How do you become a political appointee? With Kathryn Dunn Tenpas 

Valerie Boyd: Today on Transition Lab, we’re pleased to welcome a good friend of the Center, Katie Dunn Tenpas. Katie is the Director of the Katzmann Initiative and a Visiting Fellow of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. She is also an Advisory Board Member for the White House Transition Project and a Practitioner Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

A top scholar of the American presidency, Katie spends a lot of time studying trends in political appointments and presidential personnel, just like us. Thanks. We’re so excited to have her here for a conversation about the people who make our federal government rent. Katie, welcome.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. Appreciate it.

Valerie Boyd: So, let’s start off with the basics for our listeners. Could you help explain the different kinds of presidential appointees and how is the appointments process different for each?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Sure. Yeah. So, every four years or every eight years, when a new president is elected. They have roughly 4, 000 appointments to make, but this is highly unusual.

Most countries don’t do this. They usually have a much higher percentage of civil servants that don’t change over from administration to administration, but we’ve chosen to do things differently. So, every four or eight years, there are 4, 000 appointees. There’s different types of appointees. I think the easiest way to kind of understand the variation is just to say those that require Senate confirmation, which is a much higher threshold and those that are simply appointed by the president.

So, of the 4, 000, roughly 13, 1, 340, roughly, are, require Senate confirmation. And obviously, that’s a much heavier lift for the new administration, requires much more vetting. It requires a great deal of personal disclosures on behalf of the nominees themselves. And it also requires a great deal of work on behalf of the Senate committee where they will appear in front of and have to testify.

Sometimes they will have to testify and produce all of these documents about their financial background, prior work experience, and things of that nature. So, I would say it’s very logical in the sense that the higher the threshold, the more senior the appointment. So, Senate appointments include the very top leadership.

So, if you think about the Department of Labor, for instance. And think about the hierarchy in terms of a pyramid. Every four or eight years, we basically lop off the top of the pyramid and say, new president, you get to appoint people to fill the very most senior positions at the department of labor. So, the very senior ones required this Senate confirmation.

And then the next level is simply a presidential appointment. There’s another set of appointees that staff the white house. And I argue that white house staff are one of the most influential, um, Unelected set of staff members in our entire set of government. And that’s partly because they, um, are with a president day to day.

They often have close relations with the individual who is president. And the role of the president has expanded so much since even the time of FDR that there is so much that presidents need to be experts on that it’s impossible. And so, they then delegate this authority to White House staffers who become experts or who are experts on these issues and have a great deal of influence in the decision making process.

And the individuals that are in the White House office, per se, do not need Senate confirmation. The White House is also part of something called the Executive Office of the President. And some of those positions in the EOP, we call it for short, like the head of OMB do require Senate confirmation. But to keep it simple, the White House staff is a separate entity of hundreds if not thousands of individuals that are appointed by the president.

There are some civil servants who work in the White House, but a far lower percentage than at the various departments across the, uh, executive branch. So, I hope that kind of in a nutshell explains the formidable process of appointees appointments and, uh, the different types.

Valerie Boyd: That’s terrific.

And it’s a good segue into some of the research that you’ve been doing on what you call the A Team, where you talked about the importance of this kind of unconfirmed, unelected group of staff at the White House. And I think we’ve certainly seen examples of Individuals that are close to a president who they want to keep as a close advisor who they estimate may not be able to be confirmed by the Senate and they place them in a senior White House role so that they can remain a close advisor and part of the process.

So, can we back up and ask what is the A Team and who does it include and why is it an important group to track?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Sure. So, the A Team is actually not my creation. There used to be a publication called the National Journal. It was sort of an inside baseball for politics and it was a weekly publication. But what they would do whenever there was a new administration is they would produce a volume, a single volume called Decision Makers.

And it was usually in June or July of a president’s first term. So, for example. But the first edition that they did this for was Ronald Reagan in 1981. And so, in January of 19, 1981, they would send, you know, five to six reporters across Washington, D. C. and for the next four months or so, they would interview individuals across the White House and even in the executive branch, but I’m more focused on the White House.

And they tried to get a sense of who would be the most influential White House staffers in this new administration. And they published this volume, and it had a photo of those individuals and it also had some biographical information, whether they had worked on the campaign, whether they had worked for a prior president, what they did before coming to the White House and why they were deemed to be influential by the National Journal and their set of reporters.

And so, me as a political scientist, I can’t really sort of assign levels of influence to individuals in the White House. Without having some sort of systematic objective criteria that I’m using. However, the national journal basically did the work for me in the sense that I could rely on the impressions of these journalists who fanned out across Washington, DC to determine who are the most influential white house staffers were.

And so, they did this from 1981 from president Reagan, all the way through president Obama in 2009. And then they stopped. But what I did is I basically went through those publications and I made an Excel spreadsheet and put all of those individuals in it. And then I did digging to try to find out how long these individuals stayed in their job.

And the reason I cared about turnover was that in a hallway of Brookings one day, I came into contact with my colleague, Steve Hess, who, if you don’t know Steve Hess, he’s a wonderful man who was a speechwriter for Eisenhower. And he also worked in the Nixon administration. And then he moved to Brookings in the early seventies and became a presidency scholar.

