Cabinet Secretaries: What Do They Do All Day?
Merrill, Amy
Cabinet Secretaries: What Do They Do All Day? by Amy Merrill The federal government is the only place in the world where a simple, white three-by-five card is an important badge of status. It...
...Staff aides, new to government but filled with good intentions, came up with the requisite number of bright ideas-town meetings, telephone call-in sessions, and plans to spend a day in the bowels of the bureaucracy...
...What about the one third of the day that is theoretically devoted to running the government...
...If he is of Cabinet rank, often there is a press conference after lunch...
...This is their forum to air their narrow concerns...
...With every minute of their days filled, high government officials don’t have time to talk to the career bureaucrats, who actually know what is going on...
...This left less than one third of a ten-hour day for dealing with the complicated process of running a vast government bureaucracy...
...Califano t o o k o n e look at the unfamiliar face of the GS-14, asked, “Who are you...
...this is their opportunity to raise anew all the detailed points they made in the memos that were never answered...
...They invariably do...
...you do at the office all day...
...The original retinue, augmented by most of the briefers, then piles into three government cars and heads for the second stop on the schedule...
...Louis, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, all within a 24-tiour period...
...The word cover-up is a bit harsh, but honesty is not exactly the watchword for these visits...
...Then, mercifully, it is time for lunch...
...But what does seeing a program mean...
...But when Andrus visits a national park or Harris inspects a housing project they create as much commotion as when John Travolta visits a disco...
...If it is a jobs program, you look at people working...
...Sometimes someone learns something useful at a briefing...
...There are three differences between this briefing and one in Washington: the office furnishings are more spartan, the briefing is even more laden with meaningless detail, and the briefers are even more nervous to be in the august presence of the dignitary from Washington...
...Maybe that’s because high-ranking government officials simply don’t know what’s going on in their own departments...
...Projects like this take time, and federal officials have to stick to their iron-clad schedules...
...On a typical day, his three-by-five c a r d s might look something like this: 8:OO-Breakfast meeting to review for House Appropriations subcommittee testimony 9:OO-Officials of important special interest association 9:30-Car to Rayburn House Office Building for appropriations testimony 1 1 :OO-lnterview with reporter for The New York Times 11:45-Photo session with Cystic Fibrosis Poster Child 12:OO-Car to Washington Hilton for luncheon speech at a convention 1:15-Car to White House to meet with p r e s i d e n t i a l aides to lay groundwork for tomorrow’s meeting with President 2:30-Top speechwriter to discuss upcoming speeches 2:45--Interview with candidate for Inspector General 3: 15-Briefing by assistant secretary and staff on Department’s computer capacity 4: 15-Under secretary (personal matter) 4:30--Solicitor and deputy assistant e c r e t a r y t o review upcoming regulations 5:30-Courtesy visit of German industrial attache 5:45-Briefing by press secretary on tomorrow morning's news conference 6:15--Car to Italian embassy for cocktail party Can't Drop By and Chat .This is the schedule of a serious, busy, dedicated man...
...Meanwhile, in the labyrinths of the federal government, life will go on, as it always has, regardless of who is occupying the fancy offices in Washington...
...Eight-year-olds invariably ask their fathers, “Daddy, what did Amy Merrill is the pseudonym for a government official...
...There are all the leading political appointees of a department arrayed around a long conference table...
...The President conducts biweekly Cabinet meetings...
...It is routine for five Cabinet secretaries and four senior White House aides to make speeches during a three-day convention of the League of Cities or National Association of Counties...
...One reason congressional testimony is about as interesting as the Vladivostok phone directory is that it is written by agency lawyers, who must clear every paragraph with the humorless fellows over at OMB t o make sure it contains no original insight or hint of human feeling...
...Rather, they are triggered by the need to respond to one of the four outside constituencies...
...Jimmy Carter had the same idea when he took office...
...Cabinet secretaries have been known to give speeches in St...
...Hours can be spent circulating memos, talking with White House aides, and trying to develop a consensus within the administration in an effort to orchestrate a 15-minute meeting with the Leader of the Free World...
...Dealings with the press can consist of an elaborate exchange of information, and there are skilled officials who learn far more than they reveal...
...The official takes on all the mannerisms of a political candidate: he asks banal questions of the participants, such as whether they enjoy the program...
...Unfortunately, governing has become synonymous with attending meetings and initialing staff-written memos...
...I keep waiting to hear or read of an agency head who went desk-by-desk through the bureaucracy he administers asking people what they do all day...
