevail.

The FBI process, to be sure, is a little bit daunting. You never know what kinds of malcontents or personal animosities may induce a negative 302 in the FBI file, but again, we all survive that as well.

I think the process with regard to the cabinet members themselves has been really trod over in considerable detail. The only suggestion that occurred to me some time ago, and it has particular application to judges, but I think it's also transportable into the cabinet member category, is the conduct of hearings. When they have a big investigation like the Watergate or Iran-Contra hearings, you note that they'll enlist the services of a counsel, a special counsel or a staff counsel, who will organize and run the hearings.

And it seems to me that it might be worth considering for the confirming committees to have a, if you will, confirmation counsel. I think reading in the paper yesterday that John Ashcroft had received some 350 written questions from members on the Judiciary Committee in connection with his nomination to be attorney general; surely, there must be some overlap and duplication in those 350 questions, and if you had a counsel to organize those, and a counsel, frankly, to take the lead as is done in these investigative matters in asking the salient questions right off the bat, to be supplemented, to be sure, by members, who can't be denied the right to raise their own issues, that might have some worth in examining.

I want to just take a minute to follow up on Donna's observations about sub-cabinet positions, because they are extremely important and crucial. I met just recently with a new cabinet member in this administration, and my reminder was that the first three things you ought to be looking at in this department is people, people and people, because you're going to rise or fall on the quality of the people you're able to attract and hold in the operation.

And really, in my experience, I think there are really three different categories, at least, of people and three different sources upon which you can draw to put those folks into place. First of all, there is your personal staff, which in organizations in government as everywhere else is extremely important, and by and large, they should be and generally are your choices as a cabinet member.

I think that the problem with them is they immediately become known as the Wisconsin Mafia or the Pennsylvania Mafia or whatever. They are looked on as a cordon sanitaire between you and the rest of the government operations. But it is important.

The second are your deputy and key assistant secretaries, and here, kind of a Mideast bazaar attitude prevails: the bargaining with the White House over who gets those key positions really should not be observed by sane people, because there is a great backlog of people who have worked in the campaign, some of considerable talent and some who turn out to be your most valuable aides, but you also want to kind of tug at the sleeve of the White House personnel people and say you know, I happen to have a couple of people here that I'd like to see, even though they didn't work in the campaign, and they can be Nobel laureates or Ph.D.s or whatever, but there's some reason you want them there.

And this bargaining process can be extremely excruciating and taxing, and it is, I can say from sad experience, ignored at the peril of the cabinet member, because there is a prerogative on the part of the President and his team to have some of the people placed. Having been on that other side as a governor, I was particularly appreciative of that.

Finally, the third category: the others, all others: key positions, many of them important but not confirmable, not necessarily the high-profile jobs. By and large, in my experience, those are positions where the balance of power shifts immeasurably to the White House and to the placement of people whom the President and his minions have identified of being worthy of being placed in government.

But I think those differentials have to be assessed and appreciated in the process of understanding the rules of the road when it comes to filling out your administration.

I'll tell you another thing that's consumed me ever since I was governor, and that is the balance between the political appointees and the permanent civil service or the equivalent of what we have in our government, and I have been troubled by the aftermath of the Supreme Court's holding in Elrod v. Burns and Baranti v. Finkle [sp], which found First Amendment rights to exist among government employees not to be fired because of their party designation. I mean, that was a very simplified characteristic of this.

But there is such a thing as accountability, and I think this really ought to be reexamined, and I have made this point fruitlessly for a number of years, so maybe I'm a minority of one, but what you find is the risk of their being a built-in fifth column in your organization of people who are genuinely opposed to the policies that you've been appointed to implement for the President or the governor or the mayor or whomever that may be. It's not as prevalent a problem in the Federal Government as it is in state and local governments, but I think there ought to be a fair assessment made of the level to which the political appointee is appropriate for service in government to ensure that, number one, you don't have all the operation politicized to the point where people of talent are driven away by the appearances or, number two, where you have only a thin veneer on the top of the bureaucracy of political appointees who are continually frustrated by being unable to move the President's initiatives forward because of built-in resistance at the lower level.

I have a couple of stories I could share with you, but I'll spare you those. Maybe they'll come up in the course of our discussion. But let me say in the final analysis that I think that the effect of these acknowledged defects in our system is often vastly overrated. I have yet to see a genuine case of someone of talent who is interested in serving in government who throws their hands up in despair and says I can't fill out all these forms; I can't go through this process of having the FBI snoop around in my background, blah, blah, blah, all that and say I don't want the job.
I think more often than not, that is a cover story for the fact that they didn't get the job, and people still in this country, I think, have an aspiration to public service that's healthy and, indeed, an absolutely necessity in keeping this going. Thank you.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Yes; I just wanted to follow up on Dick's last point about the thin veneer. The key to being able to work with the bureaucracy is to appoint people at the top that, yes, are committed to the President and his policies but are so knowledgeable substantively that they're respected by the bureaucracy. And that's a very careful balancing act, and with all due respect, there are only a handful of generalist lawyers that you can use in an agency where you have very complex subjects. You've really got to have people who are experts on those subjects committed to the President's policies but demand and insist and understand the systems that are in place and have genuine expertise in these large, complex agencies.

So we did not have a serious problem moving the bureaucracy once we appointed very good people at the assistant secretary and the deputy assistant secretary level. And you should have heard what they said as we were leaving, because I actually lost track of who were the political appointees and who were the civil servants because of the way we put the systems together to move things.

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Let me add one thing that I forgot in looking at my carefully compiled notes here. Another factor to be considered in all of these appointments, and I have carefully parsed them out into three separate categories, is the Hill; that inevitably, you're going to find members of your own party, the President's party, who have their own candidates for these positions, and that adds another dimension to this Mideast bazaar that goes on with the bargaining that ensues about who gets what job under what terms.

And sometimes, members are not at all reticent about making their wishes known. There's a subcategory where that's particularly virulent, and that's in the appointment of judges, particularly district court judges at the Federal level. You hear in no uncertain terms from Senators who think that the Constitution reads that the Senate shall appoint with the advice and consent of the President.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Dick, you may want to discuss that with the incoming U.S. attorney in South Carolina.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Twenty-eight-year-old Strom Thurmond, Jr. Of course, it could have been 68-year-old Strom Thurmond, Jr.

[Laughter.]

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: That will not be a tough confirmation.

MR. ORNSTEIN: No, no.

