When the Presidential Personnel Office in January appointed Jeff Pon to be chief human capital officer at the Energy Department, Pon had mixed feelings about displacing the career executive in the position, Claudia Cross.

“I knew and respected Claudia as possibly the best human capital officer in the government,” he said. “But I came here because I knew she and I would be a great partnership in getting stuff done.”

Cross, now deputy CHCO, had known for months that a new CHCO likely would be named. And holding down both jobs, CHCO and human resources director, “was enormously demanding,” she said, but “it was with the expected mixed feelings that I received the news.

“However, Jeff and I had worked on some critical issues while he was at the Office of Personnel Management, and I was pleased to hear that someone who shares my passion and values would be coming to DOE. Jeff and I both approach this relationship as a partnership [that lets us] each focus on our own perspective.”

Pon and Cross appear to have forged an ideal working relationship at Energy. And it would seem on the surface that that many other political appointees and career executives across the government have similarly synchronous relationships.

"As a careerist, the more knowledgeable you are about the policy issues at hand, the more valuable you’ll be to the political leadership."
—Joseph Ferrara

Ask about the relationships between careers and politicals, and often you’ll get a stout denial that anything but respect, cooperation and enlightened self-interest exists between government’s top civil servants, members of the Senior Executive Service, and their bosses, the political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president.

But reports of conflicts occasionally bubble up. For example, recent hostilities over a reorganization at the State Department are evidence that discord does sometimes occur. According to a Washington Post story, political appointees at State blamed the problems on career executives’ resistance to change, and career executives charged they had been shunted aside for political reasons. However, the story noted, “few people would speak about the controversy for the record.”

What, then, is the nature of relations between political appointees and career execs? Is it Hatfields vs. McCoys? Or Astaire and Rogers? Or a mixture of both?

For the most part, it’s a dance of compatible partners, according to one expert. “In many cases, things do go well [between career executives and political appointees],” said Joseph Ferrara, director of the master of policy management program at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and co-author with Lynn Ross of Getting to Know You: Rules of Engagement for Political Appointees and Career Executives, a report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

But because a senior executive’s milieu is behind the scenes, it can be difficult to know about problems between career executives and appointees until they boil over publicly, as in the State Department matter.

Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, appreciates the dynamics as well as anyone. At its annual conference in 1998, SEA held a discussion on the topic and guaranteed anonymity to let people freely speak their minds, Bonosaro said.

“In the stark reality of career-political relations and government, ... uncertainty is the coin of the realm,” said a report on the discussion. “As one award-winning executive frankly stated, ‘You’re Distinguished Rank today, but dog meat tomorrow.’ ”

Most observers agree that if politicals and careers stick to certain roles, the relationship will go more smoothly.

“If you’re a political appointee, your job is determining what direction the business of your [agency’s] mission should be, and if you’re a career executive, your job is making sure that business gets done,” said Gilbert Johnson, senior manager for federal client services at CPS Human Resources Services of Washington, an organization that provides HR services to agencies.

“This is the way it is,” said Johnson, a former SES member. “If you’re a career executive and you want to be making policy, then you should get out of [the SES] and do something more political: Run for office, find a cause or an organization you can believe in and support it.”

Walking a fine line. Career executives must tread a fine line be- tween being yes-men and overstepping their authority, Bonosaro said.

“But sometimes, no matter how hard the career executive tries, it may be a case of oil and water. And it may be time for the career executive to go to another agency. But there are procedures that must be followed. It’s not like these folks are banished to the turkey farm until the next administration,” she said.

“Some political appointees come in thinking that all government careerists have horns and a tail,” she added. “Others have had some experience in the federal government or in state and local government and have an idea of how things work.”

Ferrara said the IBM Center study found there were myths on both sides. “And to the extent that politicals and careers cling to those ideas, the myths can cause tension between the two groups.” For instance, career executives, who serve an average of 26 years, sometimes at a single agency, may think of appointees as political hacks who know and care little about an agency’s history or mission beyond advancing their own ideology.

