Washington — It’s an election-year tradition: Government officials who were brought in by one administration as political appointees, and who don’t want to leave, get reclassified as career officials so that they can keep their jobs in the new administration.
News reports in recent days have described such “burrowing” as happening at the Pentagon and at the Departments of Labor, the Interior, and Housing and Urban Development. Altogether the Bush administration this year has allowed at least 20 political appointees to become career civil servants, The Washington Post reported this week.
The Education Department is no exception. The department, in response to a request from The Chronicle, listed four officials who began work as Bush-administration political appointees and have been reclassified as career-staff members since April 2006. They work in divisions that include student financial aid, vocational and adult education, and the Institute of Education Sciences.
Such reclassifications can limit the flexibility of a newly elected administration. But even Bush-administration critics acknowledge that such actions are aimed primarily at rewarding loyal workers on a personal level, rather than thwarting the new administration.
Diane Auer Jones, who quit earlier this year as assistant secretary for postsecondary education, said department officials aligned with both parties had switched from political to career during the previous two administrations and generally had done so “out of dedication to public service.”
“In my experience,” said Ms. Jones, “the people who ‘careered in’ under the Clinton administration were as much a part of the team as everybody else and were not there to undermine anything this administration was trying to do.”
And it’s not only people who switch classifications. One senior department official, Vickie L. Schray, has been a key player for the Bush administration in handling the politics of some critical regulatory decisions, even though she’s a career officer. After the departure of Ms. Jones, Ms. Schray was named deputy assistant secretary for higher-education programs and, to help her out, the job itself was converted from a political position to a career posting. —Paul Basken
