Plum Book
When a president is elected, he is handed a Plum Book and wished well as he embarks on a journey to appoint great people to help him enforce the laws of the United States. Use the link to open the current Plum Book (it is updated every 4 years with a new administration). In fact in 2012 (the most recent edition) the Government Printing Office has made the Plum Book an app. The current edition has about 9 pages of Executive Office of the President positions, about 127 pages of positions within the 15 Cabinet Departments, and an additional 55 pages of Independent Agency and Government Corporation positions. On page V (near beginning) and on pages 203 and 205, there are some keys and charts explaining some of the codes and pay scales that accompany some of these jobs. Spend a little bit of time in the Plum Book and post your comments about what you found and what you think about your findings. Make sure your comments are unique. The last thing you want to do is sound similar to a classmate's comments. Assignment is worth 10 points and is due by the time you put your name on your executive test.
Enjoy,
Mr. Thompson
posted by erdecker @ 8:03 PM
60 comments
60 Comments:
There are 8045 names in the Plum book. The president gets to pick a lot of those people. If I was president, I would not want to have to pick those names because that's a lot of work and time, I would want to deal with the pressing issues. Having to spend time picking all these people would be frustrating.
There are a lot of jobs the president has to assign when he gets elected into office. The Plum Book contains the names of the people that the president appoints, and their jobs. If I were the president, I would elect a person to pick the people for me.
Plum book is like the phone book for the president; it's useful in that he can look up people by department and lists their party affiliation so he knows who he should contact. It also shows how long certain members have been in their department, so the president will know who has the most experience.
If I were president, I would choose people who had most seniority for me, because they have the most crystallized intelligence.
Alicia Quinones Looking at the appendix and how its organized the job of having to put together the Plum Book would be unbelievably tedious and difficult. The appendix splits it up into departments and positions of all the people empoloyed, personally if it were me I wouldnt mind picking all of those people I would want them to feel hand picked even if the process would take awhile.
Jake Titus
The plum book is like the Presidents contacts list. It lists all the assistants and jobs he has to assign. The President chooses many jobs from the Public Printer, Librarian of Congress to the Architect of the Capital.
Just looking at the plum book gave me a headache. I couldn't imagine having to pick all 8000-some names. If I had to pick all the names, I'd just say that all the incumbents could just keep their positions. Otherwise, I think I'll select some one to select the people for me.
Just looking at the plum book gave me a headache. I couldn't imagine having to pick all 8000-some names. If I had to pick all the names, I'd just say that all the incumbents could just keep their positions. Otherwise, I think I'll select some one to select the people for me.
The thing that strikes me about the plum book is that most of the positions are filled. Either through a set-term or a career incumbent. The only thing that confused me was the "do" by some of the positions. Most of the abbreviations were in the legend except for that one.
Out of the roughly 8,000 jobs that the president must fill, only 364 are directly appointed by the president without any form of oversight. Keeping this in mind, it is hard to blame the president for choosing bad people for the job because the Senate confirmed the nomination. And a point that was brought up in class, "I don't even know 8,000 people that I could appoint to all those positions!" Personally, I would choose people I don't know because most of the people I interact with on a daily basis would not be suitable for the jobs in the bureaucracy.
Jared Bromberg
I don't think that the plum book is efficient. It gives the President too much responsibility in too short of time. The amount of people he has to find is astronomical, which deters his performance. There are many jobs that seem relativley irrelavant to the system, like secretarys of secretarys. It seems like a lot of stress for the President to have before officially starting.
The Plum book is officially called the "United Stated Government Policy and Supporting Positions." It is published every 4 years by the senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as well as the House committee on Oversight and Government reform. Listed in the Plum book are time limitations on appointed jobs, however some of the jobs are unlimited, and what type of salary everyone gets.
The plum book not only lists names and jobs that the president appoints, but it also includes the salary each recieves by giving them a code. Each code given out includes its own different levels of pay depending on what title of that job you have and how experienced you are. Basically having a small job at the begining does not look very nice because the salary is small, but if you can advance up the scale, you can recieve a much larger amount making it seem more worth it to have a job appointed by the president.
It seems like it would be really difficult to appoint the best people to all the positions in the plum book, but because of the party system, I feel that the party leadership would have just as much say in the appointments as the president. I think by the time he is handed the book, the president already knows who is going to fill each position.
The Plum Book seems a little unneccessary for the President to decide. Im sure that each department has a human resources staff that hires all of the staff but I wonder, how many people are actually hand picked by the president? I also noticed that not all of the appointments require senate approval. They have oversight on the Executive branch but some of the positions are just let through. The salary was also an interesting thing to see. All of those positions are around $145,700 at the lowest of 5 levels. In my personal opinion, I think that this list is slightly extensive and doesn't need to have that many positions that supposedly have that much power, especially just for one branch of government.
