Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  “Stafflation” in Congress

  From an elective politician’s point of view, staff is an extension of himself, a series of ever-widening circles starting with the close political family of his initial campaign staff. Then as an elected House member or senator gains power and builds his positions on committees, the staff family expands and becomes his or her network, clan, tribe, penetrating the federal bureaucracy for constituents, monitoring the actions of the congressional committees, pushing his policies, promoting his interests, dreaming up ideas for him.11 The staff acts as his surrogate, his alter ego, like a battery of attorneys serving a client. Staff members extend the reach, impact, visibility, and output of the officeholder. But the more they do, the more power he must surrender to them. And ironically, the more staff that Congress hires to ease its workload, the more work staff generates and throws back on the senators and congressmen, often clogging the system!

  “You skate along the surface of things,” Bill Cohen of Maine, a well-versed, substantive senator, candidly conceded to me. “More and more you are dependent on your staff. There is so much competition among staffs, fighting over issues, that sometimes you’ll call a senator and ask, ‘Why are you opposing me on this?’ and he’ll say, ‘I didn’t know I was.’ And you’ll say, ‘Well, check with your staff and see.’ ”12

  An echo of Cohen’s story came from Tony Coelho, a supercharged House member from California, now the Democratic whip. “What worries me is that I’ve lost control,” Coelho said, looking at a daily “dance card” with seventeen appointments written on it.

  “When I leave a meeting, I don’t have time to do the follow-up,” he admitted. “The staff controls that meeting, that issue. I don’t have time to make phone calls, to listen to the lobbyists. What is power? Information. Follow-through. Drafting an op-ed article.”13

  As he was talking to me, an aide, Mark Johnson, handed Coelho his draft of an article to be printed over Coelho’s name. Coelho read it rapidly and nodded his approval without any changes. “I’ve got to trust him,” Coelho said to me. “What I’ve done now is put things in the hands of lobbyists and staff. I’m going to go home tonight with two or three [large manila] envelopes of memos to read, and I’m going to say yes or no. Who wrote the memos? My staff. I’m going to respond to their interpretation of the issues.”

  Many lobbyists consider it hopeless to approach a senator or congressman unless they have first laid out their position to the staff. Without staff support, they reckon their chances are slim with the Big Man himself. After Howard Baker retired as Senate majority leader and joined a Washington law firm, he was astonished to learn how much effort lobbyists spend on congressional staff. “I was struck by the fact that they had list after list after list of people on the staff they’d gone to see,” he told me. “That’s a side of Washington I hadn’t clearly seen while I was in the Senate. I was surprised that it was almost the total focus of this little group. They were bandying about names that I’d barely heard of. I thought, ‘My God, I remember him. He’s a kid whom senator so-and-so hired. What’s he got to do with it?’ Then I found out he is the deputy assistant staff director of such-and-such committee.

  “I think part of it is an illusion,” Baker cautioned. “Because, you know, when I met with most committee chairmen every Tuesday morning around the conference table in my office, I saw how it worked. They would really go at it hammer and tongs on particular items within their jurisdiction. So I think the impact of staff is overrated. But God knows, there’s enough of them, they generate enough memos, and I know they attract lobbyists and lawyers like flies.”14

  Reporters know that usually the best place for accurate insight into substantive developments is staff aides. In private, staffers often talk more freely and with less political slant than members do. What’s more, they usually know the substance better. Occasionally, members get embarrassed in public by looking like Charlie McCarthies to their staff Edgar Bergens.

