Vacant Offices: Delays in Filling Top Agency Positions, from Carter to Bush 43.

Over 1,100 Senate-confirmed presidential appointees run the administrative state. But many of these positions are “vacant” a large amount of the time. New administrations are quick to fill top cabinet slots but take much longer to staff the next few layers. Appointee tenure is short, leading to new openings a year or two later. Then, agency officials flee government service near the end of an administration. Using new data from OPM on the start and end dates of all Senate-confirmed presidential appointees from 1977 to 2005, this paper tries to explain variation in the length of vacancies in top “at-will” agency positions (other work has analyzed vacancies in “fixed-term” positions in regulatory commissions). The length of an agency vacancy encompasses three periods: the time between the last departure and the President’s nomination of a new official, the time between nomination and confirmation, and the time between confirmation and the start of government service. Duration models that take permit dependency between the first two periods are employed to test organizational (level of position; presidential staffing models), institutional (divided government), and political (policy preferences) theories of executive branch staffing. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]