Central Clearance as Presidential Management Andrew Rudalevige CSAS Working Paper 20-05 Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government, February 6, 2020 CENTRAL CLEARANCE AS PRESIDENTIAL MANAGEMENT Andrew Rudalevige Department of Government, Bowdoin College
[email protected] Prepared for the Conference on Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Expertise and Accountability in Constitutional Government, C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, February 6, 2020. Many thanks to participants in the September 2019 workshop where an earlier iteration of this paper was presented, especially Sally Katzen, Don Elliott, and Stuart Shapiro, as well as Jennifer Nou, Nicholas Parrillo, Dick Pierce, and Joseph Postell. 2 A century ago, in October 1919, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt testified to a House committee on the “machinery” needed by federal government executives. FDR argued that federal departments should have a central “inspection force… that we could send first to one bureau and then to another, with authority to…dig out the facts for us.” And the same principle, he argued, “applies in the case of the next higher step, the President,” who needed “machinery which he has not got at the present time.” For example, “he ought to have…someone who could come into my department at any time and see how I am running it” as well as some means of overseeing legislative and spending proposals sent by the departments to Congress. “No President of the United States, as an individual,” FDR observed, “has time to coordinate the hundreds of items of the different departments before they are sent to Congress.”1 In 1946, in a meeting with FDR’s successor as president, Harry Truman, Bureau of the Budget director Harold Smith put the same case in slightly different terms.