Vacancies, Delays, and Legislative Constraints in Presidential Appointment

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

What are some influences on the decisions presidents make in appointments to the executive branch? How do presidential appointments affect federal agencies? Lewis and Piper ask a straightforward question: do vacancies hurt federal agency performance? Analyzing a 2020 survey of federal executives throughout the executive branch, Lewis and Piper evaluate how vacancies impact agency performance and isolate the mechanisms through which a broken appointment process hurts agency performance. Examining the vacancies problem from a different perspective, Piper asks why presidents decide to politicize the appointment process in some instances while opting to centralize the process in others. Using a survey of federal executives, Piper evaluates how the presence of appointees affects perceptions of White House influence over agency policymaking, yielding important insight into the tradeoffs presidents face when determining their appointment strategy. The other two papers on this panel examine legislative constraints on presidential appointment powers. Hollibaugh and Krause propose a theory which assumes that the legislature favors executive branch coordination under unified partisan control of government, while preferring a lack of executive branch coordination in times of divided partisan control of government. Hollibaugh and Krause then test the empirical implications of their theory using panel data on U.S. federal agency discretionary budgetary authority covering three decades of the modern administrative presidency. Kinane presents an analysis of how the Senate responds to presidential nominations for positions currently filled with an interim appointee. Testing the theory using a new dataset of interim appointees and nominees to leadership positions in executive departments from 1981 to 2021, Kinane shows that the Senate seems willing to forgo formal confirmation when their priorities for agency action align with those of the president.

Sub Unit

• Division 23: Presidents and Executive Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 24: Public Administration

Individual Presentations

• Do Vacancies Hurt Federal Agency Performance? - David E. Lewis, Vanderbilt University; Christopher Mark Piper, Vanderbilt University

• Presidential Centralization and the Vacancies Problem - Christopher Mark Piper, Vanderbilt University

• The Prospects for Executive Branch Coordination and Legislative Budget Authority - Gary E. Hollibaugh, University of Pittsburgh; George A. Krause, University of Georgia

• Relinquishing Consent: Senate Confirmation Delay and the President's Actings - Christina M. Kinane, Yale University

Chair

• Jennifer L. Selin University of Missouri, Columbia

Discussants

• William G. Resh University of Southern California

• Jennifer L. Selin University of Missouri, Columbia