A couple of comments, and then, I'd like to turn to Paul and hope, Paul, that you might also address the notion of whether we have a genuine deterrent effect in these rules as some of your surveys have shown. We haven't discussed much the cost here. For any top nominee to come in now to fill out these forms, relying on accountants and lawyers is extraordinarily costly, and the word around town now is that for Don Rumsfeld, it's going to be somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000.

Now, I suppose we should all have finances so complicated that it would cost that much
money--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: -- but for people who don't have major resources, we're still talking $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000. And bear in mind that there are criminal penalties attached--criminal penalties--if you make errors on these forms.

Now, consider the pressure on incoming nominees to get the forms filled out within a week or two at most while you're trying to get up to speed on a Senate confirmation hearing and on the job you're about to hold; working on dealing with the press and getting your other people in place, and you have to fill out forms that include every foreign trip you've ever taken; every potential official you've ever met; every speech you've given and so on.

It's a rather difficult process.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Norm, I had an experience with my accountants. They found a mistake they had made in my taxes five years before--

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: --in the process of going through all this review, and so, I had to refile and pay a penalty, and they were quite distraught. They wanted to pay the penalty for me because they felt so guilty about the thing. But under the ethics laws, of course, they couldn't.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, of course, the story this time which made the front section of every newspaper of record in the country was Paul O'Neill, whose accountants had advised him that giving a $50 Christmas bonus to his household help, that he could declare it as a gift, and instead, it should have been declared it as salary, and he should have paid taxes on it. So he's had to go back and pay $92 in taxes and penalties, and that was a big story.

MR. : It was $921 that he had to pay, $150 that he didn't declare, but over the years, the interest and penalties mounted up on him.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: One should also note here something that was mentioned really only in passing by Dick Thornburgh. There is an enormous burden in changing this process, I believe, on the Senate, which is the least likely to step up to the plate. First is something that Donna has suggested; namely, the uniformity of the information requested by the individual committees. This is just capriciousness on the part of committees.

What we've found as we've tried to get them to go to uniform forms in the Senate, an enormous resistance for no good reason other than ego. A second element, of course, is the use and abuse of holds, which has careened completely out of control. Every individual Senator who has taken this process and what was supposed to be--something we're now seeing applied to Senator Ashcroft in his nomination; one week to get answers to questions; two weeks. This is a custom; this is not in the rules anywhere but that's been used to block some nominations indefinitely and indeed to control them with rolling holds by different Senators and almost all done anonymously, even though they now have a rule in place that's supposed to prevent anonymity, but it doesn't.
The third element is the sharp expansion of confirmable positions. It's a part of what Paul, in his wonderful book, has called the thickening of government. But what it also means is that you get more and more posts that require confirmation by the Senate, down to deputy assistant secretaries in some cases. The requirements for filling out forms; for disclosure; for the full FBI field investigations expand accordingly, and these are clearly, in many instances, positions that are not at a level that should require a separate Senate confirmation.

They like to have it that way so that they can keep a leash on people, but it's simply not feasible to have government work efficiently.

Let me turn to Paul Light.

MR. LIGHT: Well, I could go into the layering issue. I think the question in terms of political layering is also career layering, and how do we get a senior executive leadership corps that's responsive? So Bill Luther, a fine Minnesotan, has introduced legislation to reduce political appointees by a third, but I think political people say, well, unless you reduce or change the quality of the career work force right underneath to make it more responsive, and I think this is apropos of your concern, we're not going to get anywhere.

I guess my question in our surveys is not whether we're getting good people in the Federal Government for these positions but whether we're getting the best people, and I think in the two people we have here, we have the best. Donna, I think you were the best. I think we have the best here. But what we're seeing in our surveys of people who should want to serve, your colleagues, Donna, who are university and college presidents in the top 300 schools; the top executives of the Fortune 500; top nonprofit executives from the largest nonprofits and so forth, we find a reservoir of interest in service but a real resistance to enter the process.

And it's not the forms; you're quite right. It's not the forms. They don't even get to the forms.

What we hear anecdotally from Presidential recruiters is they're not getting their first or second or third draft pick. Now, with the Washington Redskins, that would be okay, because we have a team of first draft picks, they didn't do very well.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: But the recruiters are telling us that they're going--

MR. ORNSTEIN: That's a management problem.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: --deeper and deeper and deeper into the pool so that they're not necessarily getting the best person.

What we found in our survey that we just published with our colleagues at the Heritage Foundation was that there's a desire to serve, but there's a view of the process outside Washington that it's not worth the candle, and I think we have to address that.
Now, can you do that through the forms? Sure; if we could reduce the number of questions, that's a good signal. We need to do something about the Senate. I mean, we need to make it easier for people to say yes when the President calls and not to remove themselves from the process early on. I think that everyone we talked to who has served in these posts of honor, as Benjamin Franklin once called them, remembers them to be the most enlightening and enlivening experiences of their career.

I suspect it's true for you two. Even being governor of Pennsylvania, where I lived, is probably--

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Well, it's close.

MR. LIGHT: But president of a university, these are wonderful posts, but boy, it's hard to get in, and we think what's happening out there is that people who should want to serve remove themselves from consideration early on, because they don't believe that the process is going to allow them to serve and get through with honor.

Moreover, no matter how many appointees we have, you can't wait nine months to a year to get them in, because already, the turnstiles start working. The average number of months they serve is not that long, and suddenly, you're replacing as you're staffing up. If I hear another Presidential director of personnel say that the vacancy rate among appointees is no problem, but we can't reduce the number of appointees, because we need every last one of them, I just don't know how we square that circle.

We've got high vacancy rates, a lot of turnover, and it's an issue. But, you know, it's a question about how do we get the best people? And I think that is partly cultural, and the culture gets reflected in the process, I'm afraid.

SECRETARY SHALALA: And the process is as much the small things, Paul, as it is the big things. I lost a candidate when they went over to be interviewed at the White House because they were interviewed by a 23-year-old who was sitting there in cutoffs, and they said, you know, what is this? And they were really just totally turned off. It had been hard enough at the beginning, but the fact that the White House piece was, in their perception, so unprofessional, and this was someone from business who just was not going to do that.

MR. ORNSTEIN: You know, the forms are an administrative problem, but they reflect a set of laws, rules and norms that are the problem here. And just a couple of positions we might mention: during the first Bush administration, the earlier Bush administration, they went to fill the position of deputy secretary of defense, post-Tower. Now, it's hard to imagine a more appointment management position; in effect, the chief operating officer of a $300 billion, 3 million person operation, and they had to go through more than 20 potential nominees, the problems mostly revolving around pre- and post-employment restrictions, so that in effect, almost anyone who had worked in a defense-related area, the kinds of people you would want, were either ineligible to come in or would be unwilling to do anything when they left and so were unwilling to serve.

