Happy anniversary, Mr. President!
We've only confirmed just over half of your appointees, disabling your management capacity, and then blame everything on you for not solving our collective action problems (at least those of us who didn't already blame you from day one). Mwwwaaahhh!
ps- Don't worry, you needn't manage. We've left corporate interests to run your bureaucracy though complex contracting schemes anyway! And as Harold Seidman points out, the public bureaucracy's parallel private bureaucracy--businesses that perform contract work for government--are heavily interested in maintaining the status quo. For the politically astute (but not policy-astute), using private companies also helps reduce the number of civil servants on the public payroll, as Clinton was well aware. Yet as Paul Light has shown, it exponentially increases the number of total workers on the payroll indirectly. The tangible and measurable number of total federal workers is an important consideration for presidents who need to pursue policy under conditions of anti-public-service sentiment from the public. The downside to these arrangements is, of course, loss of accountability and the resistance of private firms to changes in the public bureaucracy. So, good luck with all that, Mr. President!
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