OMB and the Hazards of Presidential Staff Work

Abstract

This article assesses the dilemmas (especially perceptions of politicization) confronting the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as an institutional staff unit that serves both the immediate political needs of an incumbent president and the long-range needs of the presidency. Observers of American politics have long recognized the central role that the OMB plays through its fiscal and legislative clearance, program coordination and development, budget preparation, and to a lesser extent, executive management functions. Indeed, the Office of Management and Budget is the most highly developed administrative coordinating and program review unit in the Executive Office. Recent events, however, have tarnished OMB's image as a once impartial and objective presidential staff agency. During the Watergate period OMB was referred to as the Office of Meddling and Bumbling, an appellation characterizing its almost intolerable interference into the internal management processes of departments and, agencies. Moreover, by the conclusion of the Nixon administration, all perceptions of OMB's neutrality had been dispelled. President Ford's transition team accused OMB of becoming too involved in departmental policy processes and of uncharacteristically politicizing the budgetary decisionmaking process. The Congressional Budget Office, House and Senate budget committees, statutory curbs on impoundment, and confirmation requirements for the OMB Director and Deputy Director were intended by Congress to serve as mechanisms for improving OMB's responsiveness to its non-presidential clients. The charges against Bert Lance did nothing to improve the stature of this once proud presidential staff agency. The perceived politicization of OMB disheartened those who valued OMB's predecessor, the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), as the bastion for neutral competence in American government-an American equivalent to the British civil service cadre at Whitehall.' In its staff capacity, the BOB also faced the danger of overextending its responsibilities into the political and operating levels (the source of OMB's credibility problem) or narrowing its role and viewpoint through concentration on routine details. Nevertheless, from 1921 to 1970 the BOB lived, at times tenuously, with these occupational hazards and, aside from greeneyeshade or abominable no-man jokes, escaped public notoriety. If a budget director was sometimes used as a presidential fire fighter on pressing political issues, the Budget Bureau as an institution was rarely looked to or perceived as a source of partisan support. The Politicization of OMB: An Ink Blot Test