Opinion: The Split Executive Shell Game
By Deepest House
(Europeia - December 27, 2018) - As proposals for reform have floated about the region in recent months, the Lazarus Project has promoted an image of Europeia whereby a split-executive would oversee regional affairs and improve executive performance. Specifically, Europeia would have a president who oversees foreign affairs and a prime minister who oversees domestic affairs.
As a former president and vice president with a solid grasp of executive functions, roles, and responsibilities, it is my opinion that such a proposal would do nothing to increase executive bandwidth, capabilities, or performance. While it is true that presidency is a time-consuming job, in both a unified and split executive, success will depend on teamwork more than anything else.
An important part of governance is identifying challenges and opportunities for improvement and the best strategy to correct those deficiencies. In this case, the purported challenge is the presidency is so large that one person simply can’t handle both domestic and international affairs alone.
Fortunately, the president doesn’t work alone. The citizens of Europeia concurrently elect a vice president when they elect the president. While the exact role of the vice president is left to the discretion of the president, many administrations have successfully used the vice president to divvy up the functional areas of the executive branch in much the same manner as proposed in the Lazarus Project.
Indeed, if the goal of the Lazarus Project’s split executive proposal is to improve executive performance by making the domestic and international portfolios easier to manage by sharing the workload, one must point out that by splitting the executive and making the vice president a collateral duty as opposed to its own position, the Lazarus Proposal reduces the president’s resources and his or her ability to accomplish administration objectives.
The vice president is indispensable to the president, an agile resource to provide additional support and leadership. Simply put, without the vice president as a standalone position the president will have less flexibility to assign additional resources where needed, potentially resulting in a slower and less responsive government. It is also a position of prestige, and one in which the citizens must also put forth their full faith and confidence to serve as president should the need arise. We should not marginalize this position by demoting it to a collateral duty associated with service in the cabinet.
The president works as part of a large team on behalf of the entire population. That team works together to advance Europeian values and administration objectives. Rather than adding capacity to the executive branch’s overall ability to accomplish priorities, The Lazarus Project’s split executive reduces the resources available to the president, it demotes to the sidelines one of the most important positions of our government, and potentially fosters competition rather than collaboration between the domestic and international leadership. I’m not a smart man, but I don’t see how this will improve executive branch performance. It will, however, diminish the role and prestige of not just the vice president, but also the president.
That isn’t the answer to current challenges facing the executive branch. For the executive to fully succeed, it requires all members of the executive team to work together … as a team. Any inefficiencies within the executive branch usually come down to effort and/or bandwidth. Either the effort on the part of an individual isn’t there, or the effort is there but the bandwidth to get the job done isn’t. Neither of these problems is solved by splitting the executive.
With the president and vice president focusing on their respective priorities in full partnership and collaboration with their trusted and empowered ministers, the unified government can achieve greater results for the republic than a split executive, which has additional weaknesses of its own.
The proposal to split the executive, consolidate positions, and rename it all amounts to a shell game – a sleight of hand in which we move pieces around to distract and confuse, and at the end we have to guess and hope we’ve made the right decision going forward. It provides no new resources for the government and creates additional administrative burdens without the promise of proportional benefit. It is change for change’s sake.
