Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I am delighted to join with the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, my dear friend Senator Lieberman, in rising today in support of the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011.

First, let me join Senator Lieberman in commending Senators SCHUMER and ALEXANDER for their leadership on this bill. Senator Alexander, in particular, has worked so hard on this issue. In fact, I am convinced we would not be where we are today without his persistent leadership. He deserves great credit for his patience and his dogged determination to bring this bill and this issue to the floor. Senators REID and MCCONNELL also deserve great credit. They made the commitment in January to make reform of the nominations process a priority.

Finally, I wish to recognize Senator Lieberman, the chairman of the committee, on which I have the privilege of being the ranking member. He and I have also been part of what has truly been a bipartisan effort to craft this bill. It is an effort we need to see more often in this Senate if we are to tackle and actually solve the many problems facing our Nation.

This bill before us addresses shortcomings in the process of confirming Presidential appointees without diminishing the constitutional roles of the President or of the Senate. The fact is this is a very modest bill that takes limited but much needed steps to reform the confirmation process. When we look at the full-time positions that now require Senate confirmation, this bill would eliminate only approximately 85 full-time positions, a truly modest number. These positions were selected because either they do not have significant policymaking authority or funding responsibilities or report directly to a Senate-confirmed official.

To be clear, not included in these numbers are almost 3,000 officer corps positions that would no longer require Senate confirmation under this bill. But let me quickly explain exactly what those officer positions are, because when many people hear the words ``officer positions,'' they are going to think the Department of Defense and that would raise the issue of civilian control of the military. Let me say these are not military or Department of Defense positions. Rather, they are members of the Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Corps of the Department of Commerce.

Apart from these officer corps positions, more than 83 percent of all currently confirmed positions and more than 90 percent of all the full-time positions will continue to require Senate approval under this bill. Let me emphasize that again because, unfortunately, there is some misinformation about this bill. More than 90 percent of the full-time positions in the Federal Government that have required Senate confirmation will continue to require Senate approval under our bill. Furthermore, nothing in this bill limits the ability of Congress to create new Senate-confirmed positions in the future. It may be that there is a new department created someday or a new position that is very important. The Senate can choose to exercise its will to make those new positions subject to Senate confirmation.

The companion standing order reported by the Rules Committee proposes that some additional 240 positions go through a new expedited confirmation process. Although that resolution is not now before us, it will be, I hope, shortly after we conclude our work on this bill. So I wish to explain briefly what the process would be under that resolution.

That expedited process would still require nominees to respond to all committee questionnaires and would still provide the opportunity for closer scrutiny of a nominee if requested by a single Senator--any Senator. The confirmation process must be thorough enough for the Senate to exercise its constitutional duty, but it should not be so onerous as to deter qualified people from public service, particularly when they are being asked to serve as a part-time member of an advisory board.

A letter from three of our former colleagues, one House Member and two Senators, put it well. The bipartisan Policy Center in endorsing this bill sent us a letter that is signed by former Congressmen and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, Senator Pete Domenici, and Senator Trent Lott, who of course served as the majority leader of the Senate. Here is what they said, and here is what we heard over and over at the hearing Senator Lieberman and I conducted before our committee. This is the bipartisan Policy Center's conclusion:

Many public spirited people are discouraged from serving in appointed office because of the length and the extreme adversarial nature of the confirmation process.

This is an issue the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has been working to address for a long time. In fact, in 2001, when Senator Fred Thompson chaired the committee, we held two hearings focusing on the state of the Presidential appointment process.

As a result of those hearings, the committee reported favorably reform legislation. A few of the provisions of that bill were later incorporated into the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which I, along with Senator Lieberman, authored.

Let me give our colleagues some more background, some of which has been covered by the chairman of the committee but I think is important to repeat to counter some misimpressions about this bill that somehow it undermines our constitutional obligations. In fact, the Constitution, in the appointments clause, makes the appointment of senior Federal executive officers a joint responsibility of the President and the Senate. The President determines who in his judgment is best qualified to serve in the most senior and critical positions across the executive branch of our government. Then we, the Senate, exercise our independent judgment to determine if these nominees have the necessary qualifications and character to serve our Nation in these important positions of public trust. But at the same time, the Constitution envisions the appointment of lesser officers by the President alone. Specifically, the Constitution provides that ``Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.'' So that process is spelled out in the Constitution.

The National Commission on the Public Service, commonly known as the Volcker Commission, gathered some very illuminating statistics. They differ a bit from some of the statistics the chairman has given because he is using CRS, but what they show is the enormous increase in the number of positions that are now subject to Senate confirmation and approval.

When President Kennedy came to office, he had just 286 positions to fill that had the titles of Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, Assistant Secretary, and Administrator. But using those titles, there were only 286 when President Kennedy assumed office. By the end of the Clinton administration, there were 914 positions with those titles. Today, according to the Congressional Research Service, there are between 1,200 and 1,400 positions in total that are appointed by the President that require the advice and consent of the Senate. Too often, that large number of positions requiring confirmation leads to long delays in vetting, nominating, and confirming these appointees.

