The Presidential Appointee Handbook

Draft Manuscript Available for Subscribers

Word count: 1,580; eight minutes to read.

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Over the last two months I’ve been working on a presidential appointee handbook.

I hoped one would have been been produced by the admin, but that hasn’t happened, and my conversations with some of the folks inside who might know tell me there doesn’t appear to be one in the works.

So I’ve taken the initiative to put together the best advice from the 125,000+ words I’ve published over the last 16 months in this newsletter.

I’ve consolidated the most useful information, along with some new material, into a short book which will be about 18,000 words, and can be read in about 75 minutes.

Funding has been secured from two conservative non-profits for it to be professionally edited, formatted, and printed.

We expect it to be released later this summer.

Free hard copies will be distributed to current presidential appointees and paid subscribers.

For everyone else the book will be available for PDF download and (hopefully) in various e-book formats so you can read it on your Kindle or Nook.

If demand (and funding) exists maybe we’ll even do an audio book version.

I’ve already posted the draft manuscript in the private Google Drive, which is available to subscribers only. There is a link at the end of this newsletter for you immediately past the paywall.

All who read the draft manuscript are welcome to send feedback on ways to improve the final version.

It won’t go to the editor/formatter until sometime in July, so you have a couple weeks. Get any recommendations in by July 4th though as I’ll be crashing that weekend to get it done, and expect to turn it in the following week.

The working title is Maxims for Presidential Appointees, but I’m open to suggestions.

Below is the introduction.

If you want to see the full draft manuscript please get a subscription.

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Introduction: Stepping into the Arena

In your hands is a collection of practical insights to help you succeed as an appointee.

It draws from the experiences of those who have walked your path, faced similar obstacles, and learned, sometimes the hard way, how to enact the president’s agenda.

This book has two goals: to shrink your learning curve and expand your impact.

Whether you are at a cabinet agency, a commission, a board, or the White House itself, you are now part of a tradition that stretches back to the founding of the Republic.

Being an appointee is among the most challenging and consequential roles in American public life. It is likely to be one of the most meaningful positions you ever hold.

Having the right ideas and being committed to the president’s policies is not enough to change the direction of the government.

You must also have the requisite integrity, courage, and stamina, plus the intelligence, skills, ability to rapidly learn, and political acumen necessary to make the president’s vision a reality.

The American presidency is often likened to the most powerful job on Earth.

Yet its actual power depends on people like you.

The president can appoint officials, issue executive orders, sign legislation, convene national attention, and set goals for his presidency.

But the implementation of all that relies on the work of the appointees who make up an administration.

The federal government is a massive enterprise.

There are over ten million workers if you include all its civilian, uniformed military, contractor, and grantee employees. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, a compilation of existing rules which govern the conduct of the executive departments and agencies, is over 90,000 pages. More than 400 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies exist, and the federal budget is nearly $7 trillion. If you stacked the money in one dollar bills you could make it to the moon and get three-quarters of the way back.

America is also the world’s largest economy with a gross domestic product of $28 trillion and a national debt of nearly $36 trillion. We are the world’s fourth largest country in terms of territory, its third most populated country (330 million and counting), and maintain the planet’s third largest military, though we’re number one in defense spending, with a footprint in over 180 different countries.

All this the president must protect and defend, manage, and improve.

To do so he relies on approximately 4,000 specially chosen people: his appointees. But the full-time number is less than 2,500, because nearly 1,500 are on part-time boards or commissions, and all available spots are never occupied at one time.

When you do the math and assume every position is filled, there is one appointee for every 1,138 federal civilian and uniformed military workers. The number turns into one in 3,762 if you include contractors and grant employees.

This ratio and the difficult oversight challenge it presents would be less of an issue if every federal worker adhered to their oath office which obligates them to “support and defend the Constitution” and “faithfully discharge the duties of the office of which I am about to enter.”

Unfortunately, many career officials think this oath makes them accountable to no one and they can decide for themselves which lawful orders to follow or not based on personal policy preferences and how they interpret the Constitution.

This set of embedded and unelected bureaucrats call themselves “the Resistance” and with help of the liberal media complex, Democrat politicians, special interest groups, and activist judges, have often been successful in obstructing a Republican president’s agenda.

When directed to implement policies they don’t like these individuals engage in a variety of covert and overt actions designed to hinder the efforts of their elected and appointed leadership, to include 1) withholding information; 2) refusing to implement policies; 3) intentionally delaying; 4) deliberately underperforming; 5) leaking to Congress and the media; and 6) outright insubordination.

The problem is especially acute during Republican administrations because the federal workforce is overwhelmingly Democrat. And the higher you go in the bureaucracy, where true power resides, the more liberal it becomes.

According to a 2021 study by National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a highly influential, non-partisan think tank best known for coming up with start and end dates for recessions, approximately 50% of employees in the career civil service identify as Democrat, with 26% as Republican, and 24% as Independent.

When the NBER examined the Senior Executive Service, the C-suite level executives who manage federal government programs, budgets, and polices, and do most of the decision-making, the number of Democrats vs. Republicans increased to 3-to-1, with 63% identifying as Democrat, 21% Republican, and only 16% as Independent.

There is even more data on the partisan affiliation of career workforce when you consider the money government employees give to political campaigns.

The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks U.S. campaign contributions, found that during the 2020 election cycle 72.63% of all federal employee donations went to Democrats while only 24.15% went to Republicans.

Some federal departments and agencies skewed even higher. Not one had government employees give more money to Republican versus Democrat candidates.

This is the environment Republican presidential appointees must contend with when they enter the executive branch bureaucracy, and why implementing the president’s policies are sometimes so hard to achieve, often don’t get done, or happen slowly.

The president doesn’t have enough hours in the day to do his job of managing a hostile federal bureaucracy. This is why a critical mass of committed and capable appointees in the White House and line departments and agencies are necessary.

To be a successful appointee means understanding this operating context, then leading, and when needed, strong-arming entrenched bureaucracies into aligning organizational resources with the president’s agenda.

It means quickly synthesizing reams of data, mastering arcane procedures, and navigating political minefields, including planning to overcome the rulings of activist judges who seek to limit the powers of the presidency in defiance of the Constitution.

Above all, it means loyalty to the president’s vision, the courage to make a decision, and working relentlessly to see it enacted, no matter the obstacles.

Being a presidential appointee is a great honor. Always be grateful for the opportunity and respectful of your obligation to assist the president, be a good steward of taxpayer funds, and serve the American people.

When it’s over I hope you’ll be able to say it was the best job you ever had.

Thank you for your service.

Yours,

Bill Short

Author of Elephant in the White House: A Newsletter for Presidential Appointees

www.elephantinthewhitehouse.substack.com

Below the paywall is the link for subscribers to download the draft manuscript