The beginning of the Clinton administration, there was a similar problem with, I believe, the assistant secretary of energy in charge of the nuclear waste cleanup; again, an extremely important position. Virtually nobody with experience other than in academia was willing to go in or was acceptable at a time when, in the culture, if you had been in the industry, in any part of the industry, you would be the fox guarding the chicken coop.

The sense that nobody could shift to a different position and adopt the fiduciary responsibility coming with the new position, we exclude just the kinds of people you would want to serve. And one of the best things done, I believe, at the end of the Clinton administration, little noticed, was an executive order that wiped out the extremely difficult and overly tough post-employment restrictions, 5 years, that Clinton had put in at the beginning of his administration looking prospectively.

That move has been harshly criticized by some of the watchdog groups around but I think has been a positive step in terms of getting people to serve.

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Let me just add an observation to that, Norm. I remember distinctly President Carter, for whom I have enormous respect for a variety of reasons but with whom I took considerable issue over his observation at one time about the revolving door in government. He deemed this to be a bad thing, that people would come into government and then use their experience in the private sector to make a lot of dough or what have you.
It seems to me that that revolving door element is a terribly important and positive attribute of our political system, because people who have worked in industry and then become regulators have a much more informed take on the problems they have to deal with than those who have been regulators all their lives. Similarly, those who have been regulators and who go into industry have a much improved vantage point from determining as to how the regulated deal with the regulators.

I thought Carter was wrong in that observation, and I think that time has probably sapped some of the vitality of that thesis. One thing that we can prosper from is having this interchange, walking a mile in the other guy's shoes. Now, obviously, if it's fraught with financial irregularity or conflict of interest, that's another matter. But simply to lay down a rule that keeps people from moving in and out of government and making a contribution, particularly of the type that Paul mentioned might be otherwise not disposed to do it I think is a mistake.

SECRETARY SHALALA: I wanted to point out to Paul that I'm in the process of writing an article explaining why the position I've just held is so much easier than running a major research university.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: It's more hierarchical.

MR. ORNSTEIN: And you don't have to deal with faculty!

SECRETARY SHALALA: And it's more substantive.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Whose great quote is that? It was attributed to Kissinger.

SECRETARY SHALALA: It was actually Wally Sear [sp.] at Columbia.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Oh, okay, about the academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Yes.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: It's a great Wally Sear quote.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Questions or comments from the floor? Please identify yourself and wait for the microphone.

MR. TROY: Dan Troy from the American Enterprise Institute and Wiley, Rein & Fielding, and I emphasize my second affiliation because Fred Fielding is the clearance counsel.

I was talking to someone involved in the clearance process, not Fred, and I mentioned this software, and they said that OGE had warned people not to use it. And so, I was wondering whether you guys had been interacting with people in the process; had been making an effort to sell it to them, and the word came back that OGE had said that it makes too many mistakes, and they were telling people not to use it.

So I pass that along and also ask what, you know, whether we can make any efforts to dispel that misconception if it is a misconception.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Terry, do you want to--

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: You have the director of the Office of Government Ethics here to respond, right here in front.

MS. COMSTOCK: Hi, Amy Comstock, director of Office of Government Ethics.

I'm not aware of that specific--is this on? I'm not aware of that specific conversation. We actually have no--we're seeing the software actually demonstrated for the first time today, so I would be upset to hear that we had a position that we were steering people away from something we had never seen.

[Laughter.]

MS. COMSTOCK: That goes against my way of thinking.

[Laughter.]

MS. COMSTOCK: We are very, very supportive of the efforts to streamline and coordinate and any effort--as a matter of fact, we've been working with Terry Sullivan and Martha Kumar on this. We had had an early demonstration; we were trying to help them.

There's no doubt that the last two weeks have been a phenomenal effort for our office, and it's possible that someone might have indicated that with the incredible one-week crunch we're under, it might not be a good time to undertake something that hasn't been demonstrated; that's new. But I would be very concerned if I thought my office was steering people away from innovative efforts.

SECRETARY SHALALA: You know, the government ethics piece, Tommy Thompson and I both had an easier time, because we came from a state that had very tough ethics rules, which meant that we had been filling out ethics forms, you know, for all those years. That actually turned out to be helpful when I got to fill out the forms, because the accountants and the tax lawyers not only took my taxes, but they took all the government ethics forms from the State of Wisconsin that I had already filled out, and our ethics people were doing the same thing with Tommy before he was confirmed, just pulling them all out.

MR. ORNSTEIN: You know, what we're hoping--we're not only hoping that this software, which we had originally envisioned as working like a cross between Turbo Tax and the college application software, would make it easier for nominees, but it would begin to highlight more broadly some of the craziness that we have generated in this process, much of it cumulatively.
Every scandal brings a new set of rules designed to close that barn door after the horse has escaped, and so, we get gates everywhere, none of which work necessarily together. At the same time, we have some things in place that you almost wouldn't believe. There have been requirements that some forms have to be filled out on a typewriter in an era where not many people have access to typewriters anymore, and it obviously makes it very, very difficult for them.

So, we are hoping that we can use this process not only to make it easier for nominees now but to get the dialogue moving along on the problems that exist in this process, some of which could be dealt with, perhaps, by executive order or simple administrative changes; some of which will require legislative changes, and there are horror stories out there.

If you have a top security clearance, and you want to move from one agency to another agency; if you want to move from the State Department to the Defense Department or the Energy Department or the Justice Department, they have to go back from scratch and do a new security clearance. Now, that's just basically because of the jealousies between the departments; they're wanting their own requirements more than anything else. But it's a deterrent that really shouldn't exist and that is unnecessary.

SECRETARY SHALALA: The other advantage, Norm, is that at least in the Clinton White House, they wouldn't give the forms to the candidate until after they had been signed off by them. They wanted the candidates, because the sign-off really had a lot to do with whether the President was traveling.

We wanted the candidates to start early, from day one, to start working on the forms so that there was no delay between the sign-off and when the forms were put in, and we could never get them.

MR. LIGHT: Well, I mean, now you can, and there's lots of information for you to guide you through this process, whether from the Survivor's Guide to Presidential Nominees, which warns you to get your high school yearbook so you can find somebody from high school who will vouchsafe to the FBI to you to these forms. GSA has some forms online; OGE is working on this.