  Several years ago, during a committee markup of legislation on the Department of Energy, for example, Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee lost a page from an amendment he was offering and had to turn to a staff aide and ask in an anguished whisper, “What comes next?” With a packed hearing room listening, the aide slowly told him what to say and he repeated what she said, word for word.15 On another occasion, Delaware’s Senator Joe Biden provided a laugh for the Judiciary Committee when he got tangled up over an amendment to the criminal code, which he called a two-for-one proposal to provide convicts time off for good behavior. “In other words for every day of good behavior in prison—excuse me, I am being corrected here,” Bidden said, as his staff aides hastily shoved his own proposal in front of him. After some confusion, Biden—who is known for frankness—candidly confessed: “Obviously, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I thought I had a two-for-one provision there. The staff, in its wisdom, rewrote it so I guess I did not want that after all.”16

  Occasionally, dependence on staff becomes obvious even on the Senate or House floor. It so offended former Senator James Allen of Alabama that he once proposed a rule barring Senate staffers from appearing on the floor and banning Senators themselves from reading staff-prepared speeches rather than debating in their own words. Allen knew the rule had no chance of passing; to this day, staff aides continue to sit by senators on the floor, passing notes and helping them debate.

  Quite often, staff aides understand Senate rules and procedures better than their bosses do. In December 1982, for example, Quentin Crommelin, a staff aide to the late Senator John East of North Carolina, was masterminding East’s filibuster against a gasoline tax bill favored by the Reagan administration and Senate leadership. It was close to Christmas and past midnight. Tempers were frayed. At one point, East mistakenly mentioned the lack of a Senate quorum, a vital tactical error because it enabled the presiding officer to break the filibuster and take control of the floor in order to call the attendance roll. At Crommelin’s coaching, East protested that he was merely making a point of order, which would have let him keep the floor. Majority Leader Howard Baker and other Republicans got into a heated argument with Crommelin because Crommelin, knowing the rules better than East, was giving East instructions. Baker and others were furious at having to deal with a staff aide as an equal; they were especially angry that Crommelin had made it so obvious that he, not East, was running things.17

  Staff as Policy Entrepreneurs

  As the East-Crommelin episode showed, staff sometimes leads officeholders, not vice versa. For among the modern congressional staff, there is a culture of activism, a spirit of entrepreneurship, a highly charged sense of competition. Most legislative staffers are bright, young, aggressive, ambitious, full of ideas, and canny enough to know that their own ambitions are best served by expanding the power and turf of their bosses. Their relentless energy and initiative cause some members to complain of “stafflation.”

  Michael Malbin, the scholar, contends that the 1970s were the heyday of staff activism because many new government programs were being generated, whereas more recent budget cutbacks have curbed legislative entrepreneurship. But I believe that social issues, foreign policy, defense, tax legislation, and congressional oversight have left ample room for aggressive staffers, even without new programs. In my experience, staff rivalries are rampant in Congress, as in the executive branch. Staffers often generate battles for visibility, turf, agenda, and political credit on Capitol Hill.

  For example, when the nuclear accident occurred at Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979, a dozen congressional committees and subcommittees scurried to claim jurisdiction over that hot item, angling to hold hearings, write reports, draft legislation. But Senator Edward Kennedy, who then deployed the largest staff network on Capitol Hill—120 strong, working for him on three different committees—got the jump. His legions scored a publicity coup by being the first to organize a hearing on the accident.

  In the mid-eighties, John Dingell of Michi
gan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, exerted great power not only because of his personal force and position, but also because of his aggressive staff. Pete Stockton, a bird-dog congressional investigator, repeatedly helped Dingell get the press limelight for hearings on the questionable practices of defense contractors such as General Dynamics or lobbyists such as Michael Deaver. Not only did Stockton cross oceans to smoke out boondoggles and scandals but he pump-primed media coverage by leaking juicy tidbits to selected reporters just before scheduled hearings, generating extra publicity for his boss.

  Stockton’s activism and Dingell’s own bulldog style gave the Michigan Democrat visibility and added to his political turf. It enabled him to rampage into the military-affairs terrain of the Armed Services Committee. For protecting and expanding turf is a vital function of legislative staffs. They know that gaining jurisdiction over the most controversial and important issues is central to the power game in Congress, for despite the established committee structure, jurisdictions overlap, and lines of authority are often unclear. So staffers elbow, scrap, and scramble to extend the political empires of their bosses and to build up their own importance.