On the other hand, political appointees, who serve an average of nine years, usually divided among multiple agencies, may think of career executives as incompetents who just want a safe government job and who will resist serving the goals of a new administration.

“If either group believes these myths, they’ll have a hard time building a relationship,” Ferrara said.

Politicals can’t go it alone, Pon said. They need constructive relationships with the career execs they work with.

With Claudia Cross as deputy CHCO, “I was absolutely stacking the deck in my favor,” he said. “She has 20-year relationships in this department and with HR directors all across government. She knows how things work.”

In the IBM study, Ferrara said, he tried to come up with rules of engagement for both sides.

“As a careerist, the more knowledgeable you are about the policy issues at hand, the more valuable you’ll be to the political leadership,” he said.

Years in government have taught career executives some universal lessons about making their political appointees successful, Bonosaro said.

“You want to follow their wishes, unless of course what they’re suggesting is illegal or unethical,” she said. “You want to present them with alternatives and with complete information, but don’t overload them.”

For political appointees, Ferrara said, “we advised that if you listen to the advice of your careerists, whether you necessarily take all of it or not, you’re going to get the relationship off on the right foot.”

A former SES employee himself, mostly at the Defense Department, Ferrara added, “the political appointees I worked with knew which careers were the real experts, and they listened to them.”

“The not-so-smart politicals will shut those people out, particularly if they sense that their expert advice doesn’t fit with their political agenda,” he said.

Former SES executive Anthony Valletta, who retired in April 1998 as acting assistant secretary for command, control, communications and intelligence under Defense secretary William Cohen, concurred with Ferrara’s evaluation.

“I have to say that my experience with political appointees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense was absolutely fantastic,” he said. “They were well-versed in the issues, and they knew the importance of people in an organization.

“This is not to say that every appointee was always the best person for the job, but the ones who were smart enough to trust us were the most successful,” said Valletta, senior vice president and director of the defense sector for SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va.

“I don’t know of any of our appointees who don’t rely heavily on the career executives,” said Ronald P. Sanders, the National Intelligence Department’s chief human capital officer. “They absolutely depend on them to make things run. They couldn’t do the job without them.”

But to believe that because such partnerships exist, to some degree and with some regularity, that well-publicized rifts between political appointees and career executives are the result of dissatisfied employees or attempts to sell newspapers would be naïve, other observers say.

“While the creation of the SES was, for the most part, a positive development in the evolution of the senior career civil service, there is widespread agreement that the reform has not fully lived up to its potential and has not significantly improved the relationship between political appointees and career civil servants,” write Mark Abramson and Paul Lawrence in Learning the Ropes, Insights for Political Appointees, published in 2005 by the IBM Center.

In January 2001, the Heritage Foundation published Taking Charge of Federal Personnel, a paper by George Nesterczuk, Donald Devine and Robert Moffit, which urged President Bush to manage the government bureaucracy more firmly. It warned that “Washington’s notorious Iron Triangle—the alliance of the federal bureaucracy, congressional staff and interest groups based inside the Beltway—is perhaps at its strongest in resisting civil service reform.”

The paper offered points of action, including an aggressive policy of ensuring that political appointees make key management decisions rather than delegating them to career executives.

“The new President must make liberal use of his power of appointment, get a loyal team in place to carry out his agenda and insist on accountability while maintaining a clear distinction between career and non-career employees,” it warned.

Proponents of this approach see the Bush administration as trying to create a more responsive and efficient government. “When the president appointed me, he wanted to make sure he had a good hand in helping to frame governmentwide change,” Pon said.

In the end, the distinction between political appointees and career executives should be subordinate to the process of reaching an agency’s objectives.

Said Pon: “It’s less consequential to ask, ‘What’s the tension between politicals and careers?’ than ‘What are the pertinent issues that will relieve a lot of our problems now and in the future?’ ”