The Bush Legacy Continued: Hey Boss, Can You Spare A Dime?

Over the last few months, the Wall Street Journal has printed two stories that suggest that many Bush administration staffers are having trouble finding employment now that President Bush’s two terms are over. According to the WSJ, up to 75% of former Bush political appointees have been unsuccessful at finding full-time jobs. Approximately 3,000 political appointees were serving President Bush at the end of his term, which means that a staggering 2,250 former staffers are still looking for work. Apparently, the current situation is much worse than similar periods after Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton left the White House.

In an interview with NewMajority, one former Bush political appointee noted that “the economy has something to do with it, as does the capture of Congress by the Democrats.” Add this to the scalding and wide-spread unpopularity of President Bush, and one finds that former staffers who are looking for work face a steep uphill battle. For an illustration, one has to look no further than former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose poor performances during testimony and severely damaged reputation have prevented him from finding full-time employment. It is certainly stunning that a former Attorney General is still unable to find work in a law firm after over eighteen months.

However, it seems unlikely that the economy is playing as large of a role as one might think. After all, even in the midst of the Great Depression, every member of President Hoover’s Cabinet who sought a full-time job was able to find one after the President left the Oval Office in 1933. The exception to this rule is Labor Secretary William N. Doak, whose inability to find work is understandable considering he died of a heart attack within months of the end of Hoover’s term.

Of course, these examples hide the fact that many of the 3,000 political appointees have radically lower public profiles. For the thousands of former political appointees who are less visible in the media, post-employment restrictions are likely a bigger barrier in their goal to find work.

Indeed, complicated rules govern the job opportunities that former administration officials are allowed to pursue. Among a plethora of other rules, executive branch employees are barred from lobbying on any matters that were within their official responsibilities for two years, and may not communicate with their former agencies for one year.

These regulations undoubtedly represent a challenge for former Bush staffers. After all, for many of these political appointees, their biggest assets come from the knowledge and experience they have in the fields in which the administration employed them. As such, lobbying for or ‘representing’ clients provides one of the few ways to connect their areas of interest to employment. Removing the right of staffers to represent nongovernmental parties in their area of expertise is thus quite damaging to potential job prospects.

However, these restrictions have a broader implication, one that touches on the overall performance of government in the future. As evidenced by Secretary Doak’s death in 1933, jobs in the realm of politics are generally quite stressful. It seems obvious to me that the best and brightest will hesitate enduring the pressures of a political staffing position if they know that it will limit their employment options in the future. As such, these restrictions may have the unintended consequence of lowering the caliber of administration staffers, which is harmful not only for the image of government but for the outcomes of each administration’s public policy initiatives.

Regardless, it seems that any deviation from the status quo is unlikely. President Obama’s administration has laid out stringent pre-employment restrictions, mandating that no lobbyists will be permitted to work for the President without a waiver, which the administration has said will be granted only in exceptional circumstances. In addition, the administration has stated that former staffers will not be allowed to lobby in their areas of involvement within the administration for the length of the Obama presidency. When asked whether pre- and post-administration employment would be damaging to potential staff expertise, Obama transition team co-chair John Podesta replied, “so be it.” If this is any indication of future policy, the current quandary that former Bush officials find themselves in may well signal to future generations of potential political staffers that they would be wise to look elsewhere.