...Armed with charts and other visual aids, the bureaucrats describe the functioning of some program in the most minute detail...
...The problem is celebrity...
...Alfred Kahn’s selection as anti-inflation czar, which seems to be the best current example of the Peter Principle at work, was undoubtedly influenced by the glowing press clips Kahn received while head of the Civil Aeronautics Board...
...Even when an official tries to pare his speaking schedule down to a few a month, he is always subject to last minute requests to substitute for some other official...
...But what contact a Cabinet secretary has with the outside world is filtered through these four external constituencies...
...Out-of-town speeches are in a class by themselves...
...Cabinet secretaries rarely are kept waiting more than an hour, but assistant secretaries, who command far less deference, can spend entire days being treated with the same courtesy that the average citizen receives when he is called for jury duty...
...News and World Report’s recent cover story ranking the Cabinet, even though it was apparent that their ratings were skewed by the magazine’s conservative bias...
...The Secretary, fighting to keep awake, asks a few perfunctory questions...
...The briefing invariably runs late, and around 11:30 the first stop on the planned itinerary is dropped...
...It is amazing the number of administration speakers that an important special interest group can demand...
...But even then, it is only accidental when the official gets any sense of what is happening in the field...
...He gazes intently at some incomprehensible machine...
...Most of these speeches are colossal wastes of everyone’s time...
...The federal government needs The Washington Post and The NeMi York Times for the same reason t h a t t h e Russian bureaucracy ne e d s Pra vdu a n d Izvestia...
...His only free time during the day was spent in the back of his chauffeur-driven Mercury Monarch reading memos between appointments...
...Last summer, Stu Eizenstat and Joan Mondale convened a meeting in the Roosevelt Room to launch a White House review of federal arts policy...
...Everyone in the administration scrutinized U.S...
...The visiting official is seated between the two people with the grandest titles and the least firsthand knowledge of how t h e program operates...
...In some ways, Congress can be an even more demanding taskmaster...
...Whenever a scheduled meeting ran short, his personal staff scurried into his office for a few quick conferences...
...This is usually accidental...
...Jimmy Carter has been known to call Cabinet secretaries when critical articles on their programs run in papers like The Chicago Tribune...
...Since most special interest groups are never satisfied with the record of the administration in their area of parochial concern, it is hard to understand what would be lost if high government officials started saying no to these obligatory invitations...
...Mostly you just walk, followed by an entourage that has grown by now to about 25 people...
...About a year ago, a high-ranking administration official visited a program office that had been known to have a huge backlog of unopened mail...
...In our model day, Congress ate up about 25 per cent of the time, special interest groups grabbed another 20 per cent, the White House got 15 per cent and the press was allocated another ten per cent...
...Almost all of what the White House staff knows about the operations of federal programs comes from the press...
...Yet amid t h e vast journalistic coverage of the government, there is little concern over how anyone, except the President, spends his days...
...Special interest groups are often too wedded to federal programs to blow the whistle on flagrant waste and mismanagement...
...Often the briefing is augmented by a slide show...
...However, briefings do give staff aides the opportunity to tell reporters, “Oh, yes, the Secretary was briefed on t h a t j u s t last week...
...The solution would seem to be that high-ranking officials should spend more time outside of Washington talking candidly to the people running programs...
...Cabinet members like Cecil Andrus and Pat Harris are not mobbed by autographseekers when they walk through airports, of course...
...Most of what the secretary of HEW knows about the Agriculture Department comes from reading the newspapers...
...Cabinet secretaries serve at the pleasure of the President, a fact of life that the White House staff never lets them fully forget...
...Unfortunately, these ad hoc meetings rarely have anything to do with running the government...
...An entire article could be written about the tyranny of having to attend government meetings...
...The Tyranny of Meetings Obviously, the person running a major federal department should not operate in a vacuum...
...It is a truism that nothing useful has ever been accomplished in a room filled with 40 people...
...The morning then begins in earnest with a briefing-this one conducted by the regional and local administrators...
...Reputations in Washington also depend on the press...
...Cabinet secretaries are invariably asked to pinch-hit for the President and lesser officials are asked to substitute for Cabinet members...
...He was impressed during his visit by how neat and orderly the mailroom seemed to be...
...As pedestrian as they may seem, these cards are at the heart of what is wrong with the federal government...
...White House officials talk only to other White House officials, Cabinet members, their high-ranking aides, and a few special pleaders from the outside world...
