The Distributive Benefits of Senate-Confirmed Appointee Vacancies

• In Event: The Impact of Politicization and the Budget on Federal Agencies

Abstract

We examine the influence of discretionary agency outlays on the relative length of Senate-confirmed presidential appointee (PAS) vacancies over time. We argue that key Senate pivots in the appointment process are more (or less) likely to extend a vacancy based on an agency's discretionary spending outlays to the Senator's state. When spending favors a pivot Senator's state relative to other states and there is a vacancy in a key PAS position, the vacancy will be extended. When spending does not favor a pivot Senator's state relative to other states, then those vacancies will be shorter (conditional on the agency's and the Senator's ideological distance from the President).

Appointed executives of bureaucratic agencies in the United States federal government are agents of both presidential and congressional power. Roughly 1100 such positions require the advice and consent of the Senate, which confers legitimacy and mediates conflict between politics and expertise. As a result, executive appointees often find themselves serving two masters, and this shared influence often manifests in the relative ideological distance they have between key principals, generally falling somewhere between the appointing president and key Senate pivots (Bertelli and Grose 2011). Indeed, nested between constitutional principals, appointees have become the institutional embodiment of the administrative state (Bertelli and Lynn 2006; Nathan 1983; Stayn 2001). Among the consequences of the expanding reach of appointee politics is a pattern of vacant positions peculiar to American government.

Following Resh et al (2020), we argue that status quo institutional factors matter a great deal for determining vacancies in important PAS positions, as does ideological conflict between target agencies and key Senate pivots. We posit that when agencies are less responsive to the relevant Senate pivot, vacancy length will be shortened to attain responsiveness. When agencies are responsive to the relevant Senate pivot when there is a vacancy, then vacancy length will be extended. The basic premise of our paper is that Senate confirmation can ensure agency responsiveness to Senate preferences (which are presumably linked to particularism), but only based on the position of key Senate pivots relative to the president and the agency. We combine a uniquely thorough dataset on PAS vacancies with federal budget data by state and agency from the George HW Bush (1989) administration through Trump (2020) (including relevant agency-level controls, ideology scores, etc.). We also break these analyses out by presidency to accommodate the potential for varying vacancy strategies employed by different presidencies.

Authors

• William G. Resh, University of Southern California

• Nicholas G. Napolio, University of Southern California

• Keunyoung Lee, University of Southern California