I mean, one of the hopeful notes here, incidentally, is that Congress enacted a bill last year asking OGE to present recommendations in April on streamlining the financial disclosure process and inviting OGE to think boldly about where we should go with these forms, and I'm just very bullish here on Amy's work and the commitment of OGE to thinking through this stuff, and hopefully, Terry, troublingly, your nomination forms online will have to be updated soon with new forms if Amy succeeds and we all succeed in getting her piece of this done.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We're all grateful to White, Inc. for helping to manage this.

Terry Sullivan?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Let me just say at the other end of the avenue here, if it were the case that OGE was actually telling nominees not to use our software, we would be hopeful that that would be what they would be saying, since it's impossible to get hold of our software.

[Laughter.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: It doesn't exist yet. We're still in the process of working out the last parts of things working right. So I can't imagine OGE is saying anything. They've been extremely supportive. In fact, out of all of the organizations that I will eventually be thanking today, only two of them are from government. One of them is in the White House, and one is the Office of Government Ethics. They've been extremely supportive and helpful in an incredibly complex process, most of which they're not responsible for. Only a small part of what we would think of as the confusing elements and repetitive elements of the questioning process, the inquiry process, belongs to the government ethics side.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thanks; Dan.

MR. SCHORR: Dan Schorr, National Public Radio.

Norman, you made a reference to security clearance. Now, your two department heads here are both from departments which are not primarily involved with security clearance. But could somebody talk about security clearance as another hindrance to recruitment?

SECRETARY SHALALA: All my top people had to have the top security clearance, because we, of course deal with issues like bioterrorism and other kinds of international issues. So, security clearance did not hold up my candidates. We got through the security clearances. It was the part that we're talking about. It was the forms; it was the confirmation process, because the security clearances were going on at the same time.

But again, there was a staffing issue at the beginning in terms of running through all of these pieces. I don't think I had anyone other than myself who had already had a security clearance at one time or another, so they didn't anticipate that. But Dick, you probably can add a lot.

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: I think the same thing is pretty much true in the Department of Justice. The top people generally need security clearances in dealing with espionage, counterespionage, terrorism, all that kind of stuff, and I can't think of a case where there was a real problem of delay or inability to fill a position on the basis of difficulty in obtaining proper security clearance. So I would relegate that to a lesser level of concern.

MR. LIGHT: Let me note that all Senate-confirmed appointees, all, must fill out and go through the security clearance process plus another 400 to 500 nonconfirmed appointees who do reside in departments with security; so, down to the assistant secretary and below, you are going through the process.

Let me also note that most of the questions on the form date back to the 1950s and are no longer particularly relevant. The one that boggles my mind, that I have most difficulty with, is the date and place of birth of your mother and father in law, which I find a difficult question to answer, because I would have to talk to my mother and father in law.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: And that speaks to my problems in my relationship.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: But there is this tradition in the clearance process of--

MR. ORNSTEIN: We'll go to Ricki Lake for that.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: Well, I was thinking Jerry Springer.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: But, you know, these questions, you know, one of the issues that comes up is that, in fact, we had a recent example in this process with the Labor Secretary designate who had filled out all of these questions, all 233-plus that Terry will talk about, and the process that didn't work. It was the media that came up with that particular--you know, so you end up filling out all of these questions about where you lived and who knew you and so forth, and eventually, they might catch up to you.

But she withdrew before the FBI was finished with its security review.

MR. SCHORR: Let me just mention one of the reasons I asked the question. A friend of mine and a colleague of mine at the New York Times who worked with me in Moscow and in Warsaw was nominated to be assistant Secretary of State for public affairs, and the State Department security people came to interview me about him and asked to my knowledge whether he had ever had any contact with Communists.

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: And I could see myself sinking his hopes of becoming an assistant secretary. I said you understand that when you work in Moscow, you deal with Communists. He said just tell me the answers to my questions, please, and I did.

MR. ORNSTEIN: And he got the job.

MR. SCHORR: No.

MR. ORNSTEIN: He didn't? On that basis?

MR. SCHORR: Senator Goldwater put a hold on him.

MR. ORNSTEIN: On that basis?

MR. SCHORR: On that and other bases.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Now, Dan, when President Nixon was conducting his own independent security clearance for you, how did that go?

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: [Inaudible].

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: The White House told CBS that the reason for the FBI investigation of me was the possibility that President Nixon might appoint me to some office.

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: It was not very convincing.

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: But enough so that CBS said if you're not happy, why don't you tell us? If it's a matter of money--

[Laughter.]

MR. SCHORR: And Nixon got me a raise.

[Laughter.]

MR. MILLIKEN: Al Milliken, Washington Independent Writers.

I'm wondering how any of you would compare and contrast what you've seen going on in this year's confirmation process looking at, first, Health and Human Ser vices as compared to the Justice Department. It seems to me that these are at opposite extremes as far as what's happening.

One hand, I observed Donna Shalala graciously introducing Tommy Thompson, and I have to suspect you've got a working relationship from the past probably in welfare reform above other things, and your geographic backgrounds seemed to certainly help and not hinder things. But on the other hand, at Justice, it seems to me that experience, qualifications, integrity no longer seems to mean much of anything.

And what's going on there, the battleground for the culture wars, has moved to this confirmation process, which it doesn't seem like that's been there before.

But I'm wondering: how is this going to affect governing in these departments? This could affect things, couldn't it?

SECRETARY SHALALA: I can answer the HHS part.

MR. ORNSTEIN: And Dick will take the Justice.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: People were a little surprised when I went and introduced Tommy Thompson. They forgot that Tommy Thompson came down and introduced me at my own confirmation hearings; that I had been chancellor of the University of Wisconsin when he was governor. He is a friend of mine. He is a non-ideologue. I made it very clear to the committee that he and I disagreed on issues like choice, but I had no questions about his success as governor of Wisconsin.

And so, it was a fairly easy confirmation process. But it has more to do with the kind of person he was with his own public record, I think, and I suppose it was highly unusual for someone to introduce someone who was going to succeed them, but in this case, it was a longstanding friendship and the fact that he had, in fact, introduced me.

If you remember, at my own confirmation hearings, at the beginning of it, the Republicans had actually targeted me as a left-winger, which was dissipated by support from a number of Republicans like Tommy Thompson who had known--and other conservative Republicans, including Bob Dole, who had known me during my years both here and at the university. Bob Dole reminded the committee that he had come to my confirmation when he was the majority leader and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and he had walked in, and they said what are you doing here? And he said Elizabeth sent me.

