Hello, prospective political appointees. It is my honor to introduce to you mister Donald Devine. No man in modern history has done more to curtail the administrative state than mister Devine. He served as president Reagan’s director of the office of personnel management, the agency tasked with managing the career bureaucrats in the civil service. Devine’s tenure as OPM director was the last time in American history that the federal bureaucracy has actually shrunk.

His reforms included the removal of over 100,000 bureaucrats and 6,000,000,000 in savings. These successes earned him the title, Rasputin of the reduction in force, a method of government layoffs that divine pioneered. His memoir on his time in the Reagan administration, political management of the bureaucracy, is the bible for political appointees who are serious about implementing the president’s agenda. We are lucky to have him with us. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. So, Don, before we drill into how the president’s cabinet secretaries can effectively implement the president’s agenda, I was wondering if you could orient us with how the executive branch and cabinet government is supposed to work.

Alright. Well, I as I say, I think it’s supposed to work pretty much like it worked under the Reagan administration, and that is to have as much contact between the president and and his major decision makers as possible. And me set up a cabinet council, he called it, the system, and there are similarities in all the administrations. You have the president and his top people in at the beginning. What do we need to do on this kind of general especially when there’s more for the one agency’s problem, which is a lot of the problem of the government itself.

You have the men talk about the general principles, what you need to do, give the president some idea where you think you’re going, let him tell you what they want. Of course, you’re only dealing major issues here, And, that should then be taken by the top officials and brought down to the next level, next level, next level. So and tell them, I met with the president. We talked about this. He said this.

You need to get the president into the process rather than trying to stuff him off at the White House and keep him from making errors, which was our problem too. All of our PR people and most of the people in White House, they didn’t want the president to do anything because then the media wouldn’t attack him and it wouldn’t hurt his political profile. And you gotta worry about those issues too. But but in terms of policy, you need to get as much interaction with them as possible. And the top person said, I talked to the president, he said this.

The next level then said, oh, I talked to the secretary and he talked to the president. Next level down, I talked to the assistant secretary. And and you need to keep that process going, through the whole administration. That’s how it should run. The president is the chief executive officer, and he is the one that sets, policy.

People ball, you got if if he’s doing something, you know, is illegal or, can’t work, you try to change his opinion. But, basically, he’s supposed to set the agenda. And each level, if you don’t know exactly what you know what his general positions are and you need to fit it in Beshekin, then if it’s something he’s totally uninterested in, then you’ve got to say well if he was interested in this what would he do? What would he be thinking? What would be doing?

And remember you’re there to implement his program not yours. You got to add your expertise in and what you can do and what, you can make what he wants work. And you’ve got to realize that you’re gonna get him in trouble if you do something really stupid or illegal. But you need that continuous process. One of the things, belatedly, but the office of presidential did this to have regular meetings even with the top, levels.

Maybe a 100, 200 people, and have some direct contact with the president, talk what he thinks is going on good. Because the president is the glue that holds the operation together, and he represents the people, and everybody else there is under that, allowance, that authority he has, that legitimacy he has. And again, he doesn’t have to solve every problem obviously, but you need to do what you think he would do if he did. And to create that kind of process and keep it going, after a while we had regular meetings with the the president and I forget down how far down many levels down. You obviously couldn’t have it.

Once a year, we had everybody including schedule c’s and everything. But you need to keep that relationship. And if you keep them hidden over in the the White House and nobody is able to see him, then you’re gonna break that chain, period. You got to have him involved in in the process, not not to make every decision, but involved in the process. And when you do, you’ve got the legitimacy the Constitution gives you, the connection to the president.

You have no legitimacy other than that except you signed up and were appointed and confirmed and take an oath to the office. You need to use the the agencies as your way. For example, you know, even as recently as Eisenhower administration, you had a handful of people in the White House. You don’t need that many people there. You have public relations in the White House.

Alright? Why don’t you have 1 guy in the White House and 3 or 4 assistants and every week bring in the the the public relations people in the agencies? Let them be your staff, and you’re you’re solving 10 problems at the same time. You’re not only getting rid of people who are hiding in the White House, you’re bringing in the people who are out there doing it. You’re getting more information and you have more staff.

