How Gridlock is Created

With 1,177 presidential appointments already needing Senate confirmation, are we asking Congress to do too much?

Maybe we're just asking Congress to do too much? From a new report by EJ Dionne and Bill Galston on the calcification of the presidential appointments process:

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he faced the task of filling 295 core policy positions in the Cabinet departments and executive agencies.  Twenty-eight years later, the incoming Obama administration confronted 422 such positions. A recent White House Transition Project Report documents a total of 1177 full-time presidential appointments, almost all statutory, that require Senate confirmation. While some of these nearly 1200 positions are part-time advisory positions and appointments to regulatory commissions, the burden of processing them further inundates an already overwhelmed system.

Galston and Dionne make the point that the proliferation of non-confirmable "czar" positions within the White House staff is an attempt to bypass the delays of the coagulating confirmation process. But that remedy only aggravates another problem: the overstaffing of the White House and the bureaucratization of the one part of the executive branch with the mission to cut through the bureaucracy.