Any professional researcher would already know this, but I didn't: Every four years, after each presidential election, Congress publishes a document called "United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions," commonly called the "Plum Book" due to the color of its cover. In this document are listed every presidentially appointed office, including both those requiring Senate confirmation and those that don't, as well as the incumbents in those offices at the time of publication. Here are the links to the 2004 and 2008 Plum Books.
I had recently completed my scan of Bush's State Department appointees to my satisfaction, having thoroughly examined the archival websites (at least those available from the main website - I hadn't thought of Wayback Machine until now), and going through the Senate nomination and confirmation records at LOC Thomas. Still, I knew there were substantial gaps based on the number of agencies, bureaus, and offices noted to exist in the department whose management I'd never run across in its archives or in the Senate records.
But I set that aside for later and, having decided to approach the agencies from now on alphabetically, I went to the Agriculture Department website to see what kind of information was available. Unfortunately for my purposes, the answer is "none": There is a treasure trove of information available on past regulations and research, but I was unable to find archival pages relating to appointees under the late regime. If I weren't doing research on precisely this, I would find it a good sign that the Obama administration had wiped the slate clean, but from where I'm standing the more Bush residue carelessly left on the servers the better.
Anyway, I was forced to rely exclusively on LOC's Senate records, which naturally only pertain to positions requiring legislative approval, and which have occasionally had gaps due to some unexpected quirks of the filing system. One of those quirks is that if a nominee was popular enough with the Senate to get unanimous consent without first being referred to committee, you won't find the record of their nomination under that committee even though they ran the department overseen by it. Colin Powell was one example from the State Department.
From there, I tried to gloss names here and there by doing Google searches of "USDA Bush" and similar combinations of terms, and came up with a few more, but it was a slow, unbounded, and frustrating approach. There was no way to know if and when I found them all. But persistence is the mother of success, and I eventually found my way to the information in the intro to this diary. It is indeed a "Jackpot."
It's not the end of the search by any means - the 2004 and 2008 Plum Books only cover the positions and appointees for those respective years, so I will have to basically Google the job titles to find out all the people who were in them at other times. And given the fact that there are, as the introduction to the document notes, about 7000 such positions listed, this could take a while. In fact, mathematically speaking, we now have a basis for making a reasonable projection of the ultimate size of the complete list.
If we say that the number of positions is 7000, and say that on average three people held each over the eight years in question, then we would be talking well over 20,000. That sounds horrendously large, but so far I've noticed a lot of people who've held multiple job titles both concurrently and serially, so if we average that out and say the average Bush appointee held two positions over those eight years, then it comes down to 10,000 - a more manageable number. I could be totally wrong on these numbers, but my instincts tell me they're reasonable - I don't intuitively expect the list of appointees to be more than 15,000, and it may be substantially smaller.
The end of the initial name-gathering process for the research is at least now in sight, although the exact distance to it will depend on the number of separate individuals involved. I've also come across a research tool that should become handy in subsequent stages: Namely, a Deep Web search engine called Pipl - it searches the database infrastructure of the net, in places that standard search crawlers don't access, and which account for about 500 times the amount of info available to Google and what's left of its competitors. This should be very useful for looking more closely at mid- and low-tier appointees.
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Previous Entries in this series:
Book Project Diary 1: Awed By The Magnitude
Book Project Diary 2: Feeling Like A Schmuck
Book Project Diary 3: Carly Fiorina Pals Around With Halliburton Executives (& Other Musings)