I mean, you’re using the whole public relations staff of the government, which is enormous rather than trying to start everything from scratch there. There are inherent functions in in the White House who might need to be. You certainly the office of presidential personnel has to have a certain degree of people there. Because they’ve got a direct function for the president. But most of the offices in the White House, should be using the resources out in the agencies.

They have many more resources than you do now that they you have a little more pashay to get higher up in the media. But And they have the legal authority. Yeah. Right. Absolutely.

Nobody in the White House does and then, you know, it’s so easy to pack people in the White House where you’re mostly, immune from anything getting there, unless you have direct leaks out of the White House, which you have too. But you can hide away and tell everybody else to do crazy things. Alright? Alright? And you’re not gonna suffer anything from this.

Alright? I mean, the agency head has the legal authority. They have to make these decisions themselves, and they will. And they’ll either do it selfishly for themselves or you if you encourage them, the president, encourages them. Politics is personal, and you got to make a personal system work, to have a president who’s in charge and to really get any kind of program adopted.

You gotta think of it more in political and that’s why the more successful agency heads, I would say, had a political background. I mean, they’re used to dealing without the people from the private sector are used to leaning on the ability to be able to decentralize decision right down to the bottom. You can have 50 levels, but you’re gonna find out if one of them is stealing money from you, unless it’s the one who’s chalking up who’s at the the process, and then you gotta keep a good eye and have a good person in charge of that. So it’s, it’s a very different business. I mean, one thing I believe is it’s a political business, it’s a personal business, and it can’t work unless you make it work that way.

If you try to run it like a major corporation, it’s not gonna work. That you can’t treat it the same way you treat the government. It’s a totally different operation, and you need a political, a personal kind of system working throughout it from top to bottom. It’s the only way it can work. So, Don, you’ve oriented many prospective political appointees in your career.

What is the first thing you would tell them as they’re coming from private sector into the government? Well, I’ll quote somebody else to begin with. A guy named Roy Ash. He was the head of Litton Industries, which was a big business operation. I don’t even know if it’s still around, but he used to explain that coming from the private sector into the government isn’t like going from softball to hardball, and baseball.

It’s like going from softball to ice hockey. Alright? It’s a totally different kind of environment and works on the different principles. One of the great, conservative economist, a guy named Ludwig von Mises wrote a book, published by Yale University Press, believe it or not. It’s simply called bureaucracy.

And he’s the one that taught me about government and how it’s different. And the model he uses is very clear. Let’s suppose that you have a multilayer institution and in the government, one estimate is it’s 70 degrees from where the president is down to where you actually meet real people, 70 levels. I think it’s more like 50 or 60 and it depends on the agency. But anyway, it’s long.

Private sector doesn’t go down. But even in the private sector when you have multiple layers you have a guy to let you know what’s going on. What do you do if you’re sitting up as the chief executive officer of a business and you don’t know what’s going down 10 layers below you, how do you find out? Well, you have a profit and loss system built into your accounting system. Alright?

And if they’re making money, that’s good. If they’re losing money, you got to do something about it. You get signals through an instrument. Now and then when you come into the government, you don’t have that instrument. You have many more layers of the government, and you have no profit and loss system to find out what’s going on.

And in fact, if you do go if you could go down and measure it, and you find out whether, let’s say by ending poverty, when you find out that they haven’t been able to end poverty, do you end the program? No. You say give them more money. So it’s just the opposite. Failure is rewarded in the government, whereas in the private sector you have this.

Well you don’t have anything other than the performance appraisal system, which means bureaucrats are telling what their bureaucrats are doing. And, of course, everyone knows what the performance appraisal system is today, and that is that everybody gets the same rating or pretty much the same rating. So the the one instrument you have doesn’t work. As as they’re coming into this massive system that you explained works very differently from the private sector, What are their legal authorities to manage this system? How do they begin to manage it?

The best tool you have is hopefully you are appointing political executives below you, and whether you’re secretary in the cabinet or whether you’re assistant secretary or, even below that, your job still is to find out what’s going on below you. You have got to put more political appointees down below you to find out it’s the only way that you’re going to find out because again, if everybody’s getting the same rate, you can’t tell whether this agency is working or not. You need to have political appointees from top to bottom, not literally to bottom but pretty close to bottom. The career people, they’re gonna keep doing what they’re doing unless you go down and find out what’s going down there. So again, the first thing you have to do is realize that it’s different.

The second thing is you need political people down to communicate, and if you don’t have them there, you don’t find out what’s going on, period. One of the things you mentioned in your book is not letting the media dictate your decisions, but at the same time, keeping in mind which actions are going to end up on the front page of The Washington Post. So how does a good cabinet secretary or political executive balance that? Well, first of all, you have to keep as much in of what you do to yourself. Actually, when you’re dealing with careers.

Now I I think the career is you need them and you you got to make them work well, but don’t expect, that their first loyalty is you. It’s not. Alright? It’s the institution as they understand it. So you need to keep your agenda pretty close.

You gotta be careful who you tell it to because if you run it through a normal process with all the the the t’s and, levels, it’s gonna be in the paper tomorrow. Alright? And the Washington Post has contacts in every agency at pretty much every level. Alright? So if you publicize if you publicize it even within a room, it’s going to if it is newsworthy, it’s going to be there and usually if you’re a conservative, it’s gonna be something the Washington Post doesn’t like.

So what do you think it’s going to be like when they cover it? And again it’s totally porous. Anything you do is going to be public in one place or another. So anything you do in today’s thing is going to be just think about it. What I’m writing now, what would that look like on the front page of The Washington Post?

Alright. So it’s a totally porous and open operation and you gotta be careful. And you see what the people that did the most in the Reagan administration to change things we’re the ones that left. Alright? And you’ve got to realize that this is ice hockey.

It’s not softball. The good thing about it is you can help change the country in the the right direction. And that’s, and if you keep that and understand that’s your goal, you can make a difference and help change the country in the right direction. And, Don, one of the other things you talk about in your book is how some of these Reagan cabinet secretaries and appointees got trapped in reacting to the media, where suddenly they weren’t advancing the agenda. They were just being totally reactionary to the media, and you avoided that.

You kept your eyes on the prize. How did you keep that mindset, and how can other cabinet secretaries keep that mindset where they don’t let the media dictate their every action? Well, I I mean, it’s very hard and actually the the most places I got it was from the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. I mean, if you keep things on a tight level in your agency, and do what I just said, about being careful what’s out there, you don’t have to worry too much about the press. The problem is once you let other people in, and especially if you go to a bureaucracy like, Office of Management and Budget, mostly careerists, Once they see what you’re doing, just figure it’s going to be in the post.

So the main way not to be led by the post is not let the information out to do it. And the second thing is you have to make a decision. What are you here for? Are you here to advance your own personal agenda? Well, maybe playing with the post isn’t so bad an idea.

Alright? But if you’re there to make a difference, then you’re gonna be careful about it and and take the hits, when they come, but don’t give them any more opportunities than you need. You said in your book that the only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing. It seems like a lot of people decide to play the Washington game and do nothing in order to climb the ladder. How do you find appointees that are actually going to do something and willing to take the bullets?

Well, you have to get people to as much degree as you can that, have shown that, they’re willing to take chances. Now we were so spoiled in the Reagan administration because we ran in 1976 before we were in 1980, and we ran against a sitting president. So anyone who would come to us, when the president, the United States was against you, and you had no I would go around the media events. You couldn’t find one elected official. I don’t care what level of government who was for us in 1976.

So anyone that was for us in 1976, we knew was solid. Right? So and we were really I mean, most people at times, you’re not gonna be have that opportunity. So you need to find people that are willing to do the thing that isn’t that way. That’s a personnel department almost always looks at people who are quote successful, which usually means that they don’t fight anything.

You need to have, especially, a personnel department that that’s looking at people who take risks, who are not going with the flow, who not everybody says is wonderful. Again, why government is so different than the private sector? You want people who will stand up to the the media in there and in the in the private sector, that’s not necessarily who you want. Alright? You need kind of people and everyone who did stand up came from backgrounds that weren’t in the top level of what you would think they would be.

