Abstract

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Amid extreme legislative gridlock and partisan polarization, policy making in the United States has shifted from the halls of Congress to the desks of bureaucrats. This shift means that the president’s most consequential power is to appoint top personnel to direct the administrative state. Critically, the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to advise and consent levies an important check on who the president selects for these unelected positions. However, this check does not always bind, especially since Congress expanded the president’s appointment power to allow acting appointees to fill vacancies. Presidents have consistently left posts vacant and relied on these "temporary" actings to permanently staff their administrations. While acting appointees exercise the same authority as their Senate-confirmed counterparts, they are not vetted by the Senate. Nonetheless, scholars have consistently, and inaccurately, assumed that presidential appointment strategies are fully constrained by Senate approval, that vacancies mean policy making is stalled or stagnant, and that major decisions have to wait for permanent, confirmed appointees. Unconfirmed Power: Unilateral Governance at the Pleasure of the President challenges this dominant paradigm. To wit, prevailing scholarship has completely ignored thousands of acting appointees who actively advance the president’s political objectives and whose decisions determine the actions of government. Unconfirmed Power corrects this striking omission with the first comprehensive examination to date of the political power that vacancies offer presidents as a means to unilaterally govern. It details the politics and policy implications of vacancies and acting appointees using a mixed-method approach that includes a new theoretical framework, quantitative analyses of a brand-new continuous dataset, in-depth interviews with former acting appointees, and qualitative case studies of agency actions that actings have directed. In answering the questions of why presidents choose to appoint actings instead of leaving vacant positions empty and how they leverage those actings to achieve their policy goals, Unconfirmed Power calls new attention to a long-standing appointment strategy that has far-reaching implications for democratic accountability and separation of powers. 

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Extended description available here. This book builds on my award-winning dissertation research, available here.