Carleigh Pula said...
The plum book is what the president lives and breathes the for the first 2 months before his term goes into effect. It's his personal hand book to make sure that the term he is about to start goes smoothly. The people he appoints to help him (8045) all get paid different amounts according to the job they get. I think it would be difficult coming into office as a new president and then being handed this book and asked to choose 8045 people trust worthy enough to appoint these jobs to, to help make your life easier and make you look good all at the same time. People are very judgmental, I mean as a society we just are. So when one bad thing is done wrong or isn't working, whether we care about it or not we make it a huge deal. Personally I think we as a country need to work on being more patient and understanding when something dumb like the website doesn't work or little things that aren't life for death matters happen or go wrong. The plum book is a group of names and jobs that the president has to appoint right after getting into office, before his term starts. That is a big responsibility, really fast in my opinion.
It looks like the president has areas in the plum book where he can write in the information of who is doing what job and there is a lot of job spots that the persident has to choose. There is also all the departments and who is in each department along with their information.The plum book is like a giant informational book for the persident so he doesn't forget things.
-Maddie McCullough
Ciera Hardyman
I thought the plum book was interesting because of the vast amounts of jobs and people involved in the Government that I had no idea existed, such as the United States Commission on International Reglious Freedom and the China Economic and Security Review Commission. When I think of government I think of the three basic branches, but I didn't know a US Government official could be paid to keep track of China's economy. If I was the president I'd make someone else read it for me or sparknote it.
The Plum Book contains information on how the different positions are picked by the president. There is GS-1 through GS-15 level positions. There is also a table of the salaries of these individuals. As the levels increse in the number, the pay decreases. Considering that the Schedule C position is not protected by performace based reviews, I would pick people who I believe will really work hard in their department.
Just reading the Plum Book made my eyes start to feel heavy. There are so many jobs that I didn't know existed. An example is the list of the United States Postal Service people. The page of jobs and people listed was extremely extensive. If I were the President, picking all these people that hold positions would seem repetitive and I would get bored very easily, possibly choosing people that aren't suitable for the job. Appointing the people in the Plum Book would be an awful responsibility to have. Yet another reason that I'm glad I'm not the President.
It is a good thing that we have so many positions that must be filled. Even though each position can be filled by people the president knows and trusts, it can still lead to every possible outcome to be considered. If a president were to look at each and every single one of these positions by himself, he wouldn't be able to cover even 2 issues in a day without first considering everything in each issue.
Given the amount of information that goes through both the cabinet and the president, it's still a lot of work to do even for all 8045 people. Having each individual voice being heard is even more difficult in my mind. Creating collaborative and effective responses to contemporary issues seems difficult as well.
In my eyes, the president and the cabinet must work in a manner similar to triage, dealing with the most important issues first, the least important issues later, and the ones that cannot be solved in a short amount of time, over a period of time.
While looking through the Plum book, I found many interesting jobs and statistics about the Executive branch. An interesting section I found in the Plum book was the Senior Executive Service. The Senior Executive Service is a personnel system covering top level policy, supervisory,
and managerial positions in most Federal agencies. Under that, the book tells more about the positions, there are 8328 positions. I think that having this many positions is key to run a stable government, because if we did not have them, then we would maybe have problems. Also i believe that is important for the Plum book to enumberate the powers of the positions.
I found the Plum Book to be just a requirement that just needs to get done; it holds the official list of people and their corresponding department. The President may appoint a fair amount of these people, but many are just there for formalities and contact purposes (I highly doubt Obama hand-picked the members for the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Post Office, and the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.) However, if I somehow (God forbid) I became President, I would find it essential that a large portion of jobs directly under the Executive Department and the heads and vices of all the major departments be carefully and personally chosen - I mean, I would have to be working with them for the next four to eight years... might as well be surrounded by experienced, dedicated "co-workers".
-Lindsey Amundson
Whoever puts together this plum book every few years must either have an amazing system or simply too much time on his hands. Everything had a special code as specified by the two page legend in the beginning, and the columns had interesting names to say the least.The "Pay Plan" column really caught my attention for some strange reason. I guess I could not believe that all of these diverse jobs could so easily be funneled into categories for how much to pay people doing them. This no nonsense system seems pretty easy to follow and use. That being said, I would not want to spend 2 months picking 8,000 people to do jobs because numbers and names are insufficient information.
