Empires of the sons (and the friends, and the mistresses...).

• Author: Konigsberg, Eric
• Position: Political appointees - Includes related article on President Bush's campaign strategies

Not every political appointee's a Dean Acheson--or even a John Dean. Here's where the White House buries the bad ones

If George Bush is famous for his thank-you notes to valuable campaigners, House Minority Leader Robert Michel is better known for thank-you jobs. He can arrange a political appointment in the Bush administration for anyone he wants, and most of the time it's in the General Services Administration (GSA), where his friend Dick Austin has worked as a high-level executive for years. Thus it was business as usual one day in 1987, when Michel asked Austin to help out his longtime campaign manager, Paul Cation.

Cation, a lawyer, was recovering from mental problems aggravated by alcoholism, but favors are favors, Austin hired him as a $35,000-a-year "confidential assistant." Favors still being favors, Austin kept him on the payroll the next year, although the FBI had notified GSA that Cation was under investigation for bank fraud. Even after he was disbarred and arrested, Cation was allowed to keep his job, and even had if after he was convicted on 15 counts of lying about his indebtedness to obtain large loans, thereby defrauding five banks of more than $500,000. It wasn't until Cation was actually sentenced to six years in prison in January 1989 that Austin forced his assistant to give up his political plum.

The Cation affair wasn't brought to light until March 1990, when Austin's nomination to become administrator of GSA came before the Senate. The nomination hearings also revealed that during Austin's year and a half as acting administrator, the number of political appointees at GSA had increased 40 percent. Among the appointees were several persons GSA considered security risks because of severe personal financial problems, but who were hired nonetheless. Austin eventually forced one of these appointees, Chief of Staff David Godfrey, to resign after more than $1.5 million in judgments accumulated against him. But it probably wasn't a painless decision; Godfrey's patron was another one-man job corps: Senator Phil Gramm.

That Dick Austin was confirmed anyway, and that he still holds his post, tells us more about Washington political appointments than it does about him. It wasn't that Austin wanted a bunch of ne'er-do-wells on his staff. He was simply holding the bag for the Bush administration and Republican Party leaders who had favors to repay. And as White House personnel understands, those favored have to be put somewhere, even if they're mental cases, rabid ideologues, callow children of big donors, or simply incompetent. So where can administration officials best bury this political garbage? For decades, GSA has been one of the federal government's preferred landfills, with 17 administrators in 22 years and a breakneck parade of lesser officials spinning through the revolving door of one of Washington's worst administered and most wasteful agencies.

Political connections breeding political jobs is no scandal in itself. Sometimes it's government's saving grace. When strong presidents, cabinet or department heads, and congressional leaders inspire smart loyalists to take up public service, government benefits enormously from fresh blood, dedication, and new ideas. Unfortunately, not every political appointee is a Dean Acheson--or even, for that matter, a John Dean. "Within any administration, there's always a certain number of 'must-hires,' sponsored by political clout," explains Pendleton James, one of Reagan's personnel chiefs. "The must-hires are typically not the cream of the crop, or else they'd have gotten jobs on their own.... Any administration will have a certain amount we'll have to dump, and it's terribly frustrating."

Toss a whole bunch of those "must-hires" into one agency, and it can also be terribly frustrating for the taxpayer. Today, in addition to GSA, the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Agency for International Development (AID), the Department of Agriculture, the Office of Personnel Management, and certain divisions within the departments of Commerce and Justice are the most expensive dumping grounds for marginal Republicans who want to cash in their campaign chits for one of Washington's 3,000 political jobs. "You always have to take some turkeys, and Washington can afford to carry them," says a former top official in both the Reagan and Bush administrations--that is, if you put them where they can't do much harm. No one's going to let a fringe fundamentalist from Idaho set trade policy. But some garbage isn't buried deep enough to prevent serious human and economic damage.

How serious? Let's look at the HUD scandal for starters. As Deputy Assistant Secretary Dubois Gilliam explained to Congress several years back, Sam Pierce's agency was a legendary landfill. "Pierce got loaded up on him a group of Young Turks who were very political and a [White House personnel] must-hire list, and we had no housing skills whatsoever," he complained. One of those Turks was Pierce's executive assistant and top aide, Debra Gore Dean, a former bartender and waitress. She became something of a household name when she was charged with steering funding for projects to prominent Republicans and other friends. And then there was the handsomely paid Deputy Assistant Secretary Janice Golec, whose previous...