Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Augur Hawk (Buteo rufofuscus) in Kenya, 1974.
How do you clean house in Washington?
The good news is that it's easier than you think.
The top folks in any Administration are Schedule C appointees, and their tenure is up with the Administration that appointed them
Just below the Schedule C appointees are the folks who really run Washington, year in and year out: the Senior Executive Service or SES.
The Senior Executive Service was created in 1978 to provide continuity of care and institutional memory from one Administration to the next. These are the folks who know how to get things done and who know why certain thing cannot (or should not) be done.
A continuing problem in any Administration is that lower-level Schedule C appointees may try to transfer over to an SES pay grade. This is not always bad (competence comes in all political stripes), but it is generally discouraged.
So what will Barack Obama's cabinet look like?
It is being assembled now, but one thing is clear: The test is competence and expertise, not political cronyism. The word has already gone out that ambassadors will not be recruited from the high-dollar donor list as was done with Bush and others, and the word has also gone out that new blood and news ideas and energy are valued. While we can expect to see quite a few Clinton-era folks in the Obama Administration, I also expect to see a lot of young hyper-educated can-do public policy technocrats running things on a day to day basis.
Look at the Obama campaign for a sign of what is to come: Smart young people you have never heard of working quietly and seamlessly, and with considerable internal discipline, to get things done. "There is no drama with Obama," note the mechanics who have been part of the inner workings of the machine: Messages are designed to support goals, and a task list is developed to achieve the goal. It's not a cook book, but it is a play book followed again and again. There are few surprises, and while the team is energetic and adaptive, it is not easily sidetracked by loud noises or hand wringing from the sidelines.
Individual cabinet appointments are to come, but the initial calls are excellent. No word yet on who will run the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service, or the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, but you can bet it will be a notable improvement on every score.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Hillary Clinton supporter, may be tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
RFK Jr. has served as an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (an excellent group in my opinion), and used to work for Riverkeepers in New York where his work to protect the Hudson River got him tapped by Time magazine as one of the "Heroes for the Planet."
Of special interest to the folks who read this blog is the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a licensed falconer (click for video). He used to be the head of the New York State Falconnry Association, and he wrote the manual and test for falconry used in New York State.
For other names being tossed around, see this piece from The Guardian entitled: Obama's potential green team.
How do you clean house in Washington?
The good news is that it's easier than you think.
The top folks in any Administration are Schedule C appointees, and their tenure is up with the Administration that appointed them
Just below the Schedule C appointees are the folks who really run Washington, year in and year out: the Senior Executive Service or SES.
The Senior Executive Service was created in 1978 to provide continuity of care and institutional memory from one Administration to the next. These are the folks who know how to get things done and who know why certain thing cannot (or should not) be done.
A continuing problem in any Administration is that lower-level Schedule C appointees may try to transfer over to an SES pay grade. This is not always bad (competence comes in all political stripes), but it is generally discouraged.
So what will Barack Obama's cabinet look like?
It is being assembled now, but one thing is clear: The test is competence and expertise, not political cronyism. The word has already gone out that ambassadors will not be recruited from the high-dollar donor list as was done with Bush and others, and the word has also gone out that new blood and news ideas and energy are valued. While we can expect to see quite a few Clinton-era folks in the Obama Administration, I also expect to see a lot of young hyper-educated can-do public policy technocrats running things on a day to day basis.
Look at the Obama campaign for a sign of what is to come: Smart young people you have never heard of working quietly and seamlessly, and with considerable internal discipline, to get things done. "There is no drama with Obama," note the mechanics who have been part of the inner workings of the machine: Messages are designed to support goals, and a task list is developed to achieve the goal. It's not a cook book, but it is a play book followed again and again. There are few surprises, and while the team is energetic and adaptive, it is not easily sidetracked by loud noises or hand wringing from the sidelines.
Individual cabinet appointments are to come, but the initial calls are excellent. No word yet on who will run the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service, or the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, but you can bet it will be a notable improvement on every score.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Hillary Clinton supporter, may be tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
RFK Jr. has served as an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (an excellent group in my opinion), and used to work for Riverkeepers in New York where his work to protect the Hudson River got him tapped by Time magazine as one of the "Heroes for the Planet."
Of special interest to the folks who read this blog is the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a licensed falconer (click for video). He used to be the head of the New York State Falconnry Association, and he wrote the manual and test for falconry used in New York State.
For other names being tossed around, see this piece from The Guardian entitled: Obama's potential green team.
To see how incredibly competetent and on the ball Team Obama is, check out http://Change.gov, which is a website launched by the Obama team's Presidential Transition Project which documents the transition into power and solicits ideas from the public. This was done on Day One.
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RFK Jr. at the University of Charleston, WV in 2002
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