Political Appointees Quotes
That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.
Trump often used the phrase "Drain the swamp" in his campaigning to mean get ride of the establishment figures who had, for the most part, dominated politics, for decades. When he was elected, he had to appoint a cabinet, but when he did so, it was almost exclusivly made up of people who had been a part of the political and corporate establishment -- the swamp.
Most recent American Presidents have appointed their most senior officials who were of their own political party although FDR, Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama appointed members of the opposition party to several important posts. However, in the Soviet Union, the senior officials would appoint no one to even a minor post who they did not perceive was politically reliable—was a dedicated communist and supported the views and programs of the Russian Communist Party leadership. However, rarely in America has there been any criteria of political or ideological doctrine in the hiring of staff. The George W, Bush Administration was a dramatic exception. Being a loyal Republican was totally insufficient. New officials had to be politically and philosophically consonant with the very conservative wing of the Republican party. This was bad enough but by following the same approach as the Russians and other ideological countries, the Bush administration had many of the same problems. One dramatic one was the hiring of people with no professional experience or qualifications but were ideologically perfect and totally loyal. One very dramatic example was the man appointed to head the Federal Emergency Management Administration. His experience consisted of managing horse shows and he had never had anything to do with natural disasters or any other kinds of emergencies nor did he have any experience with first responders. Another is the man appointed to set up the Stock Exchange for Iraq after we occupied that country and were involved in nation building. The appointee’s only job experience had been as a White House intern and not only knew nothing about Stock Exchanges or Economics, but had no business experience as he never held any other job. There were many such examples. No other administration in modern times—Democratic or Republican—went to such lengths as the Soviets to maintain ideological purity.