...If it is a housing program, you trudge up stairs...
...And, so on through an elaborate and formal pecking order...
...Cynics would dismiss the courting of the press as an indication of the large ego-need of public officials...
...He asks a few more questions and gets predigested answers...
...As long as power depends on the appearance of being listened to by the President, and as long as newspapers are the primary conveyors of that appearance, high officials will always make time for reporters . The fourth group, the special interests, like to have government officials make luncheon speeches...
...Unorthodox ideas are always the first thing erased from the schedule when someone demands that a meeting be held or a speech given...
...Communication at these convention luncheons is all onewaythe speaker is escorted to the dais, pol\itely tries to eat a lunch of chicken and green peas with baked alaska for dessert, talks in a predictable vein for 25 minutes, sits down to polite applause, ,and then is whisked to his waiting car...
...Therefore, Cabinet members conduct biweekly staff meetings...
...Leading administration spokesmen often spend more time in the ballroom at the Washington Hilton than the hotel’s banquet manager...
...Unless you are Zbig Brzezinski or Stu Eizenstat, time with the President is very limited...
...Briefings to prepare for a press conference or congressional testimony are run with a high degree of candor, insight, humor, and focus...
...Yet Anne Wexler used to convene such mass assemblages under the guise of c o o r d i n a t i n g t h e administration’s urban policy...
...A Cabinet s e c r e t a r y can become apoplectic when a leading columnist suggests he is losing his clout with the President...
...If the visiting dignitary is willing to risk offending his hosts, he is sometimes able to sneak...
...There is only one kind of government meeting that is consistently effective...
...and, upon discovering the rank of the man ushered into his presence, ordered him from the room...
...it is the rare agency head who does not fear the wrath of the chairman of his appropriations subcommittee...
...Designed to help top officials control their time, they have created a situation where Cabinet members, White House aides, and the 180-odd officials who comprise the sub-cabinet are captives of their own pre-arranged schedules...
...If it is an education program, it means you walk through classrooms...
...Special interest groups, when they can see beyond t h e i r s o m e t i m e s petty concerns, have the resources to provide government officials with telling critiques of what is actually happening in the field...
...Many of these external commitments are unavoidable...
...One meeting consisted of little more than learning how to fill out weekly reports so the administration could track the urban policy on the White House computer, including a crucial explanation of the difference between task reports and activity reports...
...Captives of the Cards Most Cabinet officials are prisoners of their exalted station in life...
...There are, of course, trips in which officials have t h e i r time b e t t e r allocated or make a determined effort to escape the constraints of their schedule...
...But these small group sessions never seem to work when the topic is running government...
...After the first round of memos, Carter never raised the matter again...
...Even in this year of fiscal austerity, the federal budget is filled with duplicative social welfare programs that are kept in the budget partially because Cabinet secretaries are willing to go to the President to fight for them...
...Highranking government officials tend to talk only to other high-ranking government officials...
...A story, perhaps apocryphal, is told about a briefing conducted for Joe Califano...
...The federal government is a hierarchical institution, and officials, at all levels of the hierarchy, conspire to keep their department head as insulated from reality as possible...
...Actually, it was during some of these impromptu 90-second discussions that many of the concrete decisions of the day were made...
...And the prospects for reform are not especially bright...
...One is always trying to put the best face on events for the White House, Congress, and the press...
...Cabinet secretaries have quickly learned the folly of scheduling an appointment with the President without a fixed agenda...
...A noble gesture, but one that is almost automatically selfdefeating, since each of the career bureaucrats will spend the entire meeting looking for’ approval from their boss, the assistant secretary, before venturing the most innocuous of opinions...
...Assistant secretaries are particularly prone to spend two days in San Francisco and do nothing more than talk to 100 people at a conference and visit the regional office...
...These briefings are often the only time that many career civil servants actually get to see the person who is running their department...
...Cabinet secretaries-and assistant secretarieswaste countless hours each year in congressional committee rooms reading long, staff-written statements in a dull 'monotone...
...Occasionally, a Cabinet member decides to broaden his horizons and asks an assistant secretary to set up a meeting with some of the career bureaucrats...
...Talking To The Bureaucrats One of the first things you learn in government is that the corridors of power are seldom traveled...
...These desultory discussions are generally dominated by those who have the least access to the Cabinet secretary...
...Yet just try to get out of them...
...The domestic staff at the White House and at OMB can put pressure on Cabinet departments to improve ineffective programs...
