Alyssa Rosenberg makes an excellent point about the missing Treasury Department subcabinet officials:

It’s hard to argue that it’s in any way a good thing that Obama hasn’t filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn’t have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That’s what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

Americans tend to assume that however we happen to do things is just the way things need to be done. But in reality, compared to other democracies we’re an extreme outlier in terms of how “deep” into the org charts of our agencies political appointees go. If you don’t like to think about foreigners, one way of thinking about how to build effective public sector institutions is always to look at the United States military where, unlike on the civilian side, political consensus has generally existed that effective institutions are important. You’ll see that while the president has discretion about which senior officers go where and do what, he doesn’t get to just pull new three- and four-star flag officers out of the ether (back in the day, things didn’t work that way, and during the Civil War there were plenty of “political generals” who did worse than the professionals). And what’s more, though a new president could shake things up right away, the expectation is that he won’t and that commanders will generally stay in place and provide continuity. They’ll report to a new commander-in-chief, and eventually they rotate to new assignments or into retirement, but the general assumption is that you don’t start everything from scratch. In addition to the various direct, practical benefits of greater professionalism this also greatly enhances the prestige of the low- and mid-level officers. The way you get to be an extremely important military commander is to start out as the most junior possible kind of commissioned officer and work your way up.

One potential model for civilian agencies might be the State Department where there are a ton of offices that are technically political appointments but where strong norms and traditions suggests that you fill them with career civil servants. Christopher Hill, for example, is a career foreign service officer. As such, he served on the team that negotiated the Dayton Accords. Based on that, he was given a “political” appointment as Ambassador to Macedonia. In 2000, he became Ambassador to Poland and he stayed in office until 2004 across a Presidential transition. Then he became Ambassador to South Korea, and in 2005 he became Assistant Secretary for East Asia. Soon, he’ll be Ambassador to Iraq. In general in the State Department it’s considered normal for the Undersecretary for Political Affairs and almost of all the Assistant Secretaries who report to him, and the policy-relevant ambassadorships to be occupied by career people.

Of course it’s worth saying that Timothy Geithner is essentially a person along this model—a guy who was working in a civil service job who, starting in 1995, got tapped for a series of increasingly-important political appointments in the Treasury Department who then left at the end of the Clinton administration. If the Bush administration had been inclined to make more Geithner-esque appointments at Treasury—elevating senior civil servants to subcabinet posts—it might have been more feasible to have a smooth transition.

As the Obama administration heads into the last day of its first working week, exactly nobody is poised at the edge of their seat wondering who the next Commerce Secretary will be. The reason is that nobody cares about the Department of Commerce. The only important sub-cabinet job—the head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—has already been filled by Jane Lubchenco (an excellent choice).

Jonathan Zasloff suggests doing away with the department altogether:

In the run-up to the 2012 Election, President Obama should propose abolishing the department. It would be his equivalent of Bill Clinton’s support of school uniforms and V-Chip: small, symbolic gestures that send a sort of cultural signal. You can trust the Democrats to run the government frugally.

Of course it’s hard to actually save very much money doing this, since you wouldn’t actually be eliminating the department’s main sub-agencies. NOAA would be a good fit inside the EPA or the Department of the Interior, the Patent Office could be spun off as an independent agency or sent to Justice (or even Education; I think several countries put their patent agencies inside their education ministries) and the Census Bureau and the other statistical agencies could go hang out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And actually the price of carrying out the reorganization might well exceed the monetary savings. Still, political symbolism isn’t always about doing things that make sense.

At any rate, as long as the Commerce Cabinet Crisis continues, I’m going to profile one Secretary of Commerce per day until Barack Obama finds his man. Check this space tomorrow for the first edition.

The country’s still awaiting not only a Commerce Secretary but a great many subcabinet appointees, deputy directors of agencies, etc. etc. etc. And this points to a paradox of presidential power. Politically, Obama is going to be at his strongest for the next several months. But organizationally, an administration tends to be weakest at the beginning—with many jobs vacant or filled by holdovers and some filled by people who don’t work out. Maximizing effectiveness requires Obama to pick good people and do it quickly. To that end, two documents out from CAP:

• Six Ways that the Obama Administration Can Improve the Political Appointment Process
• Presidential Appointments by the Numbers

A couple of factoids from the “numbers” report—it took Bill Clinton on average over 450 days to fill deputy agency head and inspector-general positions. That’s not good.