[Laughter.]

SECRETARY SHALALA: And that confirmation went relatively smoothly as a result.

The other issue, I think, has a lot to do with the candidates and his positions, and I'll leave it to Dick Thornburgh to explain what's going on on the Justice side

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Well, I'm not an unbiased witness in this area, but I must take note of the fact when you talk about the candidate's positions that the criticized positions of John Ashcroft seem to be in the areas of abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, drug enforcement and the place of individuals of faith in government.

And it should be no surprise that his positions are identical in each of those areas with those of President Bush. Indeed, it would be passing strange for a president to appoint someone as attorney general in particular who held positions contrary to his in these areas.

With regard to Judge White and the controversy over his failed appointment, my guess is that John Ashcroft probably wishes he had that one back, but even the judge himself said it was not a racist thing. To my view, it was in the heat of a political campaign where Senator Ashcroft felt that he had to make some points on the death penalty.

The other collateral things about Bob Jones and the Confederate magazine and things, those hardly rise to the level, it seems to me, of matters of moment. What you are getting here is another replication of this, in my view, playing to constituencies and frankly, in some cases, trying to pump the troops up in some of these interest groups by way of their level of enthusiasm; the full-page ads; the television advertising, I think, would have a minimal if any effect on any Senator who was voting on confirmation. What it's addressed to is the larger audience of people who feel passionately about these issues.

And I think John Ashcroft is going to be confirmed, without much doubt. There will be a lot more commotion, but it's not a pretty process, and without being judgmental, I think there's room for everyone to kind of reexamine these kinds of tactics that are used with some frequency more and more in the appointment process.

MR. ORNSTEIN: I have a slightly different take that might be seen as supplementary or complementary to it. Context means everything in politics and in political appointments. This wasn't an ordinary election. It was an, at most, once in a century election: hotly disputed; President Bush lost the popular vote. There are many people in the country who continue to believe that Al Gore won the Florida vote and the electoral vote.

And there was a disproportionate representation of African-Americans in precincts with spoiled ballots. That's part of the context, and it was entirely predictable what the reaction to the appointment of John Ashcroft would be in civil rights circles and in broader Democratic circles. It was possible to find individuals who took the same positions on issues as President Bush and Senator Ashcroft who would not have encountered the difficulty in the confirmation process, just as Elaine Chao is sailing through, and Linda Chavez, had she not run into the problems she did, would have had a much more controversial process.

It has less to do with his positions than the--and Dick Thornburgh mentioned this--the role he took on the Ronnie White appointment, which took on a tremendous importance and broader significance.

Basically, what has happened is that the role that John Ashcroft has played in some confirmation battles in the Senate during the Clinton administration, sub-cabinet and judicial appointments, has now been applied to a cabinet position. That is ratcheting up one level, but it's in the context of this extraordinary election.

SECRETARY SHALALA: It also is fair, Dick, with all due respect for us to move from people's positions on things to how they would govern, and it is a fair question to ask John Ashcroft in particular, given some of his positions, whether he would enforce existing law. And a lot of the questions that are being enforced now is how vigorously he would protect a woman's right to choose, which they have under existing law. Would he protect abortion clinics? And would he protect some of these individual health care providers

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Yes; I couldn't agree with you more.

SECRETARY SHALALA: I think that he's been questioned rigorously about this but not necessarily--I mean, no one expected the new president to appoint anyone other than people who had his point of view. But how they would govern is an important question, given existing law, and it's a central issue for many women in this country.

GOVERNOR THORNBURGH: Don't get me wrong. Those are fair questions, but once answered to then spend time quarreling with the answer or saying, well, he doesn't really mean it or what have you, I mean, that seems to have gone over the top a little bit, and that really is what--I mean, Senator Ashcroft, as I understand it, gave very forthright and unequivocal answers to the very questions you've raised.

Now, people say, well, they don't believe him. That's something that we all have to put up with from time to time. But we'll see. It'll work itself out, and the proof, as always, will be in the pudding and seeing how he performs as attorney general.

MR. ORNSTEIN: I'll make one quick comment, and then, I'm afraid we'll have to turn on to the next part of the program. There's an ironic twist to all of this, which is we have had a standard in the past at the cabinet level of not relying on the issue positions of the candidate to disqualify them. But what that means is that opponents then turn to try to uncover some personal peccadillo, and so, we've ratcheted up, in a very unfortunate way, the search for scandal or an attempt to manufacture scandal, and we've used different criteria at different times.

We've moved to nannies, which didn't exist before. We moved away from them a little bit; now, we're back. We looked for problems in tax returns. We try to dislodge the FBI reports, which are, of course, just dumps for everything, raw information that people say, and unfortunately, one of the things that's happened is the Senate has demanded access to those FBI reports, and now, we're getting leaks out of those things, and it's a downward spiral.

Now, at another level, we have applied the standard of issue positions, not qualifications, to sub-cabinet posts. Nobody has been more vigorous in applying that standard than John Ashcroft and putting holds on and trying to block nominations of people whom he acknowledged were fully-qualified and personal paragons but whose issue positions he didn't like throughout the Clinton administration.

And we are likely to see, in coming months, many nominees for sub-cabinet positions held up in the Senate; holds applied or, in some cases, an attempt to find personal things, so we'll move to a different battle. Now, you know, this is the natural give and take in some ways in a political process. But let's face it: every time we have one of these, and now, at the beginning of every administration, there's at least one; it's almost a rite of passage. You wonder if you'll be the cabinet nominee who goes down.

And then, it moves on to these other levels. You think about it: just imagine if you're considering--if you're out at, say, an academic position or in a business position on the West Coast, and you're asked to be an assistant secretary of something or other, and you think about if you were in a university on the West Coast, and you're thinking about moving to a university on the East Coast, or if you're in a position in the business world considering the same thing, all the elements that go into your decision: you've got to sell a house and buy a house; you've got to move a family; coordinate the beginning of school years.

That's if you can time to some degree when you're able to move. Imagine going through this process of months of vetting; then, being nominated for a position and twisting in the wind in the Senate for three months, six months, nine months, a year or more. You've already told the people in your previous employment that you'll be leaving, and they've written you off.
You can't move. Then, maybe it occurs, and you have to move, maybe leave your family behind; find a place to live; all of the obstacles are enormous. If that's not a deterrent to getting good people, I just don't know what is.