I had no idea there were even close to that many positions that needed to be filled. The task of appointing people to that many positions would be a difficult, time consuming task for someone with nothing else to do, so it seems strange that it is given to the president who has plenty on his plate already. That also makes me wonder how much flexibility the president has with this task. Does it vary from president to president based on how important it is to them to be surrounded by individuals they select themselves? Realistically, though, the president probably has much help with the selection process with options clearly laid out for him to easily choose from.
The Plum Book is incredible. The amount of time that it would take to make the book and to hire all 8,00 people is astronomical... and inefficient. I believe that Obama should choose the major ones, like the cabinet members. Those chosen by Obama should choose the people under them and those should choose the people under them, until no jobs are left open. This is the most efficient way that I could come up with for filling the 8,000+ vacancies.
Here is a link to a site that lists "Cool Jobs" from the plum book.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2008/11/_director_of_waste_processing.html
About half of the people in that not so little handbook live in Washington D.C.. I found that pretty impressive. In the link that Drew posted, I saw that a lot of people in that plum book are making at least one hundred thousand dollars a year. That is a lot of money staying in one place; I can see why the suburbs surrounding the D.C. area is characteristically known as a very VERY rich place. Why do all of those people need to be paid so much for the work they do. After all, 8000 people multiplied by one hundred thousand dollars a piece is 800 million dollars just for this one book of people.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of pay plans per each separate class. There are different levels of pay grade, but it makes sense with so many people in the plum book. It must really suck to be the person typing this up, cause this is one long and fairly unexciting document to type up, lots of people to keep track of.
The Plum Book shows us most if not all of the different tasks the president could ask his cabinet members to be a part of. It would be difficult to find a person that would be suitable for each position, and even more difficult just to find the amount needed to fill all the different positions. I find it interesting that any modern day president is still able to remain sane while finding people for thesetasks and also run the country, with all of the problems that come with that too.
Brooke Johnson-
The director, the U.S. Office Personal Management places positions in Schedule C along with the President and legislation. Exceptions for Schedule C are allowed when the position involves approving substantive policy recommendations or when the position can be preformed by someone who has the knowledge, skills, or sympathy with a goal in that criteria. Positions are traditionally paid a minimum but people with superior qualifications can be paid above the rate. Pay rates increase by grade and to increase grades the expected amount of work has to be completed in said position.
The most interesting thing I found was on page 220 in Appendix 5. It says the Vice President is neither part of the Executive or Legislative branch but is only tied to the Executive branch through the Constitution. The Vice President does services for the Executive and Legislative Branch but as we saw earlier in the year, the Vice President's schedule is not very full.
Jamie Knox
When I looked through, what jumped out at me was some of the really weird groups. There are a lot of groups just for specific memorials, a railroad retirement committee, and quite a few scholarships with different titles, such as Barry Goldman and Harry S. Truman. These seem to me to be a little pointless and strange to have as individual committees, I mean, a statue is a statue, the same guy can tend the Lincoln and Eisenhower memorials. But the one that I think takes the cake is the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. It's made up of a grand total of one person. New dream job.
At first glance, the Plum Book seems pretty boring and extremely complex. But once I started reading it, I found it to actually be really interesting. I had no idea that there could possibly be over 8,000 civil service leadership and support positions. Although all the departments are important in their own way, if I were president, I probably wouldn't care too much about who's elected for leading smaller departments such as the Smithsonian Institution. I'd focus more on the larger and more important departments. In general though, both creating and constructing the Plum Book would be a very tedious and challenging process.
It's interesting to see the amount of micromanagement that goes on in our government-enough so that it warrants 8000+ staffing positions. What even more interesting is that all the information, policies, etc from garnered from those in the plum book somehow make it to the presidents desk.
Since my group did the Department of Transportation for the Cabinet project, I decided to check out how many jobs a new president would have to assign in that department. The answer? Six pages worth of jobs. From the Secretary to the Chairman of the Surface Transportation board. I also noticed that for many of the jobs, the Name of Incumbent column was filled only with a "......do......." Naturally, I attempted to discover what it meant, but to no avail. The key at the beginning was no help, offering only notes about the meaning of certain phrases or how parties were denoted. The only thing I was able to deduce was that the "do"s often occurred following a slot that said "Career Incumbent" suggesting the "do" means "Career Incumbent" as well. Which is silly. How hard is it to copy and paste those two words or explain the "do"?
I really don't understand how the president can possibly have time to really thoroughly think through all the appointments that he must make. I feel like since he doesn't have a lot of time, he will make hasty decisions just to get the job done, or in order to make it easier he will keep the incumbents even if they are terrible at what they do. Also, I noticed some of the jobs didn't require senate approval, which also seems unfair, because the president can just stack the positions with his home dogs that he knows will always do everything in his favor. However that goes back to how the president has a lot of appointments to make and having the senate approve all of them would make the process even more time consuming. All in all I think this is a ridiculous request to make of just ONE PERSON. I feel like the plum book alone should make everyone realize that never being president is where it's at.
The president does his share of work to earn the $400,000 he gets paid. Along with all of his campaign promises that he is trying to keep when he enters office, this is put on his plate as well. There are many reasons why being president is so stressful, and this is definitely one of them. I am not sure why it was decided that it should be the president's job to decide on some of these positions, when there are countless other people around him that are perfectly able to do this for him and just seek his approval instead of the president individually assigning people that he may not even know.
Does the president even appoint all these people himself? Or does he appoint a few people and just make them take care of the rest?
I like how Appendix 1 is nicely organized with this chart showing the number of people in each position, and then at the bottom it counts up the number of people in each type of position, and you can just see the sheer number of people in the executive department alone.
Also, I find it interesting how this entire government document is just out there in public for anyone to look through if they want.
The Plum book is just a way for the president to keep track of all of the people he has put into office. He would have a hard time remembering all of those people! One thing I found interesting was that it says "Certain GS
employees may receive higher special rates instead of locality rates established to address significant
recruitment or retention problems." So they bribe people to stay in office?? That's kinda crazy, but smart at the same time. I also thought that the large range of all the salaries was interesting.
With 8000+ positions in the Plum Book, I wonder how many of those the president actually appoints. With such a short amount of time given to the president to assign the positions, I would hope that the president has his staff members assign some of the less essential positions(The Japan-United States Friendship Commission or the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation). Something interesting that I saw was relating to expiration dates for appointments. The Plum Book mentions how many incumbents start with a fixed term but then continue to wok far past the term end until they are finally replaced. With this, chances are the president may choose to leave the incumbents in their position so that he has less positions to fill.
-Lucky V.
I was surprised by how many of the positions did not have tenure limitations, which means that as long as they are pleasing everyone with their performance, they can stay. I was also astonished by how many positions did not have pay listed. It strikes me as though either the makers of the Plum Book did not know the worth of those people before they created it. Something that confused me was that some of the positions which did not have tenure limitations had expiration dates. What would that mean for their time in that office?
Something I found to be very interesting is that there are so many different commissions. To me, many are pointless, and just a waste of money. Do we really need an Appalachian Regional Commission? Do we really need the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation? These are not vital parts of our country, and should be cut. In this time of financial crisis, we need to be cutting down on everything that is not absolutely necessary, and I sincerely doubt that, though meaningful to some people, the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation is vital to how our country is run. The only way to get out of debt is to cut down to the bare essentials. These are not essential things. So why are they not cut? Why are we cutting Education and Fine Arts funding when the Tennessee Valley Authority is still around, and much less needed?
Something I found to be very interesting is that there are so many different commissions. To me, many are pointless, and just a waste of money. Do we really need an Appalachian Regional Commission? Do we really need the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation? These are not vital parts of our country, and should be cut. In this time of financial crisis, we need to be cutting down on everything that is not absolutely necessary, and I sincerely doubt that, though meaningful to some people, the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation is vital to how our country is run. The only way to get out of debt is to cut down to the bare essentials. These are not essential things. So why are they not cut? Why are we cutting Education and Fine Arts funding when the Tennessee Valley Authority is still around, and much less needed?
Examining the Plum Book, I discovered thousands of jobs I didn't know were needed in our government, several of them being President Appointed. While it seems extremely tedious and long to appoint all of those individuals, I think it's just one of those hard responsibilities that comes with being the President.
Sam Sanders
After looking at the plum book, I discovered a lot of important jobs were vacant. Some of these jobs, like the director of the office of management and budget, are still vacant. If these positions were filled, the budget wouldn't be in such a terrible state
Justin Davis
I found the Plum Book very interesting. I did not know that there were that many positions. All these positions are important to help things run smoothly. The president obviously cannot do all these jobs by himself, so that is why he has the Plum Book to look up people if and when he needs them. I think the Plum Book would be very resourceful if I was president.
-Ashton Andersen
One of the coolest things I found about the Plum Book is we have a Marine Mammal Commission. Aside from the fact that the Marine Mammal Commission probably isn't as important as many of the other positions the president needs to appoint, I couldnt really reason or find relevance within why protecting our bottlenose dolphins and stellar sea lions are in the same range of importance as helping solving something like our debt crisis. I believe it's also noteworthy to see that the executive director of the Marine Mammal Commission gets an impressive $179,700. I really feel like I would enjoy slaying Hawaiian Monk Seal slayers (or perhaps just save and research endangered marine mammal species), since the US Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs and the US House of Reps' Committee on Government Reform believe that doing so is quite beneficial to the US, otherwise something as awesome and unique as the Marine Mammal Commission wouldn't be placed in the Plum Book.
