ALL OF W'S GOOD IDEAS WILL BE BACK IN VOGUE NOW THAT THEY AREN'T COMING FROM HIM:

Unions Angered as Bush Further Limits Eligibility: Order Affects National Security Workers (Spencer S. Hsu, 12/03/08, Washington Post)

Government unions yesterday criticized a White House executive order that bars certain workers at five federal departments from joining a union because they are engaged in intelligence gathering, investigations and other national security work. [...]

White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said President Bush signed the order Monday to reflect intelligence and homeland security agency reorganizations since he took office and "to make sure we are able to effectively carry out those primary functions that are vital to our national security."

Executive Order 12171, issued by President Jimmy Carter in the 1979, allows the president to exclude workers engaged in national security from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program. Bush's order marked its 12th amendment.

In Praise of Patronage: The executive branch needs more of it, not less. (Paul Musgrave, Dec. 2, 2008, Slate)

What the executive branch needs is more patronage, not less.

Despite all of the talk of the resurgence of the imperial presidency, contemporary presidents actually have surprisingly modest powers when it comes to staffing the government. For most of American history, presidents enjoyed much greater power to hire and fire federal employees, from Cabinet secretaries to rural postmasters. True, many of those officials were subject to Senate confirmation, and the realities of politics have always made dismissing officials a dangerous business. Nonetheless, the president could remove many officeholders at will. [...]

In a democracy, however, sometimes rapid and fundamental change is both necessary and sustained by the popular will. (Think of the New Deal—or the Reagan Revolution, if you prefer.) If the president can't make such changes directly in the agencies, then he will attempt to go outside the system by making the White House staff responsible for policy management. Having members of the White House staff, who are remote from the departments and entirely dependent on the president's favor for their influence, in charge of operations is the worst of all possible worlds. But given the inflexibility of civil service rules and the difficulty of navigating the Senate confirmation process, it's no surprise that presidents often resort to the creation of yet another "czar"—or the legal-because-we-say-it-is "recess appointment"—to fill government ranks.

Making more positions open to political appointees (and a greater proportion of those to positions that wouldn't require Senate confirmation) would place greater responsibility on the president and his agency heads. Short of shrinking the government and its responsibilities, there is no alternative if the link between voters' choice of president and the president's management of the government is to be preserved.

Civil service reform was a disaster because the goo-goos failed to understand that the bureaucracy is itself a power-seeking institution of precisely the type that the Republic was designed to guard against. Every officeholder in the Executive branch should be an at-will employee.

Not the least of the benefits would be that presidents would be able to get rid of agencies by just not staffing them and the difficulty of managing huge turnover would force reduction in the size of government.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 3, 2008 9:02 AM