I would also point out that there is a great expense that goes along with this process. Having an FBI background check is expensive. Having our congressional investigators do their own vetting process is expensive. And many a nominee will tell you how expensive it is for the nominee to go through this process. The result of the length of this process is that administrations can go for months without key officials in these many agencies. That is why you will find there is bipartisan support from previous administrations urging us to finally tackle this issue.

The 9/11 Commission found that ``[a]t the sub-cabinet level, there were significant delays in the confirmation of key officials, particularly at the Department of Defense,'' in 2001. It was not until 6 months after President Bush took office that he had his national security team in place. Our enemies take note of that fact. That is what the 9/11 Commission found. And it creates a national security vulnerability that terrorists can and have exploited. We have seen that in the United States, we have seen that in Madrid, that when there is a change in administration, it is a particularly difficult time, particularly if we do not have our appointees in place.

As I have mentioned, Senators SCHUMER and ALEXANDER have been the bipartisan authors of this bill, which has been cosponsored not only by Senator Lieberman and myself but by members of the leadership of the Senate on both sides of the aisle. But I believe, of all members of the working group, Senator Alexander may have the best perspective. In fact, I believe he does have the best perspective because he is one of the few Members of the Senate who have served as a Cabinet Secretary and as a Senator. He has endured the nominations process himself, and I am sure he will explain what he went through in his comments later, but he will talk about how long it was, that it was 9 months before he had a chief financial officer. It took him 6 months, I believe, to be confirmed, and he could not get his team in place because the process was so bogged down.

The nominations reform bill we take up today removes only 203 positions out of an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 from the Senate confirmation requirement, and most of those positions are part-time advisory board members. I would ask my colleagues, should the Senate really spend its time and its resources confirming 10 part-time members of the National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board? I am not in any way denigrating the work of this board or the people who are willing to serve on it. I am just suggesting that I do not think that board requires our confirmation. What about the National Board of Education Sciences or the National Museum and Library Sciences Board, which has 20 part-time members, all of whom have to be confirmed by the Senate?

Again, I would point out there is a cost involved for my colleagues, and that involves everyone here who is concerned about the amount of money we are spending in the Federal Government. There is a cost to an FBI background investigation. There is a cost to having a sufficient number of staff to go out and do the kinds of background checks and vetting that we do. There is a cost to the nominees involved, who have to fill out all these forms, who have to be very careful that they are divesting themselves of certain assets. And it makes sense for the Office of Government Ethics, which already has a system in place to check for those kinds of conflicts, to not have its work duplicated, and that is what happens now far too often.

This legislation will free the Senate and enable us to focus on those nominees whose jobs are absolutely critical to our Nation, who do have significant policy responsibility, who do have significant control over Federal funds, and that will make a difference. It will also enable the Senate to spend more time on the critical work of how can we best create more jobs in this country, how can we reduce our unsustainable $14 trillion debt, how can we strengthen our homeland security, and how can we conduct more effective oversight of the executive branch. Isn't it a better use of our time to be holding oversight hearings to examine the enormous duplication the Government Accountability Office has found across government that wastes hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of taxpayer dollars, rather than spending our time worrying about the confirmation of 20 part-time members of the National Museum and Library Services Board?

Over the years, our committee has continued to hear from experts on the executive nominations process. In April of this year, we received a letter from the bipartisan Commission to Reform the Federal Appointments Process, which is chaired by our former colleagues, Senators Frist and Robb, as
well as we have heard from the former Director of Presidential Personnel for the Bush administration, Clay Johnson, and the former Chief of Staff for the Clinton administration, Mack McLarty. They wrote--and I think this puts it well--that ``[m]ost everyone agrees the federal appointments process is broken.'' They underscored that the bill before us will help the next administration ``to put in place very early in its first year the ..... people that the new Department heads need to get off to a fast start ..... working effectively with Congress.''

I hope we can agree to undertake the modest reforms we have included in this bill. I hope we do not let this legislation and the Rules Committee resolution get caught up in the turf battles and the power struggles that too often sink good government initiatives in this body. This bill is a step in the right direction and a step we should take together by an overwhelming margin.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, if they have not already been printed in the Record, that letters endorsing the bill from the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Partnership for Public Service, Senator Fred Thompson, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, and former Senators Bill Frist and Chuck Robb be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD,

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Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, I am not going to take long at this point. I absolutely support the policy behind the amendment offered by my friend and colleague Senator Coburn. In fact, I am a cosponsor of a stand-alone bill he has on this issue. My concern is that it is a rules change, and the bill before us is not a rules change. It is not a resolution. It is not a rules change. It is legislation.

Coming up after this bill is the second half of the nominations reform package, and that is a rules change that is coming from the Rules Committee.

My suggestion to my colleague and friend from Oklahoma is that his amendment would be better directed to the second half than to this bill. But, again, I am a cosponsor of his stand-alone bill, so it is not that I object to the policy.

I would note for the information of my colleagues, the Congressional Research Service does have concerns about whether it has the resources and the ability to carry out the task the Senator would assign it.

From my many years of working both with GAO and CRS, this sounds to me like a job for GAO, which has the auditors and the experience to do this kind of review and, indeed, has already started due to the good Senator's farsighted amendment which became law to identify duplication.

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