The American Presidency: An Impossible Job

Abstract

Sixty years ago, John Kennedy said that the American president should be “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government,” and expectations about the role have only increased since then (Schlesinger, 1965, p. 119). The result, John Dickerson argues in his new book, The Hardest Job in the World, is that the modern president carries an “almost impossible” burden (Dickerson, 2020, p. xiii). Stephen Hess and Pfiffner concur. The American president, they say, oversees “one of the most complex organizations in the world” (Hess & Pfiffner, 2021, p. 204). In Organizing the Presidency, Hess and Pfiffner consider how the White House bureaucracy can be organized to make the job somewhat less daunting. Hess and Pfiffner are impeccably qualified to give advice. Hess first served in the White House in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration and published the first edition of Organizing the Presidency in 1976. Pfiffner, one of the premier scholars of the American presidency, joined as co-author for the third edition in 2002. Every edition has taken a similar approach, providing a chapter about the organization of the presidency under each administration. The 1976 edition examined six presidencies, from Franklin Roosevelt to Nixon, while the current edition examines 14. There are opening and closing chapters that sketch some major themes and offer recommendations. Organizing the Presidency shows how the role of the White House has grown over the last 90 years. The White House has extended control over many facets of work within departments and agencies, such as goal setting, budgeting, rulemaking, financial and personnel administration, and procurement policy. It has also taken charge of political appointments that were once left to Cabinet secretaries. Above all, it has taken command of policy formulation. The influence of cabinet members and their advisors has declined concomitantly. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explained the order of things in 2010, when she testified before Congress about healthcare reform under President Obama: “I am not a principal in the negotiations, nor is my staff... [We] provide technical support” (Hess & Pfiffner, 2021, p. 184). The White House bureaucracy has evolved to support this expanded role. It is now much larger, employing almost 2,000 people. Assignments are demarcated more sharply, with offices exclusively dedicated to critical functions such as media and legislative relations. There are also a welter of councils, offices, and advisors charged with formulating policy and coordinating departments and agencies. Presidents have come to accept that the whole apparatus should be topped with a chief of staff who has the power to maintain order and regulate access to the president. And a distinctive ethic of presidential service has emerged over the decades. The good White House bureaucrat is an “honest broker” who assures that all interested players get a fair hearing and gives the president a balanced view of options. Bad ones run roughshod over colleagues and push their own agenda (Hess & Pfiffner, 2021, pp. 157–158 and 207). Hess and Pfiffner emphasize how presidential personality —those “inherent qualities of character and temperament”— shapes operations within the White House (Hess & Pfiffner, 2021, p. 209). The design of the book tends to privilege this theory. A new president means a new chapter explaining how structures and routines have been altered during their tenure. However, we can question whether personality matters as much today as it did a half-century ago, when the basic architecture of the White House bureaucracy was still in flux. As time passes, the changes described in each chapter are less dramatic. Even Trump, the most iconoclastic of modern presidents, failed to make radical changes in the organization of the White House. Another and perhaps more useful way of organizing the book would be to focus directly on dilemmas that have confronted presidents over the decades. The biggest dilemma relates to the size of the presidential staff. As Hess and Pfiffner observe, there are strong incentives for presidents to expand the White House bureaucracy. A bigger staff seems to promise better control of events and the executive establishment. But a large White House bureaucracy generates problems of its own: the parts are hard to coordinate, factionalism is less tameable, and employees are more likely to Book Review