Prometheus 6

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said there was nothing inappropriate or unusual about installing White House allies in politically appointed positions, and insisted that it had never been the administration’s policy to consider political affiliation when hiring career civil servants.

“I reject the presumption that we have been any more or less aggressive than any other administration in trying to execute our policies,” Mr. Fratto said.

Really?

But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers....

Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.

Any other administration do that?

For White House, Hiring Is Political
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of an internal Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, which was the subject of a Senate oversight hearing on Wednesday, provided a window into how the Bush administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility — and how those efforts sometimes crossed customary or legal limits.

Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania who studies how presidents administer power throughout the executive branch, said that while presidents of both parties over the last half-century had sought ways to impose greater political control over the federal bureaucracy, the Bush administration had gone further than any predecessor.

“The Bush administration is unprecedented in how systematic the politicization is and how it extends both across the wider organization chart and deep down within the bureaucracy,” Professor Rudalevige said. “They’ve been very consistent from Day 1 in learning the lessons of previous administrations and pushing those tactics to the limit.”