The nominees for the top five positions at the Obama Department of Justice -- Eric Holder and today's announcees -- have been pretty impressive legal minds with a broad range of experience inside and outside the government. But a DOJ veteran now in academia e-mails to complain:
As usual, DoJ is stacked with lawyers who have never been anything but lawyers, and in particular have never run a large organization. This will tend to leave the big DoJ bureaucracies (especially FBI and DEA) free to continue to misspend their resources, lobby for right-wing policies, and neglect the public interest.
But Holder, along with David Ogden and Tom Perrelli, the second- and third-in-line, respectively, all have had significant management experience at DOJ before, right?
Yes, they had management jobs at DoJ, where management usually consists of paying attention to the six litigating divisions plus the SG's office and OLC -- that is, running a big law firm -- and neglecting all the DoJ employees who carry guns or who didn't go to law school.
From a DoJ-centric viewpoint, I wanted someone like Jack Lew for Deputy, to do something like the Jack Lew job at State: a lawyer, but someone whose primary interest is making large organizations produce public value, and preferably someone with an interest in crime control and counter-terrorism policy rather than merely parsing legal texts. If Phil Heymann were a decade younger, he would have been precisely the right Deputy.
Interesting. It's pretty easy to forget that, say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation comes under DOJ's bailiwick, and managing law enforcement officials -- even "lawyers with guns" -- is a different task than dealing with legal bureaucracy.
-- Tim Fernholz