  One of the most stunning and crucial turf maneuvers in the Reagan presidency was engineered by Steve Bell, staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. It enabled Senator Pete Domenici, the Budget Committee chairman, to gain long-term control over congressional handling of the Reagan economic program, against rival efforts by Mark Hatfield, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, and Bob Dole, Finance Committee chairman. The decisive gambit was an idea for which David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, was widely credited with devising; Stockman told me that it was actually Bell’s brainchild.18

  Bell, a brash, intense, hard-charging former reporter for the El Paso Times and an English-literature major who learned budget economics from legislative economists, epitomizes the modern staff chief. He came out of New Mexico as part of Domenici’s inner political family, a strategist in all of Domenici’s campaigns, starting in 1972. Domenici and Bell are think-alike Republican conservatives with a passion for budget balancing and the same blunt-spoken drive to confront deficit spenders, whether liberal Democrats or the Reagan Pentagon. Bell, a muscular blond in his early forties, can enthrall or intimidate other staffers with theatrical outbursts and profanity, but shift quickly to “yessir” for senators. He possesses the crucial talents of the best staffers: technical mastery of legislation, political savvy, and a close, personal relationship with his boss.

  “No one ever thought he would become a numbers man because he’s a journalist, but he’s as bright as could be,” Domenici told me. “He’s also a great writer, a great user of words. And to say he’s politically astute is an understatement. Obviously, he has an instant fix on my state, but he understands the politics of the U.S. Senate, the politics of the Senate versus the presidency. We shared the leadership role there.… He and I together just pushed stuff down their [other senators’] throats and rolled them over and did a lot of partisan stuff where they had to go along.”19

  In late 1980, Bell, as Budget Committee staff chief, came up with a parliamentary technique that helped pass Reagan’s economic program; it also gave Domenici’s Budget Committee preeminent legislative control of the Reagan program. Bell’s notion—quickly bought by Majority Leader Howard Baker and by Budget Director Stockman—was to employ a rarely used maneuver known as budget reconciliation. It was ideal for ramming Reagan’s budget cuts through Congress in one package.

  Normally, Congress passes thirteen separate appropriations bills without a central blueprint. A reconciliation bill would provide the blueprint; it would require a single up-or-down vote on the whole Reagan budget, and then its provisions would dictate that other committees bring the cost of their programs in line. It was written into law in 1974, and rarely used because established committee chairmen disliked the budget committee butting into their business. Reconciliation was designed to come at the end of the budget process, after the competing committees failed to agree. But Bell proposed using it at the start of the budget process to discipline all committees at once. Democrats howled that this was railroading the budget. But it pleased Republicans, in their early pro-Reagan enthusiasm. This strategy made Domenici a preeminent figure. And it was crucial to Reagan’s first-year success—a dramatic illustration of how a staff man’s understanding of procedure critically affected major national policy. On his wall, Bell has letters of thanks from both President Reagan and Howard Baker.

  In this case, Bell was implementing Reagan’s and Domenici’s agenda. But in other cases, staff aides have initiated policy agendas for their bosses. In 1977, staff aides, for example, were the catalysts for the Republican Kemp-Roth proposal to cut marginal tax rates by thirty percent, which later became the nucleus of President Reagan’s 1981 tax bill. The initial sponsors were Representative Jack Kemp and Senator William Roth of Delaware, both of whom favored sharp cuts in tax rates. Kemp became the plan’s prime public salesman, but its real architects were Paul Craig Roberts, a supply-side economist close to Kemp and then serving on the House Budget Committee staff; Bruce Bartlett, a Kemp staffer; and Bruce Thompson, an aide to Roth.20