And the best place to find it is in the campaign. And it’s and the earlier in the campaign the office, the better. Alright? Because nobody knows who’s gonna win at the beginning of the operation. You know, when you get towards the end, well, then all the people who wanna be with the winner come.

But so so it’s called political management because political type people are the ones you will want and they’re not necessarily who you want in the suite of the Fortune 500 company. They’re different kinds of people. And again, it’s easy to say at the beginning, but at the end, it was very clear. The ones that got there were were not the big executives of the Fortune 500 companies. When the next administration came in from our which was a Republican one, they were asked the head of the personnel or one of the top people in the personnel department were asked, what are you gonna do different from what the Reagan administration did?

It was trying to pick people who were ideological and had an ideology. Well, this guy from Bush 1 personnel, operations said, we’re not looking for people with ideology. We’re looking for people who wanna build, their biographies. Well, I mean, I knew what that administration was gonna be like and it was. In your book, you also talk about how the cabinet secretary needs to be implementing the agenda at their agency as if the president himself were doing it.

They need to have that kind of understanding. How does the cabinet secretary develop that understanding, and how close do they need to be working with the president to be able to do that? So you need a direct relationship with them. I just did a book review of Barnhart who was the head of interior secretary for Trump, in which he makes a big point about this. When he was brought over there when he was the deputy, and he was told he was gonna be acting ahead of it, He only asked the president one thing.

He said, who do I report to? And Trump said to him, you report to me. Now this stopped him and would stop me too because nobody reports directly to the president, in the cabinet, in most administrations. But Trump said, you report to me. And this guy was smart enough he says, well I know that’s what the Constitution says, but who do I really report to?

And he says, you report to me. Alright? That’s what a president’s relationship has to be to the cabinet official. He’s got to be able to call the secretary who answers the phone and get to the person. He’s got to be able to get around everybody else.

And again, most times that doesn’t happen. In the Reagan administration in the first term, Ed Meese’s job was to make sure that the top agency officials could get to the president. He actually had the president sitting there not at the end process after it’s been pushed through the whole bureaucracy and everybody’s got 3 levels in the last administration anyway to get to the the president and with the the ideas being watered down each time, each level it moves up there. That’s a way to make sure you don’t have anything that really is gonna be different at work if you have to get three levels of people to answer it. It’s got to be a direct relationship.

He’s got to know what the president does and to have some contact, and the people below the cabinet, some agencies at the cabinet that aren’t pure cabinet sense, and they should be there too. OPM should be there, which it wasn’t. So you need people who are in contact with it and know that their boss or their boss’s boss has direct contact with the president too. So that whole structure of political appointees has to have good relationships with each other and understand each other and understand ultimately what the president wants. So that is the challenge when you’re looking above and you’re trying to reach the president because you have this massive bureaucracy between yourself and One of the things you talk about is having the confidence in your legal authority.

One of the things you talk about is having the confidence in your legal authority to act. So how how do you have that that confidence? You got to do it yourself. You can’t trust anybody else. Alright?

I mean, you are the one that’s gonna pay the penalty. Nobody in the White House office or OMB or up the chain or down the chain. You are the ones you’ve got to find out yourself, And keep asking questions if you have a career lawyer. You should have a political pointy there if you possibly can get one. And you need to listen to all they say, but you need to check it.

That’s what this Barnhart book is very good on that. He’d been in several previous administrations so he had a good idea. And he was a lawyer too. But he you’ve got to become a jailhouse lawyer. Alright?

You’ve got to know the law yourself. And when they say something, you gotta look and check it. I never accepted any legal opinion on its first way through. You’ve got to keep asking questions about it, especially when you think there may be some other reasons behind what it is, that they really don’t like the policy. So you’ve got to know that and, again, you’re the one that’s gonna get in political or public relations trouble.

Nobody else is when you do it. You are. You’ve got to be your own person. It’s much harder to be an executive in the government than it is in the private sector. Again, you have no real tools.

You got to do it yourself, and there’s no substitute for it. If you’re going to sign some important thing that’s going on, you’ve got to come to the conclusion that you have to understand it. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t be there. And when you do run into insubordination, how do you deal with that? Well, it depends on a lot of different things you know.

