Work Gets Done by Federal Agencies Throughout the Ranks, Not Just the Top

Five Critical Foreign Policy Posts to Watch

With much of President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet still unnamed, it’s understandable that speculation should focus on who helms the different agencies. After all, running cabinet departments is a big job, and the personalities Obama has nominated so far — New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, for instance — are politically larger than life. So are those whom Obama is expected to name, like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.
But all the focus on who will sit in Obama’s cabinet overlooks a basic fact of governance. Much, if not most, of the actual substance of policy — from its detailed conception to its experimentation to its implementation — doesn’t come from the heads of the federal agencies. It comes from deep in their guts.

This is particularly true for national security and foreign policy. When it comes to managing foreign relations and securing the country, the middle-to-upper-middle tiers of the Departments of State, Defense and Justice, along with the National Security Council staff and the intelligence community, are often critical posts. Those positions are policy laboratories and career boosters, offices where policy is refined and offices where policy gets killed by poor implementation or bureaucratic machination. As one Democratic foreign-policy expert recently put it, “These are your foreign-policy change agents.”
Not that it will — or even should — stop speculation on the composition of Obama’s cabinet, but here are five critical sub-cabinet positions that will play an outsize role in shaping Obama’s foreign policy. For the record, the Obama transition team declined to comment about who’ll fill these jobs. But those who do eventually will have a heavy burden to shoulder.