ABSTRACT
Governments require two levels of expertise in order to provide acceptable services: the professional level, which is concerned primarily with carrying out policy, and the political level, where the primary responsibility rests for formulating the goals and priorities of government. Professionