Over some 300 years, Russia was ruled by a total of 18 czars of the Romanov dynasty. However, as David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy points out, the Obama administration has now appointed more czars than that in just three months:
It has finally happened. With yesterday's naming of Border Czar Alan Bersin, the Obama administration has by any reasonable reckoning passed the Romanov Dynasty in the production of czars. The Romanovs ruled Russia from 1613 with the ascension of Michael I through the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. During that time, they produced 18 czars. While it is harder to exactly count the number of Obama administration czars, with yesterday's appointment it seems fair to say it is now certainly in excess of 18.
In addition to Bersin, we have energy czar Carol Browner, urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr., infotech czar Vivek Kundra, faith-based czar Joshua DuBois, health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, new TARP czar Herb Allison, stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney, non-proliferation czar Gary Samore, terrorism czar John Brennan, regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, and Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried. We also have a host of special envoys that fall into the czar category including AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross, Sudan special envoy J. Scott Gration and climate special envoy Todd Stern. That's 18.
This is a very conservative estimate, however. I will allow you to pick whom you would like out of the remaining candidates. For example you could count de facto car czar Steve Rattner even though the administration went out of its way to say they weren't going to have a car czar... before he ultimately emerged as the car czar . . .
But you certainly might want to count people deemed by the media to be the "cyber security czar" or the "AIDs czar" or the "green jobs czar" even if there are reasons to quibble about the designation of one or two of them.
Government by czar didn't work especially well in Russia. Hopefully, it won't be quite so bad in this country. And, yes, of course I understand that Obama's czars unlike the Romanovs are ultimately accountable to democratically elected officials. I also don't expect Obama's czars to be organizing pogroms or exiling dissidents to Siberia anytime soon. On the other hand, democratic accountability for America's czars is increasingly tenuous in light of the fact that there are too many of them for most voters to even keep straight, much less understand and evaluate their performance in any depth. Here, as elsewhere, the rapidly growing size and complexity of government makes difficult for voters to monitor those who are supposed to be serving the public . Maybe Obama's army of czars will do a good job anyway. A few of the Romanovs did. But for every "Czar-Liberator," like Alexander II (who free Russia's millions of serfs), there were a lot more oppressors and incompetents.
For what it's worth, I also recognize that it was the Republican Reagan administration that appointed the first American "czar" when they named a "drug czar" in 1982. Reagan was wrong to do so. That, however, in no way justifies the Obama Administration's massive expansion of this dubious practice.
UPDATE: Some commenters seem to be missing the point of the post; it's possible I wasn't sufficiently clear. So let me reiterate: No, I am not saying that Obama's czars are brutal oppressors like most of the Romanov czars were. I thought that was clear in the original post, where I said that "I also don't expect Obama's czars to be organizing pogroms or exiling dissidents to Siberia anytime soon." But let me be even more precise about it here to eliminate any remaining confusion. Nor am I saying that Cass Sunstein is somehow closely analogous to Nicholas II. I am, however, saying that the proliferation of czars makes an already excessively large and complex government even more difficult for rationally ignorant voters to monitor. And I doubt that there is any gain in efficiency to offset this harmful effect.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Cass Sunstein Confirmed:
- Potential Pitfalls of Political Alliances:
- Cass Sunstein and the Second Amendment:
- Mark A.R. Kleiman on Czars and "Fellow-Travelling" with "Wingnuts":
- A Czar Bites the Dust:
- Czars:
- Obama Administration Now has More Czars than the Romanov Dynasty:
Was that intended ironically?
As far as your post, I dislike the practice of refering to people as czars. Not even Marc Antony could convince me that having a czar is a good idea. But isn't insinuating that there's some possible qualitative parity between Nicholas II and Cass Sunstein, because of the way in which we've chosen to misuse language, simply irresponsible of you?
To say that Sunstein is "ultimately accountable to democratic officials" is honestly a laughable way to express what separates him from Nicholas II. But you seemed vaguely serious.
Tell me, do you think John Yoo is a legal genius?
Aren't we already so hopelessly rationally ignorant of politics that we don't pay attention to policy matters anyway? Are you saying that the czar proliferation is going to make a bad situation worse? That seems a little farfetched to me. Last year there were all these people paying attention to policy, but now, with the proliferation of czars, those people are going to throw up their hands and say "It's just too much. I could keep up with the ins and outs of energy policy before, but now we've got Browner, I just can't follow it all." I'm not buying it.
