As His Tenure Winds Down, Obama Turns Focus to Executive Branch

New York Times

By John Harwood

April 28, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/us/politics/as-his-tenure-winds-down-obama-turns-focus-to-executive-branch.html?hpw&rref=politics

WASHINGTON — John Podesta got a brief burst of attention from his hiring in a White House “shake-up,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell will be in sharp focus in coming confirmation hearings to be health and human services secretary and the cameras loved Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, during the debt-ceiling wars.

Yet the three of them can perform more valuable services for the Obama administration out of the spotlight than in. All three are considered competent, low-key managers, which is why they are in their jobs. For the remainder of President Obama’s term, what matters most to his success is what Washington watches least: competent governmental management.

Although the part of his presidency that involves getting major new laws through Congress has wound down, the part that involves effectively running the vast federal apparatus to carry out his priorities still has nearly three years to go.

In one way, the situation is liberating for Mr. Obama because, in basketball terms, it puts the ball in his hands at the end of the game. But it is also perilous. From starting health care exchanges to overseeing the National Security Agency to executing his Syria policy, the diffident chief executive and his team have repeatedly thrown the ball out of bounds.

“He’s a nonmanager,” said Charles O. Jones, a presidential scholar and a senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Mr. Obama still aims to win over Republicans on immigration legislation and a minimum-wage increase. He travels the country raising money and campaigning to help Democrats hold the Senate in midterm elections this fall.

But the stakes of partisan battles have diminished, as they always do near the end of any president’s tenure. So in reshaping his second-term team, Mr. Obama has given new emphasis to managing the executive branch.

“That’s part of being on an arc of success in a presidency,” Mr. Podesta said. “The things you got moving on get done right, and so are harder later to uproot.”

The effort to limit carbon emissions and fight climate change, a central priority of Mr. Obama’s since 2008, is one big example.

Republicans won the fight in Congress over Mr. Obama’s “cap-and-trade” plan, which would have forced industry to pay a price on carbon emissions. Thus Mr. Obama hired Mr. Podesta, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, to help oversee his fallback plan: new executive branch rules on power plant emissions.

Those rules, Mr. Obama calculates, can at least let him keep his international commitment pledging that the United States will cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

He will succeed only if aides craft the rules skillfully enough to withstand legal challenges and dissuade subsequent presidents and Congresses from discarding them. Mr. Podesta’s earlier experiences with White House rule-making found both victory (on protection of forests) and defeat (on workplace ergonomics) after Mr. Clinton left office.

Another second-term priority is carrying out the Dodd-Frank law, which aims to prevent future government bailouts by ensuring that no institution is “too big to fail.”

Democrats won the legislative fight over new Wall Street oversight, a top Obama effort after the 2008 financial meltdown. Yet the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell estimates that one-fourth of needed administrative regulations have not yet been proposed for Dodd-Frank.

Shepherding that process, and harmonizing American rules with the global financial system, is a major responsibility for Mr. Lew, chairman of the multiagency Financial Stability Oversight Council. Both Wall Street executives and their liberal critics credit the Treasury secretary with pushing colleagues to complete by 2015 the complex Volcker Rule, a main element of Dodd-Frank that limits banks’ ability to bet with their own money.

Mr. Obama’s first Treasury chief, Timothy F. Geithner, feuded with Sheila C. Bair, then chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “You now have a team that works well together,” said Barney Frank, the retired Democratic representative from Massachusetts who co-wrote the law.

Mr. Frank, who observed five presidents over 32 years in Congress, called Mr. Obama “about average” as a manager. But he said the president has sometimes paid a price for aloofness from those outside his inner circle, including important appointees.

Mr. Obama is “less hands-on than Clinton,” Mr. Frank said, comparing the Democratic presidents. Two things puzzled him, he added: the apparent difficulty Mr. Obama has in reining in the intelligence agencies, and the bungled rollout of federal health care marketplaces.

Which brings up another Obama priority, the health care law. This month, the president nominated Ms. Burwell, his budget director and former head of the Walmart Foundation, to try to make the law run more smoothly. “I could choose no manager as experienced, as competent,” Mr. Obama said.

Though the law’s first enrollment period ended strongly with eight million sign-ups, the administration must build on that in 2015 and 2016 to ensure that the marketplaces have enough young people — who are overall healthier and get sick less — to hold down the cost of premiums.

The better Ms. Burwell and her colleagues perform, the less chance there is for future Republicans in Congress or the White House to significantly alter, much less repeal, the Affordable Care Act.

Overall, a president’s ability to be a good manager is unpredictable. Presidential candidates often promote experience in the governor’s office as superior preparation, but neither George Bush’s experience as Texas governor nor his distinction as the first president with a business degree prevented the management failures of the Iraq war or his response to Hurricane Katrina.

“Presidents often don’t care about management until it’s too late,” writes Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, in the coming issue of Government Executive magazine.

In Mr. Obama’s case, Mr. Kettl concludes, improving his poll numbers on health care and other programs is no longer the point: “The best way for Obama to secure his legacy is to ensure his favored programs actually perform well.”

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