  In a different field—Soviet violations of arms agreements—David Sullivan, a burly, crewcut ex-Marine and former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, was the force behind a relentless campaign by Idaho’s two conservative Republican senators, Jim McClure and Steven Symms, for whom Sullivan served as a staffer. Often working with highly classified information slipped to him by friends inside the government or planted in friendly newspapers, Sullivan ghostwrote speeches and letters of protest urging Reagan to revoke the 1972 and 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties. Senate pressures, stimulated by Sullivan, helped push Reagan to adopt this policy. On the other side, Leon Fuerth, a quiet, pipe-smoking, high-powered specialist on arms control, spent a year teaching then–Democratic Congressman, now-Senator Albert Gore the intracies of the nuclear-arms race. Then he helped Gore formulate the rationale for a new single-warhead missile to reduce the doomsday threat of multiwarhead missiles. Gore and others sold that idea to Reagan in 1983.

  In none of these cases were the senators or congressmen unwitting dupes. They wanted to move in the direction the staff was pushing. But sometimes staffers steal the ball on policy, and members complain of being at the mercy of staffs, often forced to fight fires started by overly aggressive staff aides.

  “There are many senators who feel that all they were doing is running around and responding to the staff: my staff fighting your staff, your staff competing with mine,” Senator Fritz Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, bleated in protest.21 “It is sad. I heard a senator the other day tell me another senator hadn’t been in his office for three years; it is just staff. Everybody is working for the staff, staff, staff, driving you nutty, in fact. It has gotten to the point where the senators never actually sit down and exchange ideas and learn from the experience of others and listen. Now it is how many nutty whiz kids you get on the staff, to get you magazine articles and get you headlines and get all of these other things done.”

  Bird-dogging the Executive Branch

  Yet whatever the complaints, no one in Congress is prepared to give up any staff. All too clearly, members of Congress understand that staff is essential for competing with each other and especially for confronting the executive branch. Normally, when this confrontation occurs, staff and members work hand in hand with the congressional member leading the way—but not always. Some exceptional staffers are outchallenging the executive branch, bird-dogging it more aggressively than members. In other cases, congressional staff agencies operate almost as a third force, as referees between Congress and the White House.

  For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), set up in 1974, technically has no power; it passes no legislation. Unlike committee staffs, it cannot actually supervise the promoting, revising, or funding of programs. Its power derives purely from th
e intangible elements of information and credibility. Yet the CBO represents the most important institutional shift of power on domestic issues between the executive branch and Congress in several decades.

  Before the CBO was created, the president’s budget was, as scholar Hugh Heclo put it, “the only game in town for taking a comprehensive look” at government. The presidency, through the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), had a monopoly on the government’s economic forecasting. Congress, like the president, used CEA and OMB forecasts of economic growth, inflation, and budget deficits.

  Now, CBO gives Congress an independent perspective on those crucial matters, setting the framework of policy debate. CBO’s deficit forecasts can differ from the administration’s by $30 billion to $40 billion and that influence has a major impact on a whole session of Congress, because Congress is forced to cut more or mat cut less than the president proposed. In the Reagan years, CBO’s capabilities enabled Congress largely to ignore Reagan budgets after 1981 and to develop its own budgets—something inconceivable without CBO.

  By December 1985, when Congress passed the six-year deficit-reduction plan (the Gramm-Rudman bill) CBO was put on the political hot seat. To protect itself from politically tilted administration estimates, Congress gave CBO joint responsibility with the administration’s OMB to set deficit estimates that would trigger automatic cutting of government programs, if the deficit targets were not met. Having that much political responsibility troubled Rudolph Penner, a Republican economist who was then head of CBO.

  “It’s hard to think of other instances where unelected officials have such power to do good or evil,” said Penner, a bland, balding technocrat. He warned Congress that “substantial errors are possible” in economic forecasting and alerted it to the “disadvantages of conveying so much power to mere technicians.”22 But Congress had more faith in CBO than in OMB and put Penner in the middle.