I dunno, it worked well enough to last 370 years. That's longer than our (US) streak.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't pleasant to be a peasant. Or Catherine the Great's horse.
I think you are taking a joke far too seriously. Obviously, Cass Sunstein is much smarter than Nicholas II and differs from him in various other ways too. But the proliferation of US government czars is part of a more general trend of growth in the size and complexity of government that is very troubling for the reasons i indicate in the post.
Accountability to elected officials is indeed fact a major difference between Obama's czars and the Romanovs.
It does indeed make a bad situation worse, because it makes government more complex and difficult to understand than before. That is part of the point of the post.
Your too theoretical. How do you know there isn't any gain in efficiency? Is this merely a gut feeling?
I have to agree. Government is already basically impossible for a single person who wants to have a life to monitor. (And I suspect that even if you were to devote all your waking hours to monitoring it, you still would be unable to do so.)
So, before the appointment of these individuals, you had an impossible for one person to monitor government. After the appointment of these individuals, you have an impossible for one person to monitor government. Same old, same old.
Luckily, in either case, we can depend on division of labor to monitor the activities of government.
Are they covered by executive privelege?
Are they accountable to the Congress?
The czars need to be organized, and allowed to bargain as a group. The quickest way would be to have a czar "card check". Does anybody know the Card Check Czar's email?
I also think some commentators are a tad too serious.
(Hadur and karrde, on the other hand,made nice comments.)
Put those two together and you have a pretty good recipe for arbitrary government.
And, just because I'm curious, who might those "elected offials" be?
Isn't much of the purpose of appointing czars precisely to avoid as much accountability, as you define it, as possible? As I recall Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), for all his real or imagined faults, certainly has issues with the concept of "czars":
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19339.html
Yes but not with the concepts of "kleagles" and "Exalted Cyclops" though.
2. One problem with the original article is this- claiming there is a proliferation with the number of czars by counting the number of czars, and then adding in the individuals "functionally equivalent" to czars (special envoys, the non-czar car czar etc.) seems a little, uh, weaselly. Is the issue the appellation of czar, or the concentration of power? Was a comparison done with previous administrations and their "functionally equivalent" to czar status?
3. Finally, this post seems to completely miss the point from the whole larger picture. If you accept the modern administrative state (not that you have to- but that's a separate argument), doesn't it make sense that the executive (democratically accountable to the people) would want individuals (also individually accountable to him/her) responsible for major policy areas? What are agency heads and department heads other than czars, really? Is this a formalist argument (that the czar is an agency/department head without the requisite formalist vetting)? Or should we look at this more like Truman- since the buck stops with the President, it makes sense that the President would want individuals, accountable to him, that will report on the status of certain policy areas within the large administrative bureaucracy?
4. As a joke, the whole post falls flat Prof. Somin.
For what it's worth, I agree with the commentators above who believe the term "czar" is infelicitous.
Is the "elected official" the president, in this case?
Famous last words.
To those, like Prof. Somin and myself, who are fond of Cato and that which he stood for, a proliferation of Caesars cannot bode well for our Republic. Do those here making the usual efforts to whip Somin into the professorial party line disagree?
Basically, they're like Gauleitern or Reichsführern. They're officials who are given unconstitutional powers.
Would you settle for a Raputina? Hillary's nutty enough for that.
I think she would have said that flat-out calling someone with unchecked power over the economic life of every man, woman and child in the country a "czar" would have been too much of a giveaway.
I guess she wasn't always right.
The czar czar has already been done (albeit not by the Obama administration).
And darnit, I wanted to be first to make the joke! :-|
As to my constitutional objection, it's not clear to me that the President has the power to create new agencies (which I think the czars are, per the APA), where the agencies have the power to manage or influence other agencies. (This is not to say that the President can't create agencies, like the EPA.) If Congress created the FDIC, should the President be able to create a bailout czar which can coordinate its efforts? If so, where does that authority come from?
Richard Wagoner? And it's not the degree of brutality that's essential. It's the fact that czars rule (and ruin) the lives of private citizens, and dictate the operations of private companies.
He's already named himself.
The pleasure of the Commisar (sic.) Soetero neither concerns nor interests me.