John Michael Considering the vast number of offices that the president has to appoint people to, I, like many people wonder how he does it. However, I think it's also important to note that Senate has to confirm many of these appointments, and seeing how long it takes the Senate to decide something, I am surprised that they do anything at all besides confirm appointments.
I knew there were copious amounts of people working for the President, but seeing it all in print makes the numbers more meaningful. I was surprised by how many columns were left blank, especially the term expiration date and the tenure. As the book progresses, it seems that there are less and less expiration dates, until there are hardly any at all. Also, many positions were vacant, and I'm curious as to why that is. This book would be overwhelming for anyone and I can't imagine using it as the President.
Tori Dylla said...
Since the President has to spend so much time filling jobs from the Plum Book, it makes sense that nothing productive seems to happen within the executive branch. If I was the president, I would hire more people to do the hiring for me. Putting together this massive book of jobs would be even more tedious than filling the positions themselves. Why don't they allow the different cabinet departments fill these positions themselves?
It must be an overwhelming job for the president to appoint all these people for his executive departments. I think it would work out nicely to have that many people focusing their efforts on helping out the department. I kind of think its unnecessary though to have that many assistants and deputy's. For example, when I look at the department of energy, all I can see is special assistant, special assistant,senior advisor, senior advisor.....etc. It just seems crazy that there can be that many made-up positions to help out the department. But overall, I bet having this many positions can help speed up the process of the departments and help them accomplish more of their objectives in a timely manner.
-Zach Higgins
8000 names! seems like a ton of work just putting a few people in just a handful of jobs, cant imagine how the government can find the time to do this every 4 years!
I also was perplexed by the sheer number of people that must be individually approved of by the President.The number made me wonder whether it was feasible that one person (the President)is able to know 8000 people well enough to trust them to be appoointed to these positions. And if he does not know them, if the position is so unimportant that it can be filled by someone not trusted, is the position worth filling? I think not.
-Paul Edlund
There are hundreds of more names than I imagined who must make up a single department. For example the Department of Veterans Affairs. No wonder the President is given this book because there are more positions and names that one could memorize in a life time let alone a Presidential term. The number of assistants is crazy!Almost all of the Department of Veterans Affairs first four pages is listed with assistants.
It seems to me that the majority of the Plum Book is an outline and that only the specific names would have to be changed in the four year span. The do's appear to me as abbreviations or place setters, so I think that whatever the meaning of Do is, it would be common knowledge to those familiar with the book. Maybe writing "do..." is just to make it easier on the eyes when scrolling through, to make the more important titles stand out. As a whole, this book seems to be a program of the many important groupings of our government. I think that it would be an honor to have my name listed if I were interested in working for the government.
It is a common occurrence to see a visual difference in a president directly before and after his presidency. Often times a youthful president can come out of his presidency with what seems like decades worth of wrinkles and grey hair. After looking at plum book and the amount of effort that is put into selecting all of the different positions needed to efficiently run the bureaucracy, it seems that the majority of that aging can occur before any actual duties of the president take place.
After viewing the plum book and seeing the amount of positions in it, and therefore the number of people that need to be appointed to fill those jobs, I believe that it seems overly inefficient for the president to have to thoroughly review individuals in an attempt to fill some 8000 positions. It seems that it would be much more efficient to simply appoint other people to handle the plum book and allow the president to deal with more important issues.
Most of the names that are present a federal judges and it would be amazing to figure out how all of these people are appointed. I would believe that all of these people are appointed by the senators from each state and higher judges from the supreme court must be appointed by the president. You would think that they would have people people vote based on district, but this seems alittle more efficient
-Maranda Curtis
I think the plum book is an organized way to know who is keeping the country running. Anyone with a job that has employment with the government is in it, and it's a good way to keep track of who's doing what and where. It's a hard task for the president to do, hiring all these people, but I think the plum book makes it easier for him.
I think the plum book is an organized way to know who is keeping the country running. Anyone with a job that has employment with the government is in it, and it's a good way to keep track of who's doing what and where. It's a hard task for the president to do, hiring all these people, but I think the plum book makes it easier for him.
My apologies if someone already answered this, but I saw someone asked what the "do" is in the Plum Book. It means ditto. You'll notice that abbreviation in multiple places such as in the location column and in the position column (e.g. like where there are boards or panels that have multiple members with the same title).
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