SECRETARY SHALALA: Norm, I want to make a final point here. One of the problems that people like me had trying to hire people is not just that they're going through this process, but I wasn't interested in people who hadn't made mistakes in their careers. But if you're going to hire a bunch of grownups to run these very complex agencies and big jobs, then, they are going to have whole careers.

And we've never had time in the process to let them work through and explain that mistake. So, you know, you almost had to find people that had been perfect in their careers, and that's what cuts down--the number of first-rate people who haven't made mistakes in the course of a career, the process doesn't allow you to explain that. It knocks you out too fast, from my point of view.

And so, you get people with certain kinds of careers and certain kinds of resumes when what you want is a fuller range for these very important positions.

MR. LIGHT: It has all the features of a drive-by shooting.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT: Just, you know, people out there wonder whether they're going to be picked off for reasons totally unrelated to them or because they strayed into a bad place, an intersection in life, where they just get hit. And they talk about it in these surveys. It is a tangible feeling of fear about entering the process, even though they want to serve.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We are now going to switch to the second part of our session. I hope you will first join me in thanking our panelists.

[Applause.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Through the magic of A/V--let me say first of all a word of thanks to Martha Kumar, who, in working with Terry Sullivan, has produced some exceptionally useful materials in an archive of interviews with key White House staff members that will be available to the members of the Bush White House staff team as they go about their work.

Terry Sullivan, who is a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina and an affiliate of the James Baker Center at Rice University, has been leading, managing, running, doing the work of this project nominations online, which is an effort, of course, to ease the process of filling out forms. Terry is here not to release the software but to announce it; to demonstrate it and to give us a sense of how it will work and when appointees in the new Bush administration may begin to take advantage of it.

Terry?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Thank you, Tom.

All those problems they were talking about, we're not fixing that here.

[Laughter.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: So, don't ask me what I think about appointments to the judiciary in Missouri. We are not doing that.

Nomination Forms Online, which is this software product, is a service of the White House 2001 project, directed by Martha Kumar. We have designed this software to ease the burdens of filing for Presidential nominees. I'm going to talk briefly about the software, and I'm going to also talk about the institutions who have built that software. And then, I want to talk about some of the problems with appointments that we are attempting to address through this software. Following that brief introduction, we will pause while we fire up the software so that you can see what it looks like for a demonstration of what it can do at that point. Following that demonstration, we'll be happy to entertain any kinds of questions you have as long as they're about the software, even technical ones. And we've brought many of the technical people involved in the software's design and development.

First, let me say something about the array of institutions that are involved in this project. As I know, keeping straight all of those involved in the past Presidential transitions has become something of an art form in Washington these days. The Pew Charitable Trusts first and foremost funded Nomination Forms Online through the efforts of two of its policy initiatives, the Transition to Governing Project, headed by Norm Ornstein, and the Presidential Appointee Initiative, headed at Brookings by Paul Light.

In addition, the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University provided additional support, and I am here representing that institution, although as a three-time nominee to be ambassador to a Middle Eastern country and as assistant Secretary of State, the institute's director, Edward Dirigin has certainly had his fair share of appointment difficulties and has taken a particular interest in the development of this software.

One of the more interesting aspects of the development of the software is that the work is being carried out in two places exactly one half of a world apart. Much of the planning and testing and user support is conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in its political science department and its Center for the Public Domain's IBIBLIO project, the Internet library.
The director of that group at North Carolina, Ms. Jennifer Hora, is here with us today; and the software itself is written at Boston Education and Software Technologies of Mumbai, India. Mr. J.P. Nag, the project manager for Boston, is with us as is, and this is where I'm going to be culturally challenged, coming from the great State of Texas, Mr. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, who is Boston's managing director is also with us.

Mr. Nag's team of programmers has been working very hard not only to get the software right but also to adjust to changes as they occur both in the Senate and in the White House. One of the reasons that our software is not yet ready for delivery is that we are constantly dealing with changes made in the Senate by Senate committees and potential changes being discussed in the White House.

One of the interesting aspects of the development of this software has been written about by Bob Deans of Cox News Service. It is the case, as you can see, since all of these young computer specialists are from the first generation of their country born in independence, for them, working on the NFO project has become a particular point of pride. They are, after all, lending their hands in the world's newest democracy to help the world's oldest constitutional democracy find a solution for one of its perplexing problems.

We have had a number of other institutions, as I said earlier, willing to cooperate with us in describing the appointments process. We will only mention two from the ranks of government: first and foremost, the White House 2001 project acknowledges the help and cooperation of Mr. Clay Johnson of the George W. Bush transition team and then, as it turned out, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. It also acknowledges and thanks the efforts of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Ms. Amy Comstock, director, and particularly Ms. Jane Ley, who, as deputy director, has executed in a tireless patience in helping us understand the process we hope to help.

So, can we demonstrate a little of the problems on which we hope to help; that is, the things that we actually are going to try to do something about? For decades now, we know that appointees in what Paul Light calls should wannabes, have considered the inquiry process as intrusive and burdensome. In terms of its intrusive nature, we only need to note a couple of things: first, nominees, on an average, answer about 234 separate inquiries into their background, including intensive probing on their financial situation and their previous associations.

Of these inquiries, almost half involve what we call repetitive inquiries; that is, the most troubling questions asked across four basic forms that the nominees must complete which seek the same information but in different ways. In addition, they're often asked additional customized questions by the Senate committees, and last, because of some of the approaches taken on financial disclosure, primarily adopted by the Senate, nominees must report very detailed assessments of the value of their assets, distinguishing, for example, whether an asset generates more or less than $15,000 and falls into one of these categories listed on the screen.

In terms of its burden, we can take a single example of a repetitive inquiry having to do with knowing what the nominee owns in the way of real property. The typical nominee must respond to inquiries from four institutions: the White House; the FBI; the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Senate committee of jurisdiction.

The White House wants to know what the nominee owns. They also want to know what the nominee's spouse owns. It also wants a list of properties owned now and in the previous five years. The FBI wants to know only about properties that the nominee owns; also, those the nominee has an interest in, whatever that may mean. The nominee reports what they own and have an interest in only now. That is, the FBI drops the spouse and drops the past six years.
The U.S. Office of Government Ethics, on the other hand, wants to know what the nominee owns, what the nominee's spouse owns and what the nominee's dependent children own. In addition, the nominees list transactions taken in the current and past year's period. Then, they must set the values of those transactions within one of those 15 categories that we've already indicated.

