Tough Jobs

The top cabinet picks are chosen.  But professor Paul Light in an article for the Washington Post, “Low-Profile Jobs That Will Stay That Way, If Obama is Prudent,” highlights ten of the most challenging jobs in the federal government. Each of these positions is further described in the Council for Excellence in Government’s “Prune Book On-Line:”

 

• Undersecretary of agriculture for food safety. Responsible for tracking produce, meat, poultry and liquid egg products.  Must work closely with Food and Drug Administration, which oversees solid egg products and virtually everything else!
• Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  Responsible for healthcare spending that nearly exceeds the budget of the Defense Department.  Key to healthcare reform.
• Undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology, and logistics.  Responsible for buying military equipment, computer systems, and weapon systems – oversees more than half of the Defense budget, and its cost overruns.
• Assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.  Responsible for the military health care system, including care for Iraq war soldiers.  Links to the health and benefits system at the department of Veterans Affairs.
• Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.  Responsible for food and drug safety, including imported food and drugs. Regulations cover about 40 percent of the U.S. economy.
• Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Responds to emergencies.
• Undersecretary of energy for nuclear security.  Oversees nuclear weapons labs, the nuclear stockpile, and cleanup.
• Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.  Collects taxes and oversees a huge technology modernization program.
• Commissioner of the Social Security Administration.  Oversees $2.2 Trillion in social security and disability benefits.  Key to fixing the future of both.  Current commissioner has a term appointment until 2013.
• Undersecretary of veterans affairs for benefits. Resolves disability claims of veterans and implements a number of programs such as the GI Bill.  Faces a large backlog of claims.

 

The Prune Book summarizes over 100 key subcabinet jobs.  Not sure how many of these will be filled from the Change.gov on-line jobs application (understand there are more than 400,000 applicants so far). 

 

Are there others you think would be more important than the ones selected by Dr. Light?  He touches on some of the key jobs dealing with healthcare, for example.  But he seems to focus on positions with traditional, longer-term management challenges raised by the Government Accountability Office and recent headlines, but not the seemingly more urgent positions that would deal with the economy, the bailout, or climate change/energy, which seem to be on the top of the Obama Transition agenda.