Buffeted with a whirlwind of criticism in the wake of
revelations of widespread fraud in VA Hospital and outpatient clinic wait
times, President Obama somewhat sheepishly admitted during a news conference on
the matter that he had heard nothing of the practice on his travels around the
country. With at least one instance of false scheduling at 65% of the
facilities between September 30, 2013 and March 31, 2014 and 13% of schedulers
being instructed in how to falsify wait-times,[1]
it is odd that word had not reached the president’s ear. Maybe this is not so
odd after all, for the president’s domestic trips tended to be oriented to
campaign fundraisers and speeches oriented to proposed legislation. In other
words, the president—and Barak Obama is hardly alone here—put his legislative
role above that of his office as chief executive.
It is worth noting that the legislative role of the American
federal president is negative in that
the power is exercised by vetoing legislation. To be sure, the president is constitutionally
encouraged to make recommendations through the State of the Union report made
to Congress. Even so, the extent of time and attention that presidents have
directed to pushing favored legislative bills go beyond making recommendations,
and thus the opportunity cost (i.e., foregone attention to other matters, such
as managing the executive branch of the U.S. Government) is not justified. Put
another way, having two branches focused at the top on legislating is not only
redundant, or overkill; the joint focus leaves the executive branch without a
chief except in parchment.
This is not to say that proactive rather than veto-based
presidential involvement in the legislative process cannot bear fruit. Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the president for much of the Great Depression in the 1930s,
expended tremendous effort in seeing to it that his New Deal programs were
legislated into actuality. In an “exit-interview” at the conclusion of decades
in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) calls FDR,
“The Giant, one of probably the three greatest” presidents in American history.[2]
In dull contrast, Dwight Eisenhower was a “fine chairman of the board, . . .
but didn’t do much.”[3]
This stinging critique implies that the managerial imprint translates into
lethargy or at least a lack of accomplishment.
Relatedly, Dingell criticizes Jimmy Carter for not being
able to see the forest even as he could see every tree in the woods.[4]
While a president as presider should
have his or her eyes on the big picture, protecting society and the systems of
business and government as wholes from actualizing systemic risk, the president
as chief executive should focus on trees relative to society as a whole—that is,
relative to the orientation in presiding. To be sure, the focus of the
particular agencies is considerably narrower, and no CEO rightfully gets hung
up at that level—but neither does a CEO focus on society at the expense of the
business itself. Carter took micromanaging to the extreme, personally approving
even the White House Christmas cards. As dysfunctional as this is for a chief
executive, equally problematic is a president who acts as if he or she were a
Congressional leader, or else privileges his own presiding over managing. Yet legislating
and presiding have come to swallow up the very notion of the American presidency—Rep.
Dingell’s comments illustrating this default.
It hardly bears mentioning that for a politically-oriented
person, running around the member states making speeches oriented to a vision
of society is unquestionably more exciting than exercising executive
responsibilities. As a result, it has been all too easy for the
campaign-oriented people who have occupied the Oval Office to effectively leave
the mammoth executive branch without a CEO or managerial chairperson—a decision
that tacitly enables the sort of widespread fraud as was found in the Veterans
Administration in 2014. It is fanciful to suppose that word of even such a
widespread managerial practice would
somehow show up on a rope-line as a celebrity president is passing by. Yet in
his news conference on the fraud at the VA, President Obama saw no such
disjunction. Instead, he sought to appear as managerially on top of the
intricacies of the VA scheduling process.
I suspect that the encroachment of campaigning over
governing has a correlate in the White House, wherein legislating has come to
crowd out the executive functions. Perhaps the Electoral College was
established in part so a good executive rather than a good campaigner would
have a chance at the office; the increasing salience of the popular vote being
like a storm’s wave washing over everything else and thus effectively
establishing the sort of person who would get the prize. Relatedly, the
underlying problem doubtlessly includes the character flaw that too easily
ignores some of a job’s responsibilities in selfishly favoring others. In other
words, we can indeed blame Barak Obama and many of his predecessors for
slighting their managerial responsibilities across the executive branch in
order to have more influence (i.e., legislatively). Ironically, fewer speeches on pending legislation
would have much more currency and free
up the president to manage the executive branch. As for the quite legitimate
presiding role that is literal to the presidency itself, catastrophic threats
to the systems of business, government, and society do not arise every day; the
role does not “eat” a lot of time on a daily basis if understood correctly
instead of applied to every symptom that pops up on an oversensitive radar-screen.
Leaving legislating largely to Congress, a presiding president would likely find
that he or she has enough time to manage the executive branch effectively,
assuming an optimal mix of direct supervision and delegation is applied. Generally
speaking, balance and proper
boundaries would do a lot of good, yet unfortunately human nature may be more
schizogenic than homeostatic—more maximizing (e.g., desire) than oriented to
equilibrium.
[1] Meghan
Hoyer and Gregg Zoroya, “Fraud Masks VA Wait Times,” USA Today, June 3, 2014.
[2] “John
Dingell Rates the Presidents,” USA Today,
May 2, 2014.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid.
