Who’s Really Running the Government? Yale Lab Tracks Unconfirmed Acting Officials

Do you know who runs the federal government?

Sure, nearly everyone can name the president and perhaps some of the more prominent members of his cabinet.

But many government positions, for decades now, have been filled by acting officials — people who have not sought and obtained confirmation by the U.S. Senate as prescribed by the Constitution. Others have been confirmed for one position and moved to another. And these acting directors, commissioners, and other senior officials make consequential decisions that affect millions of Americans.

Who are they?

“The federal government does not track acting officials,” said Christina Kinane, an assistant professor of political science and faculty fellow with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. “In fact, members of Congress don’t even know who these people are. But they are widespread and often doing big things.”

ISPS has awarded Kinane funding to establish a research team tasked with identifying career and politically appointed acting directors from the Reagan Administration through the Biden Administration, developing a web scraper to provide real-time updates on which acting directors are currently serving, and building a centralized, accessible database to encourage transparency and accountability.

“On a number of dimensions, government actions can be obscured from view — basically not easily accessible in a systematic way,” Kinane said. “The only way to remedy that is to collect data in a centralized place and go through the hard work of finding it,”

Kinane, a widely cited expert on the federal bureaucracy, considers the work of her new lab as adhering to the fundamentals of scientific inquiry for public benefit.

“Part of this new initiative is to conduct basic research, like studying cells in a medical lab,”
 she said. “We’re trying to make sense of the political world around us by first gathering information and evidence with a goal of extracting significant conclusions that can contribute knowledge to the larger conversation.”

One student in the Kinane Lab is researching acting officials starting in 1981 to determine if they were career federal employees or political appointees.

Career officials are often high-level workers who are elevated to fill a vacancy at the top of an agency before returning to their previous position. They behave with the knowledge that their job in the agency will extend beyond the current administration, making them more aligned with the agency’s mission and how it works.

Political appointees are originally placed in lower positions that do not require Senate confirmation before they are elevated to acting director. And they can be hard to identify and track, Kinane said.

“We often have absolutely no idea who or where these actings came from and where they went after serving,” she said. “They could have been fired, transferred to another post, elevated to a higher position, joined the political ranks, or maybe gone back and been a civil servant for the rest of their career. We don’t really know.”

Two other students majoring in computer science and data science are creating a web tool to track current acting officials and determine if they serve beyond the 210 or 300 days allowed by law while awaiting Senate confirmation. The students are working to overcome the challenge of hitting a moving target, particularly as government websites can be structured in ways that make it challenging to identify current personnel.

“I’m incredibly proud of our student researchers,” Kinane said. “A lot of people stop when they hit a dead end and say we just can’t know. But we can know. Because we are simply looking for a reality that exists. It may be hard. We can run into places with some very dark curtains. But we have freedom of information laws, congressional hearings, official records, background checks. All of these tools help us reveal public knowledge.”

ISPS Director Alan Gerber, Sterling Professor of Political Science, touted the Kinane Lab for collecting important data in a careful way, so it will be a resource for future use.

“Christina Kinane and her students exemplify the ISPS mission to advance research and to engage the next generation,” Gerber said. “This new data will allow Kinane, her students, and other scholars to conduct novel research on the operation of the modern state. It will help us to replace guesswork and impressions with facts and will accelerate discovery by allowing researchers to evaluate theories without having to also collect their own data.”

Ultimately, Kinane wants to offer a way for anyone to easily identify the fluctuating heads of the executive branch of the federal government. Acting officials often make critical decisions, such as those recently made to forbid programs encouraging diversity, equity, and inclusion; fire staff; and dismantle entire agencies — often without public knowledge or oversight.

“Without knowing who the people are who are making these decisions, there is no way to hold people to account,” Kinane said. “There is no way to identify what the decision-making process actually was. People’s lives are at stake. The future of our government is at stake.”

It’s not enough to know who the Senate-confirmed leaders are, Kinane said. They are widely documented. But they are not always the ones making the decisions.

“Unless we know who the seat-fillers are, we won’t know who made these consequential decisions,” she said. “Understanding who is really in charge is fundamental tenant of democracy.”