The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush by Judith E. Michaels Read Free Book Online Page B

As mentioned, the overload at the White House led Nixon to lean more on Haldeman who arrogated more power to himself. What Campbell labels Nixon's neuroses
combined with Haldeman's imperiousness to breed unprecedented degrees of White House isolation, backstabbing, paralysis, and paranoia. The resulting liberties taken with the rule of law, especially in the Watergate break-in and its attempted cover-up, convinced most observers that the hierarchical White House with a strong chief of staff presented real dangers for continued democratic rule. (Campbell 1991, 188)
There is a fine irony in all this: Nixon eventually abandoned the counterbureaucracy approach because, rather than weakening the bureaucracy, it tended to strengthen it. A certain chaos had settled in on the executive branch as a result of this centralizing strategy:
the lines of authority became blurred, decisions were delayed or never made, and increasingly the result was that career officials in the domestic program bureaucracies were in the catbird seat. . . . The responsible

 

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cabinet appointees were out of touch, too busy, or too harried by the White House to find out [what was happening]. Not only were domestic affairs not handled well under this type of a system, but tensions arose as junior White House staffers second-guessed presidential appointees on matters that the latter thought were of relatively lesser consequence and that they should have been trusted to handle themselves or to delegate. (Nathan, 52-53)
An unintended consequence and additional irony of this strategy was that the White House and Executive Office staffs, in contrast to the original plan, grew in size and power early in the Nixon administration. The result was that by the end of its third year the cost of the Executive Office staff had doubled since the Johnson years. Nixon, "'distrustful of bureaucracy, . . . built a kind of defense against it-and in doing so he . . . built his own bureaucracy"' (ibid., 45).
There were other costs to Nixon's administrative presidency. For one, it roused the Congress to action. In response to his budget impoundment actions, the Congress acted to protect its role in the governing process by passing the Budget Impoundment and Control Act in 1974. This act sought to restore congressional oversight of federal expenditures by, among other actions, forbidding backdoor spending of funds by agencies without advance allocations. It also prohibited executive impoundment of congressionally mandated funds for programs the president sought to kill administratively when he could not do it legislatively (Warren 1988, 183).
The impoundment strategy also provoked the first rumblings of impeachment of the president and put the Congress on general alert:
In part at least because of its conviction that presidents were ignoring or usurping legislative authority by governing in a unilateral way through the administrative presidency, the Congress has reacted against this presidential strategy. In recent years, the Congress has both strengthened its own surveillance of the executive branch and sought to subject the decisions and actions of executive officials to closer scrutiny by outside forces. (Rourke 1991a, 116)
These outside forces include the courts. The Democratic-controlled Congress, distrustful of executive agencies headed by the Republican White House, made it easier for the agencies to be taken to court through its writing of legislation and encouragement of watchdog public interest

 

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groups. The courts have thus become involved in the bureaucracy through judicial review, subsequently limiting administrative discretion in carrying out agency mission (ibid., 117). 5
Congressional retaliation also resulted in the enactment of the War Powers Act that sought to limit the president's power to wage undeclared wars and in revisions to the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater access to government materials. Congress also made alterations to