And he was telling me some story about one of his friends from the George H. W. Bush administration who went to the White House and had a very senior job before that in business. We went to the White House and told Steve that it took him about nine months to figure out what to do. You know, he needed to learn all the new networks and how the White House operated and what they were doing.

And he said that after nine months, he basically stayed another nine months, but then by then he was exhausted. And I thought, wow, a senior staff member leaves after 18 months where they could potentially stay for 48 months. That’s fascinating to me. From an outsider looking in, somebody who studies the White House, I’ve always thought being able to work for a president seems like the job of a lifetime.

Like how many people look back on their lives when they’re in their 70s and their 80s and think, yes, I worked for President George H. W. Bush and this is what I worked on. I mean, it seems like a seminal moment in your life. Not that many people get chosen to do these jobs. There are terrific opportunities that open up for you after.

So why would you leave early? You basically have a ringside seat on American history and you’re leaving after 18 months. That’s it. And you’re not leaving because you, you serve at the pleasure of the president and they asked you to leave. You’re actually leaving by choice. And so that kind of led me down this deep rabbit hole of looking at turnover rates from presidents from Reagan through Obama.

And, um, I wrote about it. I had calculated it. The interesting thing, which to some people was not interesting is that it was relatively predictable. So, if you looked at turnover from year one to year two, the turnover rate amongst these very senior advisors, the 18 was quite low. Slight bump up from year two to year three, and then a bigger bump up from year three to year four.

And I explain that because I had previously written a book about what happens when presidents run for re-election. It was called Presidents as Candidates, Inside the White House for the re-election Campaign. And I wrote that book in part because I was really curious about how presidents simultaneously respond to the demands of governing, which seem overwhelming, and respond to the demands of a re election campaign.

And in the process of doing that research, when I interviewed a lot of former White House staffers, I realized that there’s a lot of people who jump ship in year three because they go to the reelection campaign, and they were very senior staff members. And that seemed to me quite disruptive, possibly inefficient, and it was the case for Republican presidents and Democratic presidents.

There was this trend line of people departing in year three. And so, part of my White House staff turnover data in this longitudinal study actually showed that that indeed was true, that there was this bump up in year three. Okay. So in a way it kind of built off my prior research and confirmed what I had found in that previous book.

And so from then on, and along comes president Trump and national journals, no longer publishing this decision makers edition. And I get a call from a reporter named Madison Alder, who was working for Bloomberg, and I think she was relatively young, right out of journalism school, and she says, are you going to keep doing this?

And this is in August of 2017, where people were starting to leave, and people were being abruptly fired. And she wanted to know if that was normal. And I said, well, compared to these other administrations, it’s not. And she’s like, well, are you going to keep up your data? And I was like, eh, the national journal doesn’t publish this anymore.

I’m not really sure. And she’s like, well, why don’t we do it together? And so she and I teamed up and we came up with this exhaustive way of going back to all of the positions that the National Journal cited as being influential. And I’ll spare you the data collection details, but we basically identified over the course of all of those presidents, the positions that tended to be in the 18th sample.

And then we basically listed those, and we found the people in the Trump administration that were in those positions. And so we did our best to replicate. What the national journal had done from Ronald Reagan through Obama. And we created that turnover chart for president Trump. And that was probably one of the best.

I was so glad she encouraged me to do that because I think I, my research got more exposure during those four years than ever before, because people wanted to know what They wanted to know, is there objective data that shows you that the turnover in the Trump administration is not normal? And I was able to say yes.

Uh, it also, there were lots of anomalies during those four years in terms of, there was what I called serial turnover, where it wasn’t just two or maybe three chiefs of staffs. It was more than that. It wasn’t just two national security advisors in the span of four years. It was, I think maybe, four or five.

And so, the turnover was clearly off the charts. I created a whole new set of data about serial turnover, which I had never had to do for prior presidents. But I believe I was able to sort of. provide factual information for history to sort of look back and understand what was happening with White House staffing during that period.

So that’s a really long winded answer, but I hope I answered your question.

Valerie Boyd: Not at all. You offered so many things to think about and follow up on, and one of them, I’m smiling, that reporters do ask questions that create follow up action. I know this happens in the government space too, where asking the right questions makes you consider, yes, we need to follow that trend or handle an issue in a certain way.

So, I’m glad that you remember exactly who, um, caused you to follow up on that. You know, you also pointed to the fact that individuals in the White House turnover faster than you might expect. It’s partly a result of the jobs being exhausting. We were just in an event where we met somebody who had recently left the Biden administration and commented that she had returned to the land of the living because it’s a job where you’re working around the clock.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: If you want a quick aside on that, Steve Hess and I actually conducted an e survey Email survey. We got addresses of former staffers, and this was in the early 2000s, probably 2002 or three, and we conducted the survey asking people why they left. And we sort of provided like a multiple choice. And it turned out that our response rate was so low that we couldn’t publish the responses or write anything out of it because we had such a low response rate.

But a lot of them is burnout, which is exactly what you said in that, you know, working multiple 80 hour weeks is just simply untenable for the longterm. Sometimes it was financial, and this is where Steve has comes in again. It was super interesting since he had worked for Eisenhower. He was telling me that during that era, the gulf between salary, government salaries and the private sector.

And so, I think because of that, people in the White House think I need to leave because I need to start saving money for college educations or for retirement or what have you. And so sometimes it’s financial pressure that causes individuals to leave. And Steve speculated that the turnover just anecdotally from him was much lower in Eisenhower and he was speculating that there wasn’t this temptation where you could really go out in the private sector and make 4X of what you were making in the White House.

The primary reasons tended to be burnout and sort of the need for a change in financial status. And then there were other, some sort of smaller reasons as well. But very few people, with the exception of the Trump administration, it’s rare that you are asked to leave. The number of forced resignations is very, very low.

So, it really is a choice. I do think the other thing that’s made White House jobs much more difficult, say, post President George W. Bush, It’s just the 24 hour news cycle. And now with social media and just so many ways in which you, you feel compelled to respond to events and there just is no break.

Valerie Boyd: There’s no downtime. Yeah. You’re raising good questions about the trends between different presidencies and how personnel turnover might affect their efficiency. And it may be hard to connect those two things, the turnover and the, and the outcome of it. But one thing that we’ve looked at is we. Analyze Senate confirmed appointments is that President Biden has only had two secretaries depart from his cabinet.

And I think in your A team turnover, I think the last number I saw is that President Biden’s A team turnover was sitting at 71 percent as of February of this year. Is that normal compared to recent administration?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: It is pretty normal compared to recent administrations. And again, there was a big, you know, big uptick in year three between year two and three.

So if you look back at the data, cause you can see it longitudinally on the Brookings website, you know, it is kind of fascinating to think that amongst the most senior level of White House advisors, That losing 71 percent by the end of the third year or fourth year is normal.

Valerie Boyd: That’s amazing. That’s a really high number.

And as you say, it’s the job of a lifetime. I wonder if one more pressure is that, you know, that if you stay in a fourth year, you That there’s a pressure to stay till the end.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: There is. Yeah. I’ve heard many times there are chief of staff memos that circulate saying, in the year three, saying if you’re going to leave, in fact, sometimes they even ask it in January of the beginning of year three, because they know that now the focus of the White House is on reelection.

They have shifted from trying to get major legislation passed. They’re done with focusing on the midterms and most likely they lose in the midterms. So they’ve sort of rebounded from that. And now they’re focusing on reelection and maximizing their prospects of reelection. And I have all these great quotes in my book about former staffers saying the focus just completely shifts and every decision is seen through the prism of how will this decision affect reelection.

It’s disheartening to see that over time presidents have become more and more myopically focused on getting reelected. But you can also see the trends in the, in Congress. I mean, it used to be great for senators. They were like, this is great. I have a six-year term. I don’t have to focus on reelection, but they’re actually fundraising in their first year of that six-year term.

And it’s just, things have changed. The terrain is different. Advertisements cost a lot of money to run. People are really worried about getting challenged. I just saw a democratic senator quoted in a article this morning and the phrase that followed her quote was she campaigned seven days a week, which is just.

It’s kind of like a farm strike if they feel like the other side is doing it or their colleagues in the Senate are doing it, they need to do it. They used to get this opportunity to sort of spend the first two to four years really focusing on issues that help their state and serving committees and learning all of the factual information they needed to run those committees and focusing on, you know, markups and committee hearings and the drafting of the legislation.

And I feel like that’s taken a backseat to the quest for reelection.

Valerie Boyd: So, I want to ask you things about the Senate procedures and the confirmation process before we turn there. I want to make sure we’ve kind of plumbed the depths of the White House data. Are there other interesting trends you’re seeing over time about turnover or is it staying pretty steady at 71 percent or so in a third year?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, Biden’s might be slightly higher. I usually write a summary at the end of each year. So, the last one I wrote was last January about the first three years. And I put him in like historical context and rank him according, and I think he was somewhere in the middle. So, there really isn’t anything unusual about the Biden administration’s turnover rate.

I think if you look at other presidents besides Trump, you see that kind of there is this similar trend. So, there’s nothing out of the norm like that. There’s no serial turnover, meaning there’s no single position that’s had, you know, multiple positions. Like there’s not six chiefs of staff or whatever.

So that’s back to the norm. Cabinet turnover actually is the lowest. Going all the way back to Reagan. So as you mentioned, he’s only lost two secretaries of different cabinet departments. I believe it’s labor and Who’s the second one? The second, the labor department came first. He had an offer to run like the hockey association or something like that., and then there was a second departure. So only two and, and, and political scientists tend, when we teach American government, we tend to teach the students about the inner cabinet and the outer cabinet and the inner cabinet are the most, what we deem to be the most influential cabinet positions like secretary of state defense, treasury, and also the oldest departments.

They tend to be still the most influential. And then if you look at the outer ring of the cabinet positions, they tend to be the more constituency related ones. So, the education department is really there to sort of reach out to teaching organizations and to monitor education across, but it’s basically a local issue.

States determine and local localities determine how they want to run their schools, the Veteran’s affairs, obviously that’s reaching out to a single constituency labor department. So, the two departures came from the outer cabinet, which again, I would sort of, it’s important position, of course, but it’s somewhat less influential than that, those inner cabinet positions.

And you don’t want to see turnover in state treasury defense, those kinds of homeland security I would put in there as well. So, the turnover amongst that group has been very low. And you know, that’s actually saying something because I feel like the microscope is on these individuals far more than it was in prior administrations.

And you think about it. What’s happening at DHS with Mayorkas almost getting impeached, or I can’t remember how that all fleshed out. The process starting and then the vote not passing. So, you could see, like, I mean, he, to me, he’s got every right to split, like, this is too much. I can do all kinds of amazing things in the private sector.

Why am I putting up with this? But it’s really, it’s quite a statement and I think it reflects kind of Biden’s experience in government, the longevity in government, all of the connections and friendships he’s had over time that. Made people want to stay in the game.

Valerie Boyd: And the question that everybody’s asking right now is if the vice president wins in November, what might she do with the current appointees and the current cabinet and the choices she may make?

And obviously there’ve been no official announcements in that regard, but when we talk about how the Biden team has had such longevity, it does make you wonder if there are any predictions to make about whether people may want to stay. If they have the opportunity to do so yeah. That’s an interesting question.

And we really only have one data point in the 20th century. And that is 1988 to 1999 when we moved from Reagan to Bush. Bush’s people made it pretty clear the Reagan people, the Reagan people were expecting to be able to stay in the Bush people made it clear. Now this is a new president and we are appointing our people.

Now the question is, and I don’t know the answer to this, but I think I could find it out. Yeah. There is something to the point that within these 4, 000 appointments and the multiple appointments to the executive branch, maybe some of these people could hold over and so they can wait until somebody is nominated and then confirmed and then put in that position.

So, I could see how vice president Harris might want her own people in the white house and those people would all leave, but it might make sense because the confirmation process is so slow to have some of these Biden people stay in these positions. I mean, as the partnership well knows, it makes clear is that continuity is important.

Leadership is exceptionally important in these departments. It’s not good for the civil servants to be sort of cast at sea waiting for their next leader. I think it really impedes long term planning. I don’t think it’s good for morale, causes anxiety. So, I think that if the Harris people are able to sort of negotiate something where the Biden, some of the Biden people within the executive branch are able to stay until a successor has been confirmed.

Thank you. Just an aside about the confirmation process and how slow it is. My colleague, Elaine K. Mark suggested this great project back to back in 2020. She said, you should look at the. Biden confirmations in the first 300 days of the administration and look at the first 100, 200, and 300. And what I did is I went back to George W.

Bush and Obama and Trump, and I looked at their confirmations in the first 100 days, 200 days, 300 days, so that we had some sort of context, comparative context, and after 300 days, President Biden only had 140 people confirmed to the 15 major departments. 140. And as I mentioned before, there’s roughly 1, 340 positions that need Senate confirmation.

So that pace, you’re barely going to get through half, if that, of your Senate confirmed individuals. And so that’s a real problem. And I think transition teams think about that and they think about putting agency review teams or landing teams or people in these positions that can be acting, that are competent to hold those positions in an acting role because they really need, some kind of leadership in some sort of. ability to direct these departments when there’s this huge hiatus for the nominees.

This is such an important topic to follow up on. I think we’re often at events talking about the Senate confirmation process together and I hear you and I’m like, yes, what she said. So, we have this, uh, tracker looking at the top 800 positions or the positions most relevant to the management of federal agencies, I should say.

And what we’re finding is that the average time to confirmation in the Reagan administration was only 70 days and now the average is. 191 days for President Biden’s nominees at, at this point. And as you said, it’s mathematically impossible to get through your leadership team and get people in place.

One good thing that the Biden Harris transition team did kind of predicting that this would be a problem was to focus on not just announcing the top leaders on inauguration day, but also in pointing the next level of political appointees who would be eligible to act in their place during a delay of a, um, waiting for the confirmation process.

And so, the strategy allowed them to have political leadership in place. While waiting for those Senate confirmed leaders to take office. I have heard, uh, comments on the other side of the aisle that they’ve learned from this strategy and that this might become the norm. I think as our colleague Chris Piper has looked at vacancies.

I think he found that the Trump administration actually had to rely on career officials in acting positions to a greater degree than the Biden team did. And so, this strategy might become something that is used more often.

I mean, it makes sense. I mean, what other choice do you have? If you win an election, you are entitled to staff the executive branch.

And the fact that the only way to cope with an extraordinarily slow Senate confirmation is to do exactly what you said they were doing. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever wins this November does the same thing. It’s a way of adapting, right? It’s like evolution, like animals have to learn how to adapt to certain circumstances.

And this is the only way you can sort of survive and be able to direct the new department or the new agency within that department if you have some kind of acting leadership. So, you know, given the current condition, I feel like the Senate has two choices. They can basically reform the Senate confirmation process.

And we can talk about the ways they could do that, that might improve it. Or they have to increase the amount of time, I think, that actings can serve. Because the current situation, when they have expiration dates with the Vacancies Reform Act, you know, makes it that, so there’s these like periods where there’s a vacuum of leadership, which is not good for the government.

I think everybody in the Senate, And most people across the government will agree that the current situation is not good. I mean, just the sheer span of time that’s, that’s increased from Reagan through the present, it’s just unnecessary. I mean, the Senate’s job is to confirm these individuals and they can also not to confirm them.

They can vote. No, it’s not as though that I’m complaining about their role, their constitutional role. It’s simply that they need to find ways to prioritize it. I think, especially in the first six months of a new administration. And the partnership has published this before and other organizations, but the 9/1 report pointed out that there were a dearth of confirmed individuals in high level national security positions when 9 11 happened.

And they recommended that they come up with some way to expedite those nominations. And I feel like there needs to be kind of attention to this so that we don’t put our, put the United States in a difficult, vulnerable position. I might also point out that the Miller Center has published something called the First Year Project.

Where they went back and they looked at the first year of a number of administrations to point out the mistakes and the foibles, many of them foreign policy related, that occurred during that first year. It’s unclear whether having a full slate of people confirmed would have solved those problems, but it makes you wonder if they had been fully staffed up, would they have been as likely to make those mistakes during that first year in office?

You’re touching on so many reasons that the vacancies actually matter, and that people should care about this problem. So, I feel like we should summarize a list of the reasons you’ve just shared. One, the 9/11 Commission finding that that tragedy was due in part by having only 55 percent of President Bush’s national security leadership in place and therefore not having the ability to cohere as a leadership team to help prevent that tragedy.

Two, you talked about the, I think you talked about the perception of American leadership in the world and the inability to get things done. And you also talked a little bit about the impact on agencies and federal employees. Do you want to say any more about that?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, I think normally I am reluctant to compare government service to anything in the private sector.

But I think that in the case of vacancies, in the case of leadership vacuums, all you need to do is think about a work experience in the private sector. I mean, could you imagine a major company like PepsiCo losing top leadership every four or eight years and then taking forever to fill the positions?

And think about all the employees scattered across the world, like wondering, oh, am I going to get laid off? Is this new product going to be something that the new CFO or the new CEO wants to pursue? Like there’s so much uncertainty and it doesn’t need to be that way. That’s the thing. We can fix this.

And so, it’s kind of like we’re just sort of putting ourself in a vulnerable position for no reason.

Valerie Boyd: Yeah. And as you said, it doesn’t make sense for the Senate either. It’s not a complaint about their role, but it’s taking a tremendous amount of their time to manage this process.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Right. And I think it was Chris Piper also that did another incredible, um, study about the percentage of time that senators were spending in nominations.

And I think it was over, I don’t know, a three month period. You can correct me, but. They were spending roughly 60 percent of their timeline nominations. Well, maybe you should think about drastically reducing the number of positions that require confirmation. Let’s all agree that not every position is so influential and so consequential that it needs Senate confirmation.

And the number of positions that require confirmation just keeps going up and up and up. I think that they definitely need to curb that. And I feel like they could, I understand that there’s. Self interest at stake that maybe there’s a department or an agency that is especially influential in your home state.

And you think it’s good that these people get Senate confirmation because it’s more cachet and it’s more prestigious, but we have to get past that. And we have to think about what’s a feasible number of nominees that the Senate can actually confirm and get to and review. And then we go from there.

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, absolutely.

It seems that. One easy place to start is by reducing the number of positions requiring confirmation, and we could look at some of those persistently vacant positions that have remained open across administrations, either because of the challenge in finding people with the right skill set to move to D. C. and take a pay cut, or perhaps political challenges around that position and filling it. So persistently vacant positions are one, boards and commissions are another. Where else would you look at attacking this problem?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Well, I came up with a solution that, or with an idea that, that will, will go nowhere.

But I really think before they go on their spring recess, they should have a number that they have to achieve. They have to confirm X hundred of individuals to our government by that April of an inauguration year. And then if you sort of make them do a certain amount of work between X and Y time before the recess can start and they can go to their home states and start campaigning, that’s a way of filling those positions.

But I think to get them to impose a rule on themselves like that is impossible. But I think that that’s a good idea. And I think what you could do is you could have an administration sort of rank order, because. Things change over time, right? New issues arise. And so 2008, 2009, the treasury department was absolutely front and center given the financial crisis.

Get those people in. In 2020, it was COVID. So, it was really HHS and other DHS and other departments that you really needed to prioritize. So you can’t really come out up with the standard list of priority nominations and confirmations, but I think it would be good if the transitions team did come up with their ideal list and the Senate would sort of acquiesce.

Understanding that all of these issues are so critical to the citizenry, they need to act on these positions. Again, it’s kind of like forcing somebody to go on a diet. Like they don’t want to do that. And you can tell them what it’s good for you. It’s good for your health. It’s good for the country, you know, whatever it is, but you can’t make them do that.

But I just wish there was some sort of internal discipline. I think it’s also a function of a larger issue where we’ve seen the decline of senators who care about the institution. And they care about the institution’s rules and its longevity and the fact that it’s not bleeding away power to the executive branch.

They’re protective of their institution. You might remember Senator Byrd from West Virginia. He was an institutionalist. So, when Congress passed the line item veto for President Clinton, he was like, no, you can’t do this. Like you need to stand up. Presidents should not have a line item veto. Eventually the court overturned it.

Which saved him. But there are very few senators that really stand up for the institution and care about the internal workings and the efficiency of those internal workings. To the point where they could are willing to sort of put some pressure on their colleagues to, to make these changes. It’s just a low priority.

Valerie Boyd: It, it raises this larger question that we often get asked about whether the delays in the confirmation process are related to cultural issues and polarization or tribalism between the parties not being willing to confirm each other’s nominees and whether procedural fixes can address those cultural problems.

Do you have a perspective on that question?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: That’s a tough question. I just think there are so many variables in this equation of like the different things that are affecting the current senators and what they’re willing to do or not do. I think if I had to have a hierarchy, I think polarization is one of them that currently the Republicans don’t want to do anything that give the Democrats a perceived win in quotations.

And so they’re willing to kind of obstruct and put hold on various nominees. I mean, the Democrats do that. I want to be equal time here. They, they also put holds on Republican nominees, but I just think doing everything for a political victory, as opposed to for the good of the country. Like, why did you become a Senator?

Did you become a Senator to help the Republican party? Or did you become a Senator to help your state and to help the country? And I feel like we’ve come a long way from thinking about the importance of political roles and what it should be. It shouldn’t be about having political wins that you tack up for your team.

And I just don’t know how you, you change that mindset. Maybe it’s through leadership, subsequent leadership doesn’t emphasize that and is more willing to reach across the aisle. It’s difficult. Cause I think one party thinks that it’s been burned by the other party. And it’s just, it’s kind of like the Hatfields and McCoys, like there’s this long running feud and it only gets stronger and stronger over time.

And people get more and more entrenched. There needs to be a sea change in kind of the whole attitude. And we need to get back to sort of the 19th, not that this was the golden age, but the 1980s and nineties, at least a reporter told me once, this is in like the early two thousands. They walked by the Senate dining room.

on a weekday, maybe a Tuesday or Wednesday and said it was empty during lunchtime. And I mean, I think if you’ve done that in the eighties, the Senate dining room is like bubbling with activity and people are having lunch together and solving problems over a meal. Yes. And also, there’s the whole other thread.

Norm Ornstein has brought this to light many years ago about how members of Congress don’t live in Washington anymore. Obviously, it has become expensive to have two homes, but if you’re here and if you stay and you work a Monday through Friday a week. And your kids go to school in the D. C. area, then you’re at soccer games, and on the sidelines is your colleague from across the aisle who also has a child at this school.

And so you’re no longer vilifying this individual. This individual is just like you, trying to raise a family, trying to be a senator or a member of Congress, a member of the House. There are more ways where you could casually intersect with people from the other party and get to know them and build friendships.

But the whole Tuesday, Thursday work week and the rush to get back to the district and the fact that they don’t typically have a full time house with their family here, I think takes away a lot of those opportunities for understanding and getting to know your colleagues. And I think half the battle of sort of working together is understanding where other people are coming from.

The Katzmann initiative that I am the director of, is named after Robert Kastman, who was a political scientist and a judge and a lawyer, and his early political science work was trying to figure out how to make the branches get along better. Does there really need to be this much acrimony between judges, the judicial branch, and Congress?

Congress obviously appropriates money and can sort of regulate and pass laws that affect judges. But if they both understand each other better

And so, he wrote books about improving the relations between the branches. He would often have gatherings where there were judges and members of Congress to sort of talk about these things. And his research was done in the 1980s, and I think now, if you tried to broach that line of research, people would laugh and say, yeah, good luck.

We’ve come a long way. But I believe in his original, uh, idea. Um, goals of trying to make perceived opponents understand each other better so that they can work together.

Valerie Boyd: And, and you do see initiatives around the country of different universities promoting initiatives like this or the University of Chicago Center for Excellence in Government and the Portman Center and these questions about the, the big picture of culture and polarization are so hard to solve.

As you said, no one becomes a senator because they want to spend 60 percent of their votes on, on personnel matters. So, there is some hope that there are some procedural fixes that could help. We’ve seen a resolution.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: I just wonder. Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. I just wonder if it’s sort of awareness, like maybe the people working on Capitol Hill think it’s perfectly normal to have 140 individuals confirmed after an entire year or 300 days.

And if they think that’s a norm, then they don’t think anything’s wrong with the holds and the extended delays. And, you know, these poor nominees that are just sort of hanging out there waiting to see if they’re going to get confirmed. And as you know, many times they have to quit their jobs because there’s conflicts.

If they became a future Senator, I’m sorry, if they became a future head of a department, the other side of the coin is like, we need to care about these nominees. We’re trying to recruit the best and the brightest to serve in our government. And there are a lot of people that want to do it, but financially, And just lifestyle as they can’t make it work given the current state.

And so I think senators should be, I worry that they’re not aware of the losses that are incurred because of the slowness of the process.

Valerie Boyd: Yeah. We know people who’ve been waiting two years in the process and unsure where their kids will go to school and, um, not able to take on business because they’re concerned about conflicts of interest.

And it’s not a way to attract talented people to serve in challenging positions.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Right.

Valerie Boyd: So, are there any other procedural fixes you would point to? I think we’ve seen a resolution recently on bundling nominations. There’s been some discussion about whether the privilege calendar, which was supposed to expedite non controversial positions, is actually working.

Do you see anything there that might help?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of those ideas have been generated by the Partnership for Public Service and I actually would defer to their expertise because you all have so many people who have. Um, worked on the Hill, worked in the White House and have a much better sense of what’s a feasible reform that, that you could maybe convince senators that, that it’s a good thing to do.

So that’s kind of out of my realm of expertise in terms of coming up with procedural means. I would, you know, think Molly Reynolds from Brookings or Sarah Bender might have better ideas of reform initiatives that would be something where senators would actually think, Oh yeah, we can do that. That’s, that’s okay.

So, I would, you know, defer to the, the expertise of both Brookings and the Partnership for Public Service for sure. And so, and my view is since I don’t kind of know the inner workings as well and the rules as well, I would just like to see some evidence that senators care about this problem and that they’re willing to make efforts, even if it’s small.

I mean, I would like to see a huge reduction in the number of positions, but that’s completely unrealistic. They’re not going to do that. And it seems to me like the nature of America and politics in general is all of these like incremental little reforms. We take baby steps, and we make change with baby steps.

I would like to see massive change, but it’s kind of not in the body politic and I think it’s unlikely that the senators are going to do it. So now I’ll settle for anything. You know, I don’t even need to have a favorite if they just do something that works to decrease the amount of time that nominees have to wait to get confirmed.

That would make me happy.

Valerie Boyd: I, I agree. I agree. This needs attention and focus.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: We just, we can’t be picky. We just do the best we can and hope that one of the reform initiatives that’s tossed out there is, is accepted and pushed and that there are some senators that, that are aware of the severity of the problem and that, that want to do something for the good of the institution and the good of the country.

Valerie Boyd: So now that you’ve been studying these challenges for, for many years now, do you have any advice for listeners hoping to become political appointees?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, I still believe that government service is sort of one of the highest callings, and if you get the chance to work in government, I feel like you have to do it.

I mean, I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who have served in government, and they’ve moved on to other jobs that you and I would perceive as quite prestigious. But when they look back on their career, the highlight was that government service. again, and again. And it wasn’t just the substance of the work.

It was the quality of the other individuals, the civil servants with whom they got to work. And it was kind of the, the satisfaction of feeling like you’re serving your country and you’re making a difference. And I think jobs in the private sector that may be prestigious and that may be high paying, they often don’t come with that satisfaction of making you feel like you’re doing something that’s good for the country.

Valerie Boyd: I agree. Everyone I know who has left government service is wistful about their time inside. And I think a big part of it is. The sense of teamwork to solve problems, but maybe even more so the ability to work on a mission that matters. No matter what agency you’re in, you’re doing something to help people, and it feels meaningful to be involved in that.

So, I want to ask about your podcast, uh, because you’ve been hosting one recently and my impression is that you’re covering a lot of these big questions about the effective functioning of government. Can you tell us a little bit more about yours?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Oh, thank you for that opportunity. Yeah. It’s called Democracy in Question and every episode is a question.

So, some of the questions that I’ve asked is, is democracy in decline? Does your vote matter? What can we do about foreign interference and corruption in elections? So, it’s a variety. Each episode is a question. There will be eight episodes. We finished recording seven of them. The eighth one will happen after the election.

And it’s basically, it’s an evergreen podcast. So, it’s not so much about current events. It’s more for instance, in the case of Is Democracy in Decline, I bring on Brookings scholars from governance studies. And so, I’m basically showcasing the talent across governance studies and everybody’s research niche.

So, you’re hearing from kind of the best and the brightest in these various fields. And you know, they’ll talk more broadly about, Is democracy in decline? Well, how do you, what objective measurements can you look at to see if democracy is in decline? Do you look at other countries that are similarly situated to determine if democracy is in decline?

So, in a way, I think that every episode, which is roughly 40 minutes to 50 minutes, and I have two guests, so it’s two segments. It’s kind of like a small crash course. And, you know, how do you think about democracy and how do you think of it in decline? And at the end of each episode, I asked the scholars on a scale of one to 10, how nervous are they about the future of American democracy?

And it’s really interesting because they’re so steeped in their field. It’s interesting to see how they think about the future of American democracy. And so, there’s a little answer at the end of each of those interviews. And it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve learned so much from all of my colleagues and, um, gotten the chance because before every episode, as you know, you need to study up on what this individual does and their work.

