Assistants and Unders

We're two weeks into the Obama administration and there's a good number of Undersecretaries and Assistant Secretaries -- the people who do the deal heavy lifting on policy formation -- who haven't been appointed yet, much less begun their confirmation processes.  It usually takes six to eight weeks from the point of nomination to confirmation.  There's some anxiety among Hill Democrats because of this; a lot that needs to be done can't be done without the right people in place.
The worry is especially acute about national security appointments, as I discovered when I erroneously assumed last week that State's intelligence chief had been confirmed -- she's yet to be nominated!   At the State Department, three nominees have been confirmed, plus two non-Senate confirmable special envoys.  At the Defense Department, the controversy over the William Lynn deputy SecDef nomination had halted the confirmation of people like Michelle Flournoy, who is slated to be the Undersecretary of Policy, and prevented SecDef Robert Gates from moving forward with assistant secretary nomination. (Today, there's a vote scheduled for the Lynn confirmation; that may break the logjam.)

The announcement this weekend that the National Security Council would be dramatically reorganized is news of a sort; it's the first thing many in Congress had heard about the NSC under NSA Jim Jones. No staff announcements, no nothing, yet.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/02/assistants-and-unders/423/