Lastly, the Senate committee--here, we've taken just the Committee on Commerce--the Senate committee wants to return to the White House of ownership; drop the spouse; drop the dependent children; take up the FBI time frame, so drop the past six years; then drop the previous two years; forget about sales and acquisitions; drop the value ranges, but then, it wants you to add a specific value to each property reported.

Using the best of all of these possible interpretations, nominees, therefore, must answer information on real property over four separate forms in three different time periods designating three separate classes of owners and starting on at least two separate types of transactions. This example represents just one of the numbers of complex inquiries that we want to help with in developing NFO.

Just as a basic description of what NFO does and what it doesn't do: first, the software is a private project. It is not sponsored by the government and therefore has the good fortune of not having to go through the Paperwork Reduction Act and all of the various other things that eventually, the development of such software will have to go through. It is, in fact, a private attempt to help on a public problem and to do that by demonstrating that, in fact, it can be done. As Paul pointed out, there are several private and public agencies who had a good idea that it couldn't be done.

It employs an open architecture and nonproprietary solutions, thus making it easy to modify and adapt to service. And as someone who has been advising companies and private and public institutions since the early 1990s on the development of software and solutions for software and particularly among government institutions, one of the biggest problems that institutions have always had is the reliance upon proprietary software solutions.

Often, what that means is you get a proprietary software solution. It ages; and you are stuck with that solution. You spend millions of dollars, as the National Archives has done, for example, upgrading their software until eventually, it becomes useless, and there are several Presidential libraries that have important documents--the Carter Library in particular and its Congressional liaison records--that were kept entirely on proprietary software which no longer exists because the man who wrote the software for them died, and nobody's been able to figure out how to crack the code in the software.

Despite having online in its name, the software is used on the nominee's own machine without access to the Internet or other external resources. It is, therefore, reasonably secure. Next, because it has separable file structure, something I will demonstrate in a moment, NFO is portable. That means its data can be transferred electronically when that capability gets developed in government. It is compliant with a number of database programs, and its database is mutable, meaning it can be saved and archived, and the files can be swapped out, something I will also demonstrate in a little bit.

The software is programmed to be used on PC and on Macintosh platform. It utilizes an approach that permits the nominee to enter data once and to have that information transferred among 1,541 separate inquiries, which is the sum total of all of the programming that these 16 programmers in India have had to develop.

It produces output identical to currently-used forms. A copy of the output from the currently-accepted SF-86, which is the national security background check of the FBI, is in your packet along with the NFO version, which was produced by the software just last night. And if you hold them up to the light, except for the differences where NFO has populated the form, they are virtually identical.

That ends the PowerPoint part of the demonstration.

Now, unfortunately, I have a problem in working this particular piece of hardware to get to the software, so you'll have to bear with me while I try to manipulate on-screen this--they disabled my mouse. That wasn't it.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: What I'm going to do for you, as soon as I can get the mouse up here, is launch NFO for you so you can see how the program works.

We're going to start with the basic program.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: The thing behind me is--

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Almost there.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: What we're going to do is launch the software in its initial mode, where all of the forms have been blank, and we'll show you how to go through an initial entry of data. Then, we're going to shut down NFO. I'm going to show you how the information is transferred from one area to another. Then, we're going to shut down NFO; we're going to throw away the basic data files and bring in what are called the portable files, which allows us to archive the data.

And there are a couple of advantages of using this particular approach. One is since one of the forms that all of the nominees have to fill out is the SF-278; that's also a form that every member of the Executive Branch above GS-15 has to fill out every year. And so, one of the advantages of using this software is once you have been nominated, and you've gone through the process; you've filled out these forms, you have the data for your next SF-278 filing available for you on your machine. All you have to do is fire up NFO; make a few changes and print it out and send it in again.

In addition, if you are nominated and put up for a position and, for some reason, don't end up with that position, you can fire up NFO and make the changes in your data and apply for a new position if the President so desires to nominate you to some other position.

MR. : When do you expect the software to be ready?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: That's an interesting question. Here are the elements. Primarily, the key data entry for all of this is the personal data statements used by the White House, and the current White House is in the process of deciding whether or not it's going to use the Clinton administration personal data statements. Typically, the personal data statements of the administrations don't change that much, and so, we're hopeful that they'll decide that they're going to continue that.

However, and we can talk about this in a little bit, there are various strategies for reforming the process, one of which is what I called unilateral disarmament, which is the White House gives up using the personal data statement. And if they do that, then, there will be a significant lag in the development of the program as we adjust to what the White House wants. And the main mission here is to produce something that nominees can actually use, and as the Senate is already changing forms, and we're adjusting to those already, the White House also wants to change its personal data statement, that will delay it.

Currently, we're en route to delivery. We're just waiting now for the White House to make a decision.

This is the initial entry point. As you can see below, there are several, if I can get the laser to work, there are several areas here where you can restructure your forms once you've started a process. You can jump into the middle of the forms once you've already begun and have gone off and come back, and you can also write out a portable file.

The advantage of writing out a portable file is that it allows us to email the entire population of forms that you've filled out for the government and produced in hard copy; allow you to email those to whomever you wish, one of whom might be the White House Office of Personnel, which will then allow them to populate their database, Telemagic, which is what they use to maintain their personal data.

This is the first time that that capacity has ever been made available, and we've worked quite closely with the Bush transition team, as we did with the Gore transition team, to make this possible.

So this is the original data entry place, and let me just populate this quickly for you.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Come on. Just a little closer.

[Laughter.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Now, the software builds what's called a workstream, which takes a little bit of time to load. But what it's doing is it is identifying what the Senate Committee on Commerce; what the 278, the FBI and the White House all require in common and then develops the linkages between forms so that when you fill in an answer on one part, it will transfer that information to the appropriate places and the other committee forms or the other forms, and obviously, the speed at which it does all that depends on the processor. And here, we're using, just for the record, a Pentium II processor, which is a typical laptop, not a high-end machine.

Now, you can already see that the program has begun to transfer data; already, form elements have already been filled in. In addition, though, a workstream has been built on this side so that you can keep track of where you are in the development of data. Black is the screen that you're at; red are screens that you haven't completed; orange are screens that you've only partially completed, and greens are screens that you've completely completed.

That's important to make that distinction, because several of the agencies require that all questions on the form be answered, even if it is simply to say none. You have to answer every element of a form, otherwise the counsel kicks it back to be redone. So one of the things that we've tried to do is make sure that the software will let you know, won't let you print out mistakenly a form that hasn't been completed.

