A Department in Disarray

Empty offices and lack of drive at Schlesinger's shop

Even if he were not constantly having to drop everything to plead with some legislator over the fate of the energy bill, James Schlesinger would have his big hands full. The job of shaping up his seven-month-old Department of Energy is turning out to be just about as tough as moving President Carter's energy bill through Congress. Though DOE was set up to bring order, drive and direction to the uncoordinated activities of the 50 federal agencies involved in energy matters, Secretary Schlesinger's superagency has been sinking into a bureaucratic stupor.

This has been caused largely by Schlesinger's unavoidable preoccupation with the energy bill. The more his attention has been diverted by it, the less time he has had to begin moving his department off dead center. As Schlesinger told TIME Washington Correspondent Don Sider: "Sure, no question about it, the dual track we've been pressing ahead on has resulted in some distraction from our underlying objectives. Most of my time has had to be devoted to the legislative goals, and less of it to the internal management matters that I prefer. We have a great deal of room for improvement."

Not least of the problems is where to house the department. Its headquarters staff is scattered among 22 sites across Washington and in suburban Virginia and Maryland. A year ago, even before the department was officially set up by Congress, Carter gave Schlesinger permission to house it in the Forrestal Building, midway between the White House and Capitol Hill. The 5,000 Department of Defense employees who occupied the building protested against being evicted, and not until late April could Schlesinger himself move in. So far he has been able to gather in 200 DOE officials--"We now have a bridgehead," cracks Schlesinger --but it will be at least another year before DOE'S 5,000 headquarters staffers are under one roof.

A worse problem is finding qualified people to fill DOE posts at the high level of Assistant Secretary. Now three such positions remain vacant, and few people seem willing to undergo the months of congressional scrutiny and cross-examination that have become standard for anybody willing to take a job in a policymaking area as contentious as energy. Example: Lynn Coleman, once a partner in John Connally's Houston law firm, which has oil industry clients, waited eight months until the suspicious, supercautious Senate finally approved his nomination as DOE general counsel. Schlesinger has not yet submitted the names of candidates for Assistant Secretaries for Defense Programs and for the Environment. His nominee for Assistant Secretary for Conservation and Solar Applications, Omi Walden, 32, director of the Georgia office of energy resources, has been waiting for Senate confirmation for nearly five months.

Schlesinger has temporarily filled the jobs with stand-ins dragooned from other DOE duties, but this has raised legal snarls. The General Accounting Office ruled that four acting chiefs (general counsel, inspector general and two Assistant Secretaries) had not been confirmed by the Senate and therefore had no legal authority in their jobs. Though the Justice Department disputed the opinion, the issue is causing uncertainty about even the most routine regulatory action by DOE.

The department's aimlessness has undermined morale. Decision-making remains concentrated in the hands of Schlesinger and his small circle of principal aides, so lower-level staffers feel far less able to influence policy than when they belonged to smaller agencies. Some program specialists even phone up friends at the Office of Management and Budget to try to scuttle top officials' ideas for new research or funding projects that they consider wasteful or foolish.

The department is under increasing fire from the energy industry and consumer groups. California independent oil producers complain that. DOE'S bureaucrats have failed to find a means to ease the Alaskan oil glut that is damaging West Coast producers. At the same time, consumer groups contend, the department is far too receptive to industry pleas about regulations and pricing policies. In a particularly embarrassing disclosure several weeks ago, Congress Watch, a Ralph Nader group, produced a photostat of a memo by an oil industry lobbyist claiming that he had persuaded DOE to rewrite several proposed pricing regulations in a way that would be more acceptable to oil producers. That may have been an idle boast, but the leak--through a temporary stenographer--proved that DOE is extremely porous.

A daunting array of policy questions rest on Schlesinger's cluttered desk. What to do to help develop coal slurry pipelines? Coal gasification? Oil shale? None of these issues have really been thought out --nor will they be, until the fate of the energy bill is determined and the Secretary gets down to his longer-term work.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.