As of now, there are an estimated 7,000 politically appointed positions in the federal government. Again, it’s an estimate, because there is no centralized list of political jobs, so no one knows the actual number. Nor is there a list of how many of those jobs are vacant on any given day. John Hudak argues that missing data created an embarrassing management and oversight problem for Congress and OMB. He has some ideas for how to close that information gap. Hudak is a fellow for Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He explained on In Depth with Jared Serbu how the government machine can still run with a large number of vacancies.

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