Lawyers and Policymakers in Government

Abstract

If my government service holds any interest for this symposium's other participants and readers, it is because I served in a different capacity than most lawyers in government. First, neither I nor the agency that I helped to runthe Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)did any legal work, however broadly defined. Quite the contrary. The head of my agency, Henry Aaron, was a distinguished economist who had been (and remains) a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Our staff consisted of almost 100 policy analysts, mostly trained in economics and other social sciences. To my knowledge, none were lawyers. Second, the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW), Joseph A. Califano, Jr., held what I imagine is an unusual view of the role that lawyers can and should play in public life. Califano, a famously sophisticated, energetic, demanding, politically adroit, and wellconnected individual, seemed to believe that God in His or Her infinite wisdom had endowed lawyers with special faculties for governance, policy development, and political leadership. Lawyers were somehow better equipped than other mortals to perform the chief tasks of high-level government: politics and persuasion, analysis and synthesis, management and implementation. Califano acknowledged, of course, that policy analysts, program specialists, budgeteers, personnel experts, data gatherers, researchers, inspectors, and other government officials also possessed valuable skills. These individuals, however, were essentially technicians, functionaries, staff aides, and consultants. The most talented of them could rise above these limitations, of course, but their more