How important the person is, somebody you need. So you know you there are all kinds of alternatives. I never found the the need to fire anybody. I did fire people to cut back on it, but not for what you’re talking about, you know, insubordination. Yeah.

You don’t really have to fire I had this democratic, one who was a political appointee, and obviously, he wasn’t for me. But I moved him to the division that, handled the retirement account, the the processing of it, not any policy direction. But making sure that the place operated and people who retired would get them in time and make them work it. And the backlog was always enormous. I put him there.

He was great there. Alright? He wasn’t in a policy position. Alright? I gave him a $10,000 bonus.

Alright? He did everything right. I mean, there’s a lot of things you can do. You know, I had one of the top political appointees call me up and said, when I was sitting there he said, what is this? I hear you are in favor of giving, bonuses to, careerists.

And I said, yeah. I am. Get him to work for you. He never did it. You’re wasting money.

No. If you and of course, if you do give and he doesn’t do it, then you can fire him, then you can do something. But there are incentives that you can use to get people who were totally opposed to you to do the right thing. I don’t think I really fired anybody for cause because I wouldn’t stand for them if they weren’t doing it or move them someplace else. And it’s a lot easier to move a tube.

But, you know, you have the option to fire them and if they’re bad enough to do. I did fire 1 or 2 of them, for cause, but not many. So if you were to get in as a cabinet secretary today, what would you do on your first day in office? That’s a tough question to answer because it depends so much on the agency. Yeah.

I guess if you need one thing to do the first day is bring all authorities in the agency up to you, so that nobody can do anything without going through you. You’re not gonna be able to keep that very long, but throughout, you should have as many come to you that are important as you can. The first thing, I guess, I’d do would be that if, so that they can’t do anything unless you know about it or have somebody you know knows about it do it. And then would you move on to ensuring that you’re putting the political appointees into the proper roles beneath you? Well, again, you should be doing that before you come in.

I mean, you should be saying who do I need here and there? Who would fit here? Who would not? Go to the personnel, of White House personnel and find out who do you have in the process. You need to do that before you get there, and you should have a team with you.

We were enormously lucky. I was the head of the transition team and the head of the agency, and I just brought all the people in the transition team over to the agency. And that’s, of course, very helpful too is the people who have been through the transition. And the ideal should be as many people in the transition as you could get in get in who are good and you’ll find out who was and who wasn’t during the transition. So you should be ready to run the organization from day 1.

And hopefully, the transition team has somebody in there already if you weren’t doing it yourself. I mean, the ideal is to have the transition team later be the one who is the appointee in the agency. Thank you, Don. It’s been a great talk. I think we should leave the appointees with a summary of what has been said today.

Alright. The first thing is that what you’re doing is different from what you’ve been doing. Alright? This is a different kind of business. It’s a political business.

It’s a personal business, and you don’t have a nice profit and loss system to tell you what’s going on below. That means you can’t decentralize. You’ve got to do it yourself. It means that you need the details of operation. You have to get into everything you’re doing in a way you didn’t do before.

You need to look at the specifics. You need to know that the whole process depends on presidential relationships. The loyalty to the president is not some mind thinking. It’s what the constitution says. That’s what you’re there for, to implement his program.

Next, realize everything you do is going to be on the front page of The Washington Post, if it’s gonna hurt you. Be careful with everything you do. Keep your agenda close. Know your legal rights and find out yourself. Yes.

Use the lawyers, but find out keep asking questions and read it yourself. Keeps contact outside of Washington and outside of keep in touch with some real people. The last thing I guess is say, laugh at yourself for being in this crazy business. Alright? This is not how most of the world works.

Right? This is a very personal political operation, and keep asking yourself, why am I here? Alright? Am I here to build my resume or am I here to, help the president of the United States make the country better? And hopefully, all you people are gonna take the latter one.

Thank you so much, Don. It’s been a pleasure. And I think our political appointees are gonna be very well equipped going into the next administration now. Well, thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

And this is the kind of lecture I gave to all the people coming into the Reagan administration. So, I hope it helps. Alright. Thank you.