I'm with Dave on this. There are many good reasons to use Commissar, but it's probably too late -
Don't turn around, uh-oh
Der Kommissar's in town, uh-oh
And if he talks to you
And you don't know why
You say your life
Is gonna make you die
Affe, re "Rasputin for the UN"--some people (though not me) think we already had that with Bolton.
As I see it, the fundamental problem is not that presidents appoint "czars". It's that they appoint czars because the American people seem to like them, and particularly, that the thing the American people seem to like most is the connotation of unlimited power.
Likewise, special envoys are czars now too? They sort of seem like regular old diplomats who report to the Secretary of State like everyone else, but just deal with specialized subject matters.
But I concede that it's true that if you some random dude on the internet decides to start calling a bunch of people czars instead of by their actual titles, we really do have a proliferation of czars.
Not only does the administration have department heads with demands that need to be reconciled, the administration has these czars who are going to end up in conflict with one another and the cabinet heads of the departments, let alone all of the independent sraffs and instutional staff conflicting.
The infighting is going to be intense, and Byzantine isn't going to quite describe this.
The only people who should really be worried about the swelling ranks of government czars are the people getting picked to be those czars.
That has been true for a long time. What's different here, is that the appointment of such czars to loosely defined domains circumvents Congressional oversight, as well as Senatorial inspection. It also makes for a nightmarish organizational chart. Does the Secretary of Energy devise energy policy or has he simply become a functionary in charge of day to day operations? One can get a far better sense of where Obama is headed by looking at his extra-departmental appointments and at the rungs below the cabinet level. Unfortunately, one can only look through that glass darkly.
Take Obama's appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, for example. Not only was it blatantly symbolic politically, the President effectively removed one of his chief critics from the Senate and turned her into a mouthpiece for his Administration. Meanwhile, he appointed an ideological loyalist to the U.N., elevated her to Cabinet status, and seriously undercut both Clinton's international and departmental purview by installing Special Envoys as well -- none of whom answer to the Secretary or to Congress.
This is part of a wider problem that is even more opaque to voters by orders of magnitude. Call it your Shadow Government at work. Congress routinely passes laws and immediately hands over responsibility for detailing the ways and means, so to speak, and actual regulations, to governmental agencies. This is a form of bureaucratic legislation and is very nearly the norm.
The stance the EPA is taking on CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and the attendant consequences are emblematic. Once atmospheric C02 is officially designated as a hazard to human health and welfare, the EPA's rulemaking authority kicks in. The public has a legally created right to "comment" on the initial designation and on proposed rules, but has zero official sway. Despite the superficial link to global climate change which makes this particular initiative a politically palatable move, no specific, practical dangers to individual health have been established or even identified.
Nevertheless, the EPA can declare C02 a hazardous chemical by virtual fiat, thereby according itself the power to devise legally binding regulations. The capping of carbon emissions, for example, which could easily have devastating economic and bureaucratic consequences, might actually lack sufficient support to pass legislative muster in the people's Congress. Four years is a regulatory eternity. The power to replace a President is a risibly tenuous form of accountability in this regard, and might not, in fact, even serve as a corrective.
It means that the government has gotten so big that it believes they can play the shell game on us and nobody will complain.
Harold Ickes was dubbed the "Oil Czar" of the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Note this quote from TIME, December 6, 1943:
Imperial Russia also had its temporary "czars" (though not by that name), and some of them got their jobs done. During a famine in the 1890s, the Czar appointed a Colonel Fon Vedrikh as "czar" of all railroads, to get grain shipments rolling from the southwest into the starving northeast. (Russia's rail system was organized to move grain to the Black Sea ports for export; many thousands of carloads of grain were stuck in yards due to traffic jams.) Fon Vedrikh introduced block signaling, fired a lot of recalcitrant managers, and got the grain moved out within a few weeks. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The re-organization causes many problems, but might be worthwhile if the issue is important enough and the existing organization makes it difficult to implement a policy. The downside of a czar is all the disruption to all the other activities, and lack of coordination of czar's work with all the other policies it impacts.
Of course, it just might be that czars are named for the PR value more than for organizational improvement.
Quibble: at one time, they were called the "kitchen cabinet."
The numeric comparison to historical czars strikes me as more ice breaker than salient comparison, but I must say, I agree with Dave N that "commissar" might actually be apt.
Was this post just a third-rate attempt at humor?
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