IRS scandal highlights leadership vacancies
The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday hears from two men it could attempt to hold accountable for possible political discrimination carried out by the IRS: outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller and former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman.
Neither of them, however, will be of any help as the IRS attempts to right its ship and restore public trust in the agency. That job will -- for now -- fall to Daniel Werfel, the senior White House budget officer that President Obama has appointed to take over as the agency's new acting commissioner. Werfel begins his new job on Wednesday, and like Miller, he'll be acting without the confirmation of the Senate.
The federal government relies on thousands of politically-appointed officials, but a number of agencies -- like the IRS this year -- are left with temporary leaders without the imprimatur of the White House. From 1977 to 2005, top positions in Cabinet departments and executive agencies were vacant or filled with an acting official between 20 to 25 percent of the time, according to Anne Joseph O'Connell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. With time, the numbers are only getting worse, O'Connell told CBSNews.com: The Obama administration has been relatively slow to announce nominees, and the confirmation process has grown slower.
"Both the White House and the Senate need to move faster," she said. "We have a country to govern and few people to do it."
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It's the president's constitutional right to appoint leaders in the executive branch, but as the government has grown in size, so have the number of presidential appointees. There are currently around 1,200, of which about 800 must get Senate confirmation.
Presidential appointees, explained James Pfiffner, a public policy professor at George Mason University, are the people with real authority in the executive branch.
"They can hire people, fire people, they can commit funds, and build buildings," he explained. "If somebody is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, they have official authority to make policy in the executive branch. If Congress wants them to testify, they can really hold them over the coals."
By contrast, when career bureaucrats are tapped to serve as acting leaders (as Steven Miller was in the IRS), they're reticent to make those significant decisions. "It's difficult for them to assert much authority, and they don't want to stick their necks out too far, because their superior may come in and reverse it," Pfiffner said.
At the same time, career officials can possess a deep knowledge of their agency and potentially the management expertise needed to run it.
That's why when Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., wrote to outgoing acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank last month requesting she get the White House to fill the record number of vacancies in her agency, he also wrote, "I would also suggest that these positions might be better filled with career employees to ensure continuity of leadership as Administration change and to minimize vacancy durations."
The White House has gone for months, Wolf noted, without appointing anyone to lead several arms of the Commerce Department, including the Census Bureau, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As chair of the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee in the House, Wolf told CBSNews.com that all the vacancies have made it difficult for the Commerce Department to address issues like furloughing employees in the wake of the sequester. The administration, he said, has had more than enough time to appoint people.
"They won the election, this is the second term," he said.
The administration has made some progress in recent days -- the Senate last week confirmed Ernest Moniz to serve as Energy Secretary and Marilyn Tavenner to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Still, in an illustration of just how slow the process can be, Tavenner is the first Senate-confirmed CMS administrator since 2006.
The last Senate-confirmed CMS administrator, Mark McClellan, told CBSNews.com he didn't expect the agency to go for so long without an official leader. The CMS, with an estimated 2014 budget of more than $854 billion, impacts just about everyone, he pointed out.
"If you're not a Medicare beneficiary, one of your closest loved ones is," he said. For that reason, "it gets a lot of congressional attention, and I think that does complicate the confirmation process."
Republicans are likely to hold up the confirmation process for some of Mr. Obama's nominees in other high-profile agencies. Gina McCarthy, Mr. Obama's nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, and Thomas Perez, his labor secretary nominee, were both approved at the Senate committee level -- but only by a party-line vote. It's unclear how their nominations will proceed in the full Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is considering changing Senate rules so that presidential nominees aren't subject to filibusters, his office confirms to CBSNews.com.
McClellan said it would be helpful if there were a streamlined process in the Senate, but he pointed out that Republicans aren't holding up nominees like Moniz or Tavenner. "It is possible to get bipartisan action, it would just be nice to find a way to get that sooner," he said.
Some government watchdogs, meanwhile, are specifically calling out the administration for the current vacancies in the offices of Inspectors General (IG). Inspectors general provide independent oversight of an agency, holding it accountable to the public. It was a Treasury Department inspector general's report, for instance, that prompted the IRS to come clean about its misconduct.
In spite of the critical role they play, there are eight agencies that have either no IG or an acting IG, according to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). The State Department has been without a permanent IG for more than five years.
Permanent IGs, POGO's Joe Newman explained to CBSNews.com, have to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. "It gives that person a little more job security, to act independently without fear that you're going to lose your job, that you're going to make your boss angry," he said. "An acting IG is often picked from the staff of the agency and is someone who knows they're in a temporary slot -- so they often, we believe, are not trying to cause waves. I'm sure they do good work, but it's just not the same."
