The Enemy Of the Good

President Obama says he wants to reform public schools and greatly increase federal spending on education. But when NEWSWEEK called Education Secretary Arne Duncan's office last week, the phone rang for two minutes before someone picked up. The person at the other end said that she normally doesn't answer phones, but added apologetically, "There's a lot of empty offices around here." Duncan is not the only new cabinet appointee who is lonely at the top. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who must be the most overworked, if not overwhelmed, person in government, is surrounded by the empty offices of a dozen top officials at Treasury. He relies instead on three Bush administration holdovers and a patchwork of senior appointees who don't require Senate approval. No wonder he lost track of the AIG bonuses. Trying to prepare for the upcoming G20 summit to save the global banking system, British Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell vented his frustration over his government's inability to get phone calls returned by the U.S. Treasury Department. "There is nobody there," he announced in an off-the-record remark that leaked out. "You can't believe how difficult it is."

Candidate Obama wanted to bring change to Washington. To fight the old revolving-door culture, he decreed that administration jobs could no longer be used as steppingstones to more-lucrative lobbying jobs (former Obama appointees will not be allowed to lobby their agencies until the election of a new president). Obama has had no trouble attracting job applicants—he's received some 300,000 for 3,300 positions. But of the top 373 open slots that require Senate confirmation, according to The Washington Post, Obama has been able to fill only 43 so far. A superstrict vetting process has weeded out or driven off some otherwise very qualified candidates, most notably Obama's highly touted pick to reform health care, Tom Daschle. Nominated to be Health and Human Services secretary, Daschle withdrew after it was disclosed he had failed to pay about $140,000 in back taxes and interest on a car and driver provided as a corporate perk. The White House says scores of candidates are stuck in a Senate-confirmation logjam.

Staffing Treasury, at the center of the financial storm, has been a particular problem. According to a source close to the process who declined to be named discussing a sensitive matter, the Senate Finance Committee has quietly rejected candidates for top Treasury jobs because of tax issues. It's the old law of unintended consequences: in order to satisfy a public desire for squeaky-clean government, elected officials have put at risk a more critical goal: dealing expeditiously with the financial crisis.

In some ways, the tale is depressingly familiar. This is what happens when hope meets reality or, in America, when a reformer's zeal is turned over to the lawyers to implement. The White House's basic vetting questionnaire for a top federal job is now close to 100 pages long. A separate national-security vetting form can be filled out only by typewriter. The questioning by White House lawyers can be excruciatingly personal. One job dropout told NEWSWEEK he just couldn't bear to get into the messy lives of his children. Daschle was asked to produce a receipt for $30 to prove a charitable contribution.

Hiring lawyers and accountants to plow through the paperwork is very expensive. To pay for it, a top national-security appointee who has been living on a modest academic salary told NEWSWEEK that he had to take out a second mortgage. In 2006, Defense Secretary Robert Gates spent about $40,000 on his vetting process—and his record was hardly unknown to the government. He had served in the CIA for nearly 27 years. (Gates's predecessor at Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had to spend more than $250,000.) The wealthy must then be prepared to divest themselves of stock regardless of the personal price tag.

No one's quite sure when the process got out of control. Some point to John Tower, George H.W. Bush's first choice for Defense secretary, who was shot down for drinking and womanizing. Others cite Zoë Baird, Clinton's failed nominee for attorney general, who neglected to pay taxes on her nanny or look closely into her immigration status. Obama officials say they are ahead of recent presidents in staffing the government. To fill all Senate-confirmed positions took Ronald Reagan 194 days, George H.W. Bush 163 days, Bill Clinton 267 days and George W. Bush 242 days.