If At First You Don't Succeed
I suppose it's only fair to admit that my effort to rise to the Mark Schmitt challenge ended in failure. I thought to myself, "where's an agency so obscure you could get away with handing off all the top jobs to totally boobs without anyone noticing?" and immediately it came to me: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Fortunately for the country, though unfortunately for this blogger, the NOAA leadership team seems perfectly reasonable, at least to the extent that you get that impression from scanning their bio pages.
Now the Labor Department is a different matter. The secretary's only job qualification is being married to Mitch McConnell, while her deputy never had anything to do with labor issues but . . . used to work for Mitch McConnell and a surprisingly large number of their subordinates don't have biographies.
Then it didn't "end in failure" Matt...you did come up with the Labor Department. ;-)
I agree NOAA is just fine...they provide decent warnings, just getting our country's leaders to take heed is the only problem there.
September 9, 2005 2:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
What about the White House with an obvious knucklehead in charge?
September 9, 2005 2:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd like to know what, exactly, Matthew thinks is a proper background for a head honcho at the Department of Labor? Do you need to have been, oh, I dunno, a laborer? Because I'm sure Alexis Herman had done lots of labor in her life.
As to NOAA, actually, they very well could be important. I was, in fact, just reading (here) about the great Chicago Heat Wave of 1995. You know, the one where 700 Chicagoans died, and FEMA was... nowhere! (OOOOps, was that natural weather-related disaster purely a state and local concern? Apparently!) Anyway, a NOAA report is linked: "The [NOAA] report also recommends that emergency response organizations at the federal, state and local levels recognize severe heat waves as potential natural disasters, and that areas at risk should be prompted to develop emergency response plans for severe heat waves."
Damn NOAA, always asking for federal help for natural weather-related disasters in which hundreds of people died. I guess NOAA really is important.
September 9, 2005 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Matt,
I fear your middle name might actually be Santorum ;-)
I guarantee that if you replaced all the highly qualified, dedicated PhDs and domain experts at NOAA with hacks - every airline, pilot, electric utility, municipal streets dept, forest products company, etc in the US of A (and plenty in other countries too) would be screaming bloody murder in 36 hours.
sPh
September 9, 2005 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
As sphealey suggests, I think Matt made a mistake in picking NOAA as a likely destination for political hacks. NOAA is going to appeal to service officers as well as scientists, which means that there will be reasonably high prestige and competition by top-flight people for jobs in the agency. (Similarly, it's not worthwhile to look at the National Science Foundation: dedicated professionals from top to bottom, from what I can see.)
September 9, 2005 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
It occurs to me that a more efficient search would start with Bush's cronies going back to his days in Texas and see where they are now. Are there any prominent but not especially well-qualified Bush supporters who haven't received a sinecure of some type?
September 9, 2005 3:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't NOAA also manage the tsunami warning system, along with several parts of the Hurricane/severe weather warning systems? Wouldn't replacing the people responsible for sending the tsunami warnings to Hilo with political hacks just be asking for even more trouble?
September 9, 2005 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
That missile defense system is bound to be a sinecure farm. It's never really worked. It's never really expected to work. The endless pursuit of failure is amazingly profitable. And, it costs billions of dollars. Christ, I wouldn't be surprised to find Simone Ledeen working as Senior Launch Engineer, now that the CPA boondoggle has folded.
September 9, 2005 6:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem comes when they have to do something besides agree with the WH line. The ability to appoint leadership throughout the government comes with winning the election but the performance in many areas in the past few years has been abysmal. Maybe it will begin to be seen as a danger to our country to have so many people simply spouting the republican party line.
September 9, 2005 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
What about the US Census Bureau? There isn't even going to be a census during Bush's presidency.
September 12, 2005 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink