Oct 10, 01:10 AM
The Hackocracy—or—“I got a job for ya, Altoid Boy”
Michael “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” Brown was hardly the only Bush-appointed boob running our government.
TNR has a guide to Bush’s “Hackocracy”, a list of the top 15 most under-qualified, highly cronyfied schmoes serving in some very important posts in the US government.
There’s the recently appointed young man, Israel Hernandez, who will be overseeing 1,800 employees in 80 countries as Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service. His primary qualification seems to be that he became a close friend of the Bush family when he served for several years as Bush’s “travel aide,” where his alacrity with dispensing breath mints led Bush to nickname him “Altoid Boy.”
And there’s Andrew Maner, Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Homeland Security despite his complete lack of any training or experience in finance and accounting. DHS’s budget is an unwieldy $40 billion.
Claire Buchan, Chief of Staff in the Department of Commerce, has no relevant experience but was rather a PR hack in both Bush presidencies and the Republican National Committee. A reporter on the White House beat who had experience working with Buchan was surprised to learn of her appointment, saying that she was “the most useless in a Bush universe of enforced uselessness. She took empty banality to a new low.”
TNR reassures us that Patrick Rhode, Acting Deputy Director at FEMA, does have some relevant experience other than his years of work with Bush political campaigns. “Rhode has covered disasters—as a TV anchor for local network affiliates in Alabama and Arkansas, in which capacity he developed ‘an acute interest in what responders do in times of crises.’ Perhaps not acute enough. He recently said that fema’s response to Katrina was ‘probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country’s history.’”
Within the Department of Health and Human Services, the head of Public Health and Emergency Preparedness is presumably a pretty important position considering the possibility of an outbreak of Avian Flu. I, for one, am not comforted to learn that the man who fills that post is not a doctor, epidemiologist, or anyone with any relevant training in public health. Nope, Stewart Simonson is a lawyer. His most recent job experience is as a top official at Amtrak. (Where he showed off his management skills by helping that long-troubled organization turn itself around—oh, wait.) He’s an old buddy of Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor who was Bush’s first Secretary of HHS. Thompson appointed Simonson to his post just before leaving in early 2005.
The list goes on (and I do encourage you to read the whole thing), before scientifically determining the number 1 biggest hack by this elegant formula:
And that biggest hack is none other than Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, which makes sense. On the top half of the equation, you have the facts that “the president has given her five jobs over the past eleven years. And senior White House aides have repeatedly remarked about her devotion to Bush.” Multiply that by the consideration that the Supreme Court is the most important position to which a president can make an appointment (and it’s a lifetime appointment!).
And Miers’ rather thin resume does not begin to mitigate these problems. TNR, snarkily, relates this story:
In announcing his choice, Bush pointed to her storied career as chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Although the Commission has historically not produced many Supreme Court justices, Bush has reason to be pleased with her lottery service. Miers may not have dealt with issues like civil rights or the death penalty, but she dealt with bingo. As chairman, she opined that she wanted all bingo-related games “to look and feel and smell like the game of bingo,” which seems like a reasonable position.
(On Miers’ breathtaking under-qualification, I would also suggest you check out this column from law professor Geoffrey Stone.)
The TNR staff decided to limit themselves to only the top 15 hacks, but, despite their use of math, this kind of thing is quite subjective. So, like the American Movie Association’s famous lists of various categories of top 100 films of all time, its best use might be as a catalyst for further discussion. There are a lot of other unworthy hacks out there who could make a claim for a spot on the list.
For example, there’s former top procurement officer David Safavian, recently indicted for obstructing justice by giving false statements in the investigation of sleaze-bag lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Time published an article recently about Safavian and several other hacks that is pretty eye-opening:
David Safavian didn’t have much hands-on experience in government contracting when the Bush Administration tapped him in 2003 to be its chief procurement officer. A law-school internship helping the Pentagon buy helicopters was about the extent of it. Yet as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Safavian, 38, was placed in charge of the $300 billion the government spends each year on everything from paper clips to nuclear submarines, as well as the $62 billion already earmarked for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.
Time goes on:
Safavian spent the bulk of his pregovernment career as a lobbyist, and his nomination to a top oversight position stunned the tightly knit federal procurement community. A dozen procurement experts interviewed by TIME said he was the most unqualified person to hold the job since its creation in 1974. Most of those who held the post before Safavian were well-versed in the arcane world of federal contracts. “Safavian is a good example of a person who had great party credentials but no substantive credentials,” says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit Washington watchdog group. “It’s one of the most powerful positions in terms of impacting what the government does, and the kind of job-
like FEMA director-that needs to be filled by a professional.”
Teddy Roosevelt said that “The bulk of government is not legislation but administration.” It matters who is appointed and approved to work in these positions. In Katrina, we learned that it was a matter of life and death.
I intend to look further into the Hackocracy. Good government is important, and I think it’s something that every American can support, regardless of political ideology. As a country, it’s time we started taking patronage more seriously.
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