It’s a painful reality check for the president. Obama's brain drain

President Barack Obama has a big to-do list for his final two-plus years in office. But he doesn’t have all the key people in place to pull it all off.

A POLITICO analysis of the 15 Cabinet agencies plus several other departments with high-priority policy agendas found a recurring theme for the outgoing Obama administration: plentiful job openings and several slots where long-term vacancies could have real-world consequences for policies from national security to the economy and the environment.


At the Homeland Security Department, Obama has no Senate-confirmed policy chief in place to handle terrorism and cybersecurity threats and the immigration crisis on the southern U.S. border. Obama wants to act on climate change, but the Environmental Protection Agency is missing several of the political leaders needed to shepherd regulations through a demanding process with tight scrutiny from industry, environmentalists, other federal agencies and the White House’s own budget crunchers. And the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs is hesitant to make some big new policy changes until it gets a fresh batch of political leaders.

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More than 220 nominees are still awaiting Senate confirmation to fill vacancies across the administration, and a senior Democratic aide said Majority Leader Harry Reid is planning to force floor votes on a “good number” of them before the November election. Still, the openings are sure to grow as more staffers make their strategically timed exits through D.C.’s revolving door while the cachet of having Obama-related experience still means something on a résumé.

It’s a painful reality check for the president — and one that would only grow worse if Republicans win control of the Senate. Back in early 2009, he had the cream of the Democratic crop gunning to work for him. Now, as Obama relies more on federal agencies to bypass Congress and help secure his legacy, he’ll be lucky if his second, third or even fourth stringers are on the clock.

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“Without in any sense knocking the people who are ‘acting,’ when you’re not a permanent officeholder, your ability to make decisions and to plan and to direct the agency in a strategic way is compromised because everybody views you as a short-timer,” said Michael Chertoff, who served as President George W. Bush’s second-term Homeland Security secretary.

“In terms of responsiveness and creativity and cutting through the bureaucracy, those things are lost when some of those big positions remain unfilled,” added David Hayes, who served as deputy Interior secretary during President Bill Clinton’s final four years and then returned to the same post for Obama’s first term.

While the Department of Homeland Security recently got a handful of senior leaders through the confirmation process, the agency is coping with the May departure of its policy chief and two high-ranking cybersecurity experts who exited this summer. The vacancy in the policy chief spot could undermine the Obama administration as it sends lower-ranking officials into talks on everything from Middle East security to the Russia-Ukraine standoff, Chertoff said.

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Denise Krepp, a former Coast Guard officer and former Obama chief counsel at the U.S. Maritime Administration, said the DHS vacancies are a problem for such a relatively new government agency consisting of 22 different agencies that “don’t all play well in the sandbox.”

“If you don’t have a head of policy, who’s making your decisions?” said Krepp, who also worked on the team that created the homeland security agency in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, Obama’s pick to be chairman of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals has been stuck in Senate confirmation limbo for more than 2½ years. The agency, mired in charges of mismanagement and corruption, also is missing a chief financial officer and an assistant secretary in charge of policy and planning.

Lacking Senate-confirmed officials in several VA posts, the agency’s acting leaders are unlikely to produce new initiatives or projects for fear they’d be undone if and when someone is confirmed for the jobs, said Jerry Manar, deputy director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ National Veterans Service.

“They’re caretakers,” Manar said.

The Pentagon faces more than just a growing global workload and shrinking budgets. Seven of its nominees are still awaiting Senate approval, including an assistant secretary for homeland defense, a Navy under secretary and the top lawyers for the Army and Air Force.

Vacancies are also piling up at the Justice Department, which saw its top tax cheat prosecutor leave in June and later this month will be without the head of its civil division, who also led negotiations for record settlementswith banks over past mortgage abuses.

At the Treasury Department, the late-stage brain drain means multiple departures in the office responsible for managing the debt ceiling and coordinating financial regulation. The Internal Revenue Service is without several top leaders from the unit that oversees large businesses and international operations. And the Federal Housing Administration’s commissioner is leaving at the end of the year.

The Department of Education has a vacancy atop its Institute of Education Sciences, a $200 million office that leads key research projects and also manages national testing in math, reading, science and other subjects.

Openings for more than a year have meant no Senate-confirmed surgeon general or director at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Inside the White House, an acting chairman has been running the Council on Environmental Quality since Nancy Sutley’s departure in February.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is surrounded by empty chairs as she looks to complete Obama’s green agenda. Her deputy administrator recently left for a job at a climate change nonprofit, while openings remain for top posts handling air pollution, water, finance, scientific research and development, human resources, environmental information and international and tribal affairs.

“It has to be much harder for an agency like the EPA to operate at its full potential when so many important slots have not been officially filled,” said Frank O’Donnell, a longtime agency observer who heads the environmental advocacy group Clean Air Watch. Of the EPA career staffers filling in in an ‘acting’ capacity, “There’s a shadow hanging over their heads.”

The personnel drain for Obama is only going to get worse. As his lame-duck status grows over the coming months, more people are expected to make their next career moves given the dim prospects for any major legislative action or new policy proposals as well as the allure of better private-sector paychecks.

“You don’t want to be the one to turn out the lights at the end of the day,” said Tevi Troy, who was deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services for President George W. Bush’s final two years.

But finding quality people to serve as replacements will be a challenge for Obama at this late stage of his administration, especially when the kinds of first-term big new ideas have slowed to a trickle and growing GOP ranks in Congress threaten to add extra layers of scrutiny for anyone considering applying for a top agency job.

“It’s more about doing the grunt work,” said Adam Ingols, a former Bush Energy Department chief of staff who recalled dealing with collapsing financial markets and $150 oil prices during the administration’s final year. “That’s not terribly attractive to a lot of high-profile candidates.”

Liza Wright, who had the top White House personnel job from 2005 to 2007, said her daily routine as George W. Bush’s administration wound down involved monitoring potential departures and maintaining a list of possible recruits willing to stomach the internal vetting and Senate confirmation process.

“It’s one big succession-planning exercise on steroids,” she said.

Jumping into government still represents a good opportunity for aspiring administration officials “to see what they can do,” said Marcus Peacock, who served in Bush’s Office of Management and Budget during the first term before becoming EPA deputy administrator in the second term. After all, there will be future job openings whenever the next administration with the same political affiliation wins the White House.

But Peacock warned of practical considerations associated with giving inexperienced people on-the-job-training on high-stakes regulations and policies that will face legal scrutiny and political challenges.

“People we vetted in the first term that we said no to, it was not uncommon to see their names come up again,” Peacock said. “It was a sign that’s it difficult to find good people in a second term. There are plenty of people who want those positions, but you want to make sure the people who are in there can handle the job.”

For all the departures, Obama still has a formidable team.

The Senate in the last 10 months has confirmed more than 100 of Obama’s picks for a range of high-level jobs, the byproduct of Reid’s November 2013 “nuclear” rule change requiring a simple majority vote to confirm most presidential nominees. Obama has a new Federal Reserve chair and replacement Cabinet chiefs at the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs. Several deputy secretaries are also now in position across Obama’s Cabinet, from Commerce to the Interior Department, and dozens more senior staffers have also been cleared to start jobs everywhere from the Small Business Administration to the CIA.

More than two dozen new ambassadors are now on duty from Canada to China and Russia.

But the sluggish Senate confirmation backlog has already prompted some casualties for Obama. His pick to be the top health official at the VA bowed out in June, citing fear of a lengthy confirmation fight. The White House also withdrew its nominee to be the Energy Department’s chief financial officer, Elizabeth Robinson, who currently has the same job at NASA but plans to leave there at the end of the summer.

Obama isn’t giving up either, announcing plans during the August congressional recess to nominate 18 more officials, including a national drug control policy director, a new member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a deputy director for the Peace Corps.

But Obama also blames Senate Republicans for his personnel gridlock. During an early August press conference, he noted how much trouble he faced getting a new ambassador to Russia confirmed during the Ukraine crisis until just before the start of the summer recess. Obama also lamented that his diplomatic posts remained empty in Sierra Leone amid the Ebola outbreak and in Guatemala, the home to many of the undocumented children arriving at the U.S. border.

“As the president said, the American people demand and deserve a strong and focused effort on the part of all of us to keep moving the country forward and to focus on their concerns,” said White House spokeswoman Jennifer Friedman. “And if Congress would do the job that the people sent them here to do, we could be doing even better, the economy could be even stronger, and more jobs could be created.”

Rachael Bade, Erica Martinson, Erin Mershon, Jon Prior, Caitlin Emma, Zachary Warmbrodt and Mackenzie Weinger contributed to this report.