Dan Froomkin points us towards the Obama administration's Friday night document dump, which featured the recent financial histories of many key White House advisers, including one Larry Summers.Summers, you'll recall, was appointing to a White House position and thus didn't see his recent financial history combed over by the Senate Finance Committee's tax lawyers. So, unfortunate though it is, we may never know if slight tax errors lurk in his past returns. He could have a lien somewhere! But the White House requires disclosure forms showing income streams, and so we now know that in 2008, Summers received more than $5 million from the hedge fund D.E Shaw and more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from other Wall Street firms -- including $135,000 for a single appearance before Goldman Sachs. These are sums that would make Tom Daschle positively blush, and they likely would have posed a serious threat had Summers been named Secretary of the Treasury. But he wasn't. Summers was named to the White House staff rather than sent to the Senate to be confirmed as a cabinet official. These disclosures may thus prove an embarrassment, but probably little more than that. The emerging precedent deserves attention, though. Summers, we now know, might have been lost to an actual confirmation process. Daschle would have been saved had he simply been named to the Office of Health Reform (a White House staff position with no confirmation fight). Going forward, we may increasingly see a situation in which the real heavyweights and key players are named to the White House staff while the actual agencies are given to less influential and impressive administrators who are sure to easily pass Senate confirmation. You could see that having a couple different effects. Cleaving influential advisers from actual bureaucratic authority is the sort of thing that leads fairly quickly towards power struggles. On the other hand, maybe it's better for agency administrators to focus on agency policy rather than national affairs. Either way, it's not a change that's being discussed in our political system so much as compelled by the auditors on the Finance Committee and the fact that government officials now commonly go to work for the industries they were once charged with regulating. LUCKY LARRY?
Dan Froomkin points us towards the Obama administration's Friday night document dump, which featured the recent financial histories of many key White House advisers, including one Larry Summers.Summers, you'll recall, was appointing to a White House position and thus didn't see his recent financial history combed over by the Senate Finance Committee's tax lawyers. So, unfortunate though it is, we may never know if slight tax errors lurk in his past returns. He could have a lien somewhere! But the White House requires disclosure forms showing income streams, and so we now know that in 2008, Summers received more than $5 million from the hedge fund D.E Shaw and more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from other Wall Street firms -- including $135,000 for a single appearance before Goldman Sachs. These are sums that would make Tom Daschle positively blush, and they likely would have posed a serious threat had Summers been named Secretary of the Treasury. But he wasn't. Summers was named to the White House staff rather than sent to the Senate to be confirmed as a cabinet official. These disclosures may thus prove an embarrassment, but probably little more than that. The emerging precedent deserves attention, though. Summers, we now know, might have been lost to an actual confirmation process. Daschle would have been saved had he simply been named to the Office of Health Reform (a White House staff position with no confirmation fight). Going forward, we may increasingly see a situation in which the real heavyweights and key players are named to the White House staff while the actual agencies are given to less influential and impressive administrators who are sure to easily pass Senate confirmation. You could see that having a couple different effects. Cleaving influential advisers from actual bureaucratic authority is the sort of thing that leads fairly quickly towards power struggles. On the other hand, maybe it's better for agency administrators to focus on agency policy rather than national affairs. Either way, it's not a change that's being discussed in our political system so much as compelled by the auditors on the Finance Committee and the fact that government officials now commonly go to work for the industries they were once charged with regulating. 
