Political appointees who lack the institutional knowledge to lead the agencies they are appointed to lead are not aberrations. They are the structural consequence of the appointment system.
The Appointment System's Design
The American federal government has more political appointees — positions filled through presidential nomination or appointment rather than competitive civil service — than any comparable democratic system. The approximately 4,000 positions that change with each administration range from Cabinet secretaries and deputy secretaries to mid-level programme directors and schedule C appointments that occupy positions throughout the executive branch. This extensive political appointment system reflects the democratic principle that elected leaders should have the management team they choose to implement the programmes they were elected to pursue.
The structural problem with this design is the combination of high appointment volume and low domain expertise requirement. The political appointment system prioritises the appointee's political relationship with the appointing authority over their expertise in the domain they will manage. The result is a significant proportion of appointees who manage agencies, bureaux, and offices in domains they have limited prior knowledge of, for teams of career professionals with decades of domain expertise, in institutional environments that are more complex and more resistant to rapid change than the political appointees frequently expect.
The Competence Gap
The competence gap between career professionals and political appointees — the difference in domain knowledge, institutional knowledge, and operational experience — is not merely an inconvenience. It shapes the policy-making process in consequential ways: career professionals who recognise the competence gap will sometimes use it to advance their own preferred policies by managing the information environment that shapes political appointees' decisions; political appointees who recognise the competence gap will sometimes respond by distrusting career professional advice and seeking outside counsel that confirms their prior views. Neither response produces good policy outcomes.
The political appointee problem is structural, not individual. It is produced by an appointment system that prioritises political loyalty over domain competence, and it creates the information asymmetry between appointee and career staff that shapes the policy-making process in ways that neither group typically acknowledges explicitly.
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