I'll Have My Chief of Staff Call Your Chief of Staff's Chief of Staff

The day after a suicide bombing at the parliament building, few Iraqi legislators made it to the chamber floor. Now they're planning time off: two months this summer. (By Ceerwan Aziz -- Associated Press)

Used to be in this town that you were nobody unless you had a chief of staff. No more. You want to be someone in this town? Then you need a chief of staff to the chief of staff, someone to get your chief of staff's coffee so the chief doesn't need to leave that important meeting.

In fact, from humble beginnings at the start of the Reagan administration, the chief-of-staff function has "spread downward in the bureaucracy to where this is now a chief of staff to an assistant assistant secretary," according to New York University professor Paul Light.

The various deputy chiefs "are there to make the chief look better," Light said. There are deputy chiefs of staff to assistant secretaries and a chief of staff to an associate deputy assistant secretary, he said.

It appears that the first Cabinet-level chief of staff showed up at the Department of Health and Human Services in 1981, Light said. The secretary, former Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker, recalled that he had long heard of the difficulties of getting things done in big agencies. So he picked his longtime aide on the Hill, David Newhall, and gave him the chief-of-staff title so he would have the power to steer things through an oft-clogged bureaucracy.

From that humble beginning, the chief-of-staff position quickly metastasized so that every Cabinet member now has a chief of staff.

In the position's early incarnations, the chief of staff generally was someone like Newhall, selected by and loyal to the secretary, there to watch the secretary's back and so on, Light said. That arrangement largely held true during the Clinton years.

But "the nature of the function has changed dramatically in the Bush administration," Light said, "where the chiefs are selected by the White House vetting process and tend to be very young and very loyal" to the political arm of the White House. "So they have at least a dotted line to Karl Rove," Light said.

There are 14 Cabinet department chiefs of staff, and 13 of those have deputy chiefs. There are seven chiefs of staff to undersecretaries. There are 10 departments with chiefs of staff to an assistant secretary, and four of those have a deputy chief of staff.

That deputy title is now "the fastest spreading title in the federal hierarchy," said Light, who is "sans a chief of staff for the time being."

And of the original goal of streamlining the bureaucracy? Perhaps "it works too well," Schweiker said.

A Name in the Hat to Be Deputy at State

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The State Department is looking at candidates to replace aid chief Randall Tobias, who thought it would be a great idea to "have gals come over" to his apartment from an escort service to give him a massage.

We're told a leading candidate is Henrietta Holsman Fore, State's undersecretary for management. But there may be some opposition to her, however, since she gave $3,500 in 1999-2000 to a pro-choice Republican women's group called WISH List.