Unemployment for Bush appointees is 10 times national rate

Posted Feb 22nd 2009 10:30AM by Peter Cohan
Filed under: Employees, Economic Data, Financial Crisis

This week, Texans watched a meteorite burn up in the atmosphere leaving a few glowing pebbles in the scrub for astronomers to recover. It turns out that when 3,000 people accepted positions in the Bush administration, they thought they were hitching their career wagons to a star. Now, it looks more like their careers were attached to that flaming out meteorite instead. How so?

With the national unemployment rate at 7.6%, the unemployment rate among those Bush appointees is 75%. Or put another way, only about 25% of those 3,000 folks have found jobs. It turns out that this unemployment rate is much higher than for former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton staffers -- about half of which had jobs within a month of leaving their government posts.

Many of the most prominent former W. staffers work in academia now. For example, Condoleeza Rice returned to her position as a political science professor at Stanford and Hank Paulson works now at Johns Hopkins. One of the more prominent unemployed Bush staffers is Carlos Gutierrez, who formerly ran the Commerce Department. Of all the top Bush officials, I'd blame Paulson more than Gutierrez for the economic collapse.

Still it looks like potential employers want to hire ex-W. staffers about as much as they'd like to swallow radioactive waste.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing.

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