Laura Rozen has an interesting item about a secret dinner Barack Obama had with some foreign policy experts outside his circle of official advisers:

[Lee] Hamilton, the longtime House member from Indiana who cochaired the Iraq Study Group, the 9/11 Commission, and numerous others over the years, has become a kind of wise-man mentor to Obama. Last Thursday, the Wilson Center president assembled a small collection of scholars on the Middle East and South Asia for a meeting that stretched through dinner for hours into the night.

Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore); Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting); incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts. [...]

A source close to Hamilton explained that he had a long relationship with Obama, and noted that many former Hamilton staffers had gone on to be key staffers and foreign policy advisors to Obama.

Among them: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who wrote speeches and was a policy advisor for Hamilton for several years; Obama’s top foreign-policy advisor Denis McDonough; who worked for Hamilton on the staff of the House International Relations Committee, Obama Mideast advisor Daniel Shapiro, who worked for Hamilton as his professional staff member on the Middle East when Hamilton was chairman of the then-House Foreign Affairs Committee in the 103rd Congress (1993-94); Dan Restrepo, a top Obama Latin America advisor now with the Center for American Progress who worked for Hamilton on the Hill; and Mara Rudman, who worked for Hamilton on the Hill and is now a member of the formal Obama transition team.

There are a few noteworthy things about this. One is that Roger Cohen was observing earlier this week, echoed by many others, that it might be good for Obama to have some people of Arab or Persian ancestry in his brain trust on Mideast issues and not just a spectrum of Jewish-American opinion. And evidently Obama sees some truth to this or he wouldn’t be reaching out to this group. But so how come there aren’t any names like this being bandied about for the top jobs? And then there’s the matter of this national security team featuring Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Daniel Shapiro, and Samantha Power with Lee Hamilton in the background as an eminence grise. That sounds to be an awful lot like the Obama national security team I remember from the campaign. What ever happened to those guys? Or to non-Hamilton folks like Scott Gration and Richard Danzig? Obama feels like he’s already “in the bubble” but it appears to be a bubble overwhelmingly of his own devising. The names we’ve got for the most senior positions—Gates, Lynn, Flournoy, Clinton, Steinberg, Slaughter, Jones, Donilon—are all well-qualified people, but it’s really striking that none of them are Obama’s people. It’s not surprising to me that he might start to feel uncomfortable with that situation, but I don’t really see why he created the situation in the first place.

Laura Rozen has a good reported piece on the continuing anxiety of the foreign policy hands who took risks with their career to support Barack Obama in the primary, and who now seem to be left a bit out in the cold as the time comes to fill jobs. At issue is the fact that Obama decided to give the jobs with the most subordinates at Defense and State to people who obviously weren’t Obama loyalists. And Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton understandably want to fill their top subordinate positions with people they like and are comfortable with. And then those people in turn have their own ideas. Meanwhile, Susan Rice, who headed up the foreign policy operation in the campaign, has been sent off to be UN Ambassador. That’s a very senior position. But unlike in alternate realities in which she’d been made Deputy Secretary of State or Deputy National Security Adviser, it’s not a position that gives her a lot of sway over a large number of subordinate jobs.

More appointments:

The president-elect is expected to name [Cass] Sunstein—his friend and informal adviser—to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a transition official said late Wednesday.

A low-profile position in the current administration, the job is likely to be a higher-wattage one after Obama takes office this month.

Sunstein seems like an unusually high-wattage person for this somewhat obscure job, further reenforcing the extent to which Obama is assembling a real team of all-stars where you have a bunch of people in secondary positions who would have enough stature to take on higher-profile jobs. OIR itself is a sub-part of the Office of Management and Budget and even though nobody’s ever heart of it, it has rather sweeping influence across the whole ambit of regulatory activities. Since there’s talk of doing a big overhaul of financial regulations that will be an obvious focus, but there’s lots and lots of regulating happening all over the place.

With regard to the Panetta situation, it’s worth noting that not only has it never been the case that the CIA Director must be a career intelligence professional, it’s also long been the case that past service as a White House Chief of Staff has been viewed as a wide-ranging qualification for future public office. Alexander Haig became Secretary of State. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both went on to serve as Secretary of Defense. James Baker become Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State. There’s nothing unusual about the idea that service in that job qualifies people for senior national security positions.

Bill Richardson is withdrawing from consideration as Commerce Secretary. I’m going to throw my hat into the ring Caroline Kennedy-style.

Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.

That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.