And so, it’s been very gratifying. I get to know them a little bit better personally, and I’ve learned so much in the process.

Valerie Boyd: It really is fun to do this kind of thing. Can you tell us any more about other projects you have coming up?

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: So, you know, one of the things I’m most proud of is the, with the Katzmann Initiative.

We recently had our formal launch and Justice Breyer spoke at the formal launch, but we also shortly thereafter launched something called the Courts Congress Index. And what that is, is its data that sheds light on the relationship between courts and Congress. It’s all publicly available data. That’s really hard to get.

So, for instance, we talk about salary and we show judicial salaries over time compared to congressional salaries. We’re going to write essays as these judicial salaries annually get updated. Then we’re going to write about the history and what’s happening with judicial salaries. With that particular table, we recently added a new data point.

We thought to ourselves, what is a job that exists now that seems roughly comparable to being a judge? And so, we picked law school deans. And so we’ve provided another data point that shows law school dean salaries over time compared to judicial salaries for life tenure judges and to members of Congress.

We’re currently gathering appropriations data, and it has been a heavy, heavy lift. You would think that appropriations data from the early 1900s to the present, how much the judicial branch asked for and how much they received from Congress, that those, those Answers will be very easy to get. It turns out it’s extraordinarily difficult because OMB and the government generally would change their method of collecting that data and put it in different documents over time.

And so, our goal is to become a go to source for journalists, scholars, people like you who are just interested in the Courts Congress relationship. And they can go to this website called the Courts Congress Index and gather the data and use it in their reports or their stories if they’re a journalist.

And one of the other areas we have a lot of information that actually would be of great interest to the partnership is on judicial nominations and confirmations. We have the percentage of no votes over time, all kinds of granular detail on these votes for judicial nominations, and going back quite far.

So, there’s some interesting longitudinal trends. But our goal is over time for it to be the go-to place for data. And we keep adding to it and we’ll keep writing about it to raise awareness and educate people about the role of the courts and its relationship to Congress.

Valerie Boyd: You’re reminding me we didn’t discuss at the top about how hard it is to collect this kind of data about turnover as well, particularly for staff who are not Senate confirmed.

You’re looking through…

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Yes. I’m glad I did it. And it’s kind of interesting because I wrote a couple articles in political science journals and I co-authored one. There wasn’t much interest in it. I’m guessing maybe five people in the country read these articles, right? Other political scientists who are interested in it, maybe 10.

Then Trump comes along and there’s all of these aberrations with staffing. And so my colleague, Paul Light said, Katie, It only takes an outlier and then people will care about your research. And sure enough, this outlier actually made people start to think about the importance of White House staff. And so, I’m building out the data set to have a lot of demographic information.

So, you can see, see over time, like the increase in the number of women who are serving on the White House staff, the average age over time, all kinds of demographic data about these men and women who serve the president. Because as I mentioned at the top, these are some of the most influential positions in our government.

Valerie Boyd: You know, that’s a good segue to the question that we’re asking everybody. You talked about your podcast has sort of a question at the end that you’re getting to. We’re asking everybody, what gives you hope in this next administration? And I hear you talking about interest in the issues, interest in the, in the personnel process and who is serving in the next administration. Yeah. Well, I, unfortunately I think in this election, we’re sort of facing stark differences. I mean, I’m sure you’ve been following the news about the transition, but

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: to me, a signal of someone’s willingness to care about governing and the processes is how seriously they take the transition. And I just read yesterday that the Trump transition has not signed on to two agreements that will provide resources to their transition team.

I don’t understand the reluctance, but it just has me a little bit worried about then their attitudes. Towards setting up a new government. So, I wouldn’t say it gives me hope. It gives me concern. And the transition period is so critical to an incoming administration. I guess I’m hopeful that there will be some change and maybe they have a plan B that they’re just doing things differently on their own track and it will all be okay.

But I would say what gives me hope is organizations like the Partnership for Public Service and the many other organizations that are trying to sort of improve civic dialogue, improve civic education on these issues, raise awareness. And there’s a lot of people that they keep working day to day to day despite ups and downs in, in the outcomes, despite increasing polarization.

And they keep chugging along because they care about institutions, and they care about our government and the future of American democracy. And those, those organizations, those individuals aren’t going to go anywhere.

Valerie Boyd: I completely agree with that point, and on the transition planning front, I do hope that the different parties involved in the MOU negotiations are continuing to talk and address concerns because it is for the good of both candidates to have teams that have the infrastructure to plan.

It’s good for everyone. federal agencies to know what to expect with a White House MOU signed in advance of the election. And it’s good for all of us to have continuity and information sharing across administrations. So, Katie, I was looking forward to this and as expected, it’s a tremendous amount of fun to talk to you about challenges in the process, but a lot of agreement on where attention should be focused next to make the process better.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: Yeah. Well, keep up all the good work you’re doing for the partnership.

Valerie Boyd: You too.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas: And thank you for your time. It was really fun to talk to you.

Valerie Boyd: Thank you, Katie. Same here.