Suchergebnisse

"In this volume, resulting from the Washington Forum on the Role of the White House Chief of Staff held in 2000 in Washington, D.C., twelve of the fifteeen men who have held the office of chief of staff discuss among themselves and with a select group of participants the challenges, achievements, and failures of their time in that role. Their purpose is to find lessons in governing that will help future chiefs of staff prepare to assume the office and organize the staffs they will lead."--Jacket

Can the current presidential appointments process be improved? This essay highlights three kinds of problems: inexperienced appointees, a lengthening process, and tedious and adversarial inquiry. While the essay side‐steps trying to affect the prerogatives of institutions involved in the tussle over appointments, it concentrates on improving the support of presidential personnel operations and the process of inquiry that nominees face, and it identifies patterns of repetitiveness among the roughly 2,800 details that a nominee must provide in responding to some 295 individual questions in nine categories. The most adversarial and tedious categories of inquiry include identifying personal background, reporting on criminal entanglements, and assaying potential conflicts of interest. Five strategies are identified for better matching the needed experience in the White House to the demands of presidential personnel. These changes would indirectly shorten the nomination and confirmation process, and the author makes three important recommendations for structuring inquiry that could reduce the adversarial burden on nominees by nearly a third.

This article begins a series on data resources available online. It begins with a new data set on public opinion and presidential standing.

That the White House had no institutional memory—the problem
prompting the White House Interview Program (WHIP)—represents just
one area in which the White House 2001 Project affected the
presidential transition. In appointments, the Pew Charitable Trusts
identified a second transition problem. In 1996, the Twentieth
Century Fund produced a blue-ribbon study outlining several issues
undermining the appeal of government appointment. The study,
entitled Obstacle Course: The Report of the Twentieth
Century Task Force on Presidential Appointment Process,
convinced Pew to focus on the recruitment of presidential nominees.
As part of that initiative, they contemplated a computer program
that would reduce the burden placed on nominees by filing numerous,
intrusive, and repetitive questionnaires.

Nothing challenges a new President's team more than its need to fill
out the executive. The White House 2001 Project played a significant
role in this aspect of the presidential transition. Its White House
Interview Program provided useful information gleaned from the
rarified ranks of White House personnel, and its Nomination
Forms Online Program detailed for the first time the
exact particulars of the inquiry process. Already well under way by
the time the Bush team began planning in 1999, the White House 2001
Project provided the Bush staff with details about two of the five
great transition challenges affecting personnel: scale and
complexity.

The Bush transition team faced several challenges including issues of scale & complexity. Scale presented the Bush team with organizational challenges while managerial problems further complicated the transition. Of particular concern was the nomination & appointee process. The Bush transition team streamlined the nomination process by reducing by 30% the number of questions & inquiries nominees had to answer, thereby diminishing intrusive inquiry. This technique, suggested by the White House 2001 Project, was just one of several modifications that were recommended. Other simple changes suggested by the White House 2001 Project are likely to further simplify the process in the future. 2 Tables, 48 References. K. Larsen

The recruitment of presidential nominees has long been an arduous process. In working with the Pew Charitable Trusts, the U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the James A. Baker Instit, & the Presidential Appointee Initiative, the White House Interview Program (WHIP) was able to create software: Nomination Forms Online (NFO). This software considerably reduces the time that presidential nominees must spend filling out forms, answering questionnaires, & providing the personal information required by Senate confirmation committees. Though not fully implemented by the Bush administration, the NFO software did influence the transition period. 3 References. K. Larsen