...It is de rigeur for high-ranking government officials to have their secretaries type their appointments for the day on one of these cards...
...strategy session, Cabinet secretaries will continue to fill t h e i r days with meetings, briefings, speeches, press conferences, and inspection tours, captives of their three-by-five cards, and blissfully ignorant about the agency they are supposed to be running...
...He asked each Cabinet member to send him a memo outlining what they intended to do to keep in close touch with the American people...
...To convey the flow of a day in the life of a Cabinet member, let’s begin with a hypothetical, but realistic schedule for a secretary of a major domestic department...
...Sometimes they don’t even want to...
...It is axiomatic t h a t political appointees come and go, but the bureaucracy endureth forever...
...Jimmy Carter is not a president who encourages people to drop by and chat when they are in the neighborhood...
...In fact, most Cabinet members must devote the predominance of their time to catering to four major external constituencies: the White House, the Congress, the press, and special interest groups...
...The relevant assistant secretary and the deputy assistant secretary accompanied the GS-14 to brief Califano...
...Lunch is in the local Holiday Inn...
...and sometimes these slides are the closest the official comes to the program he has journeyed 1,000 miles to see...
...One of the fictions of Washington is that Cabinet secretaries spend most of their time running their departments...
...The afternoon is a grim replay of the morning...
...The effective careers of many government officials are even shorter than those of punk rock stars and quarterbacks with weak knees...
...Only later did it seep out that 10,000 unacknowledged letters had been hidden in a broom closet in honor of his visit...
...Many of these projects were begun, but quietly abandoned when it became clear that Cabinet members have almost as much difficulty going among the people as the President himself...
...On arriving, the visiting official is ushered into the program director’s office and given-yes!-another briefing...
...away after 15 minutes, and maybe even.,catch a peek at a program...
...Unfortunately, newspaper assignment editors don’t have the same curiosity...
...During the height of the convention season, one has the sense t h a t half the administration is changing planes at O’Hare Airport...
...It is this kind of protocol that paralyzes t h e information flow essential to (though essentially missing from) government...
...These cards are carried in the breast pocket of one’s suit, and when a meeting runs long it is a standard ploy to pull them out, stare at them intently, and say apologetically, “I’m afraid they have me going to the White House at three o’clock...
...Anyone who has seen the prose style of memos to the President can understand why Carter is more apt to react to a well-written article in a major paper...
...Moreover, congressional hearings are run with the same concern for time a s a n AMTRAK train schedule...
...Editorial writers would defend the large amount of time spent on the care and feeding of the press as just another reflection of the public's right to know...
...From there, the dignitary is whisked to the local office of his department or agency, where a handshaking tour among the employees has been scheduled...
...Often this is the time when the mayor or the local congressman makes an appearance...
...The typical inspection tour for a government big-wig begins at, the airport, where the visiting dignitary is met by a retinue of regional administrators, local program managers, and local information officers...
...When the President wants to know about health maintenance organizations, he doesn’t call a bright GS-13 at HEW, he calls Joe Califano...
...In her best faculty senate manner, Juanita Kreps soon had the assembled Cabinet members and other luminaries discussing that pressing topic, “What is culture...
...But, as our hypothetical schedule suggests, government officials rarely encourage these tendencies...
...Assistant secretaries so obscure their wives have trouble remembering their names find themselves fawned over when they spend a day in the field surrounded by their regional employees and those local hustlers who depend on a steady stream of federal largesse for their livelihoods...
...It was on an obscure program, and the person best versed in this arcane area was a lowly GS-14...
...An inquisitive Cabinet secretary calls in one of his assistant secretaries, when he has a question...
...Reality is somewhat different from either of these facile explanations...
...Briefings, especially qt the Cabinet level, are just another species of lairge meetings...
...Congress has been known to run informative oversight hearings...
...Often secretaries are true believers in their own programs and no more want to acknowledge problems than their underlings want to reveal them...
...Briefings begin when an assistant secretary or department head arrives in the Secretary’s office witheleven career bureaucrats in tow...
...Meanwhile, $1 million worth of highpriced government talent sits with blank expressions on their faces trying to remember whether they picked up their clothes at the dry cleaners...
...Until the time comes when they are willing to give the unorthodox idea priority over the 9:OO a.m...
...He is asked how he likes the local program, even though he has spent exactly 47 minutes looking at it...
...These occur when four or five people sit around a table to thrash out a response to a problem that won’t go away...
Vol. 10 • February 1979 • No. 11
