330,000 applicants vie for administration jobs
WASHINGTON -- More than 330,000 people have applied for top jobs in the Obama administration so far, in an unprecedented outpouring of interest spurred by excitement surrounding Barack Obama's election, according to independent groups that monitor presidential transitions.
"President-elect Obama said he wanted to make government cool again," says Max Stier, president of the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service. "We are seeing a massive response."
The numbers dwarf those from previous transitions.
At this point in President Bush's 2000-01 transition, there were 44,000 applicants; in former president Bill Clinton's 1992-93 transition, there were nearly 135,000, according to Stier's group, which promotes effective government.
Several factors are driving interest, transition watchers say. Among them:
• The ease with which applicants can apply online at www.change.gov.
• The desire to help the country during an economic crisis.
• The pent-up energy of Democrats waiting on the sidelines through eight years of a Republican White House.
Obama has "energized and engaged a whole new group of Americans," says Jennifer Dorn, president of National Academy of Public Administration, an independent, non-profit research group on governance. "He has made people feel welcome and wanted."
Transition officials say a team of 50 workers is sorting the applications to match applicants to the right jobs based on their experience and qualifications.
"We are staying connected with the very supporters who worked hard to elect Obama and have always said that these same people working in their local communities would be the ones helping to bring the change we need to Washington," transition spokesman Nick Shapiro says.
Rebekka Bonner, 35, who went to Yale Law School and Harvard Business School, earlier this year turned down what she calls a "major promotion" at Goldman Sachs, where she worked as a vice president and assistant general counsel.
Having just paid off her student loans, Bonner said no thanks and headed to Washington, D.C., where she spent seven months working full time, for free, for the Obama campaign.
"I found myself on Wall Street watching the country I love go off track," Bonner says.
Now, she's hoping for a job, she says, so she can help repair the nation's broken economy and foreign policy.
Only about one in 100 applicants will get jobs — and that could be the downside.
The jobs Obama will fill with political appointees, some of whom need Senate confirmation, represent a tiny fraction of the 1.6 million full-time federal government jobs. The transition hasn't yet released an exact number of how many jobs it will fill with political appointees, but transition watchers say it likely will be between 3,000 and 4,000. The Bush administration currently has 3,300 such positions filled.
"The dilemma, the challenge, is how do you handle the heightened expectations? For every 10 applicants to a federal job, you have nine who are alienated" when they get a rejection letter, Dorn says.
Stier says transition officials must figure out how to channel the enthusiasm of those who don't get offers into their communities, either in the form of state or local government jobs or volunteer work. Otherwise, "we may ultimately do ourselves more harm than good," he says.
Marc Grinberg, 25 — a Palo Alto, Calif., native who has been living and working in Washington, D.C., on and off for several years in between graduate school at Oxford University and stints volunteering for the Obama campaign's national security team — is looking for a job at the Defense or State departments or with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Honestly, I have absolutely no idea what my chances are," Grinberg says.
He says he knows that many, many more people worked on the campaign than will end up with jobs in the administration and he's realistic. He expects to find out sometime in late spring or summer. "People at my level are the last to hear," he says.