Measuring the Impact of Appointee Vacancies on US Federal Agency Performance

Abstract

In this article, we evaluate the relationship between vacancies in presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed (PAS) positions and US federal agency performance. We explore this relationship using an innovative new perceptual measure of agency performance. This measure is derived from the evaluation of federal executives who work closely with the agencies they assess. The measure is comparable across agencies and avoids many of the limitations of existing measures. We find a robust correlation between vacancies in PAS positions and lower evaluations of agency performance, even when accounting for differences in the way Republican and Democratic federal executives perceive performance. We conclude with a discussion of how dysfunction in the US appointment process is influencing federal government performance on key tasks and the implications of our findings for the creation and use of performance measures in a world of partisan differences.

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