At this point, I am going to stop NFO, relaunch it with a portable file that's already been populated so you can see some of the data elements transferred from one element to another, especially the more complicated ones having to do with financial disclosure. I apologize that it takes so long to work this mouse.

The process for repopulating the form is actually quite simple. You keep, for example, your records stored. Ms. Gwaltney [sp.] has her records stored in this folder here, which we'll then open.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Now, we paste them into the file, and we relaunch NFO, and NFO thinks it has been working on this for quite a long time. It builds up a workstream that's been predefined in Ms. Gwaltney's files, and, in fact, it remembers where she last finished completing her forms and will jump to that area. Then, we'll jump back to one of the more complex problems, which is the transference of asset information.

[Pause.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: One of the advantages of the Macintosh version of the software is that it has little devices that spin around when you're waiting, so at least you know the thing hasn't frozen up.

[Pause.]

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: No, you can't fill them out simultaneously. You have to maintain the integrity of the one set of data. In other words, there's a set of files that maintains your data, and you can't--

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Right. I have a sneaking suspicion this has failed, as we're back to the same screen, the same work area that we were in. And if that's the case, I'm going to have to stop the demonstration here, and you're just going to have to take my word for it: we can populate these files with our portable files. It's taking too long for this to work.

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: That could be.

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: If you enter that one, and as you enter the data, it transfers it to the--we have a complex grid behind this for the programmers. As you enter the data, it reads that [inaudible] the information to where it needs to go.

In addition, one of the things that I'm going to show you is that because of some innovations that were worked out in India, the software actually allows you to make these distinctions between your property, your wife's property, your dependent children's property or property if you're in, for instance, Texas, which is a community property state, it will make distinctions between the different types of property.

And when you're asked by the FBI for only the property that you would own or that you own in a community property state, it will only report that data, and it won't report the data from the dependent children or from your spouse if it's not a community property state. And it does that all behind the scenes while you're entering.

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: You're entering that data, so the end product will be [inaudible] four different forms that are filled out?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: That is correct; actually, the end product is you press print, and it asks you in what order you want to print them out. So, you may, for example, decide that you, for example, in the Clinton administration, one of the requirements was the personal data statement be turned in within 24 hours. Well, obviously, that was [inaudible] to do, but if you don't have much of a personal data statement, you can do that; you can print that form out. Then, you can go back and continue [inaudible] the rest of the forms.

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: All of the forms that are populated, all of the forms--many of the Senate committees do not require forms. They only have questionnaires, and it's like in academics, it's like taking a comprehensive exam. You type out the question, and then, you answer it for [inaudible]. But where there are real forms involved, the objective here is to produce a form that when the Senate committee or the FBI or the White House gets that back populated, they won't know whether it's a form they sent you in hard copy or not.

And the way that we do that, as in your agency and in other agencies, we create a PDF file.

And then, the program populates that PDF file [inaudible] for the 278, we're using your agency's file that you created and very graciously made available to us the version that we could program.

QUESTION: [Off-mike].

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: That's right.

QUESTION: But it will only go to one place.

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: That's right.

QUESTION: Now, if you're only filling it out for the White House [inaudible] personal data statement, how do you know you don't have to answer that question?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: The software builds the workstream by form.

QUESTION: Okay.

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: So that first group of questions you'll be answering are the personal data statement. And actually, you can see in the workstream over here, PDS is the personal data statement. The next one down is the SF-86, which is the next one you have to turn in, which is the FBI national security background check and then the 278, which is OGE's financial disclosure statement; and then, the last one is the Commerce Committee. So you will always know from your [inaudible] list where you are in the process.

QUESTION: Is there any interaction with the various recipients of these forms that they will use the data directly as opposed to PDF format?

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: None of the agencies are ready to take electronic submissions. No agencies are. I mean, think about how difficult it is for the IRS to, you know, 30 percent of the etaxes that are filed never make it to the IRS or never get processed properly at the IRS. And that was one of the initial problems when etax [inaudible].

Submitting government forms electronically is extremely difficult, because you have to protect the integrity of the process as well as the security of the process. So there are no agencies that are ready to take them electronically, and we early on decided that the only thing we could do would be to create forms that would be printed out and would be [inaudible] revision [inaudible].

And also, as a matter of fact, most of these forms require you to sign them. One of the things the White House has been considering is requiring you to notarize some of the forms. That's a technique that they developed in Texas that they felt would indemnify them from a nominee who has lied or made a mistake. So obviously, since electronic signatures are much more difficult to generate, and electronic notary publics are impossible to generate, those are difficulties that the government [inaudible].

MR. ORNSTEIN: Okay; thank you very much; thanks very much, Terry.

We knew that this was a complicated process when we began it, but we had no idea how complicated it would be, and under very difficult and adverse circumstances picking it up [inaudible] extreme, there's a lot of other elements, and without unlimited funding, this is an extraordinary outcome. We are all--I think the country will end up being grateful to Terry and Martha, to these programmers who are available for other complicated [inaudible] as well.

[Laughter.]

PROFESSOR SULLIVAN: Let me also add in terms of the difficulty, just as another testament to how hard these people have worked: originally, the entire process was to be programmed at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, which is the best school of library science and information science in the country.

And it just so happens that not even a year ago yet, the lead faculty member got very ill and had to drop out, and the entire programming effort stopped at the School of Information Science.
The Boston people have picked up this programming effort not only in midstream but in midcatastrophe last summer and have worked, those 16 people, 12 hours a day, six days a week developing the software on a crash program. They've just done a terrific job.

And as Norm knows, because Norm and Paul have put up the money from their two projects generously to step in in the breach when this catastrophe happened, they're doing it on very, very little money.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, we know what should be done to streamline this process so that the next generation will be much easier. The Twentieth Century Fund Task Force some years ago; Cal MacKenzie, who's in the audience, was the director of it; came up with a set of recommendations which are there ready to be pulled off the shelf. The American Bar Association has others. There are a number of ways in which we could improve this process.
We will continue to work to make that happen, and we will continue to work to make sure that for many of the people who will come on stream in this administration this year and maybe not till next, they'll have the opportunity to use this software at least to make their lives easier and to reduce those barriers to entry and streamline the time frame a little bit.

Thank you all for coming, and thanks again to Donna Shalala and Dick Thornburgh.

[Applause.]

[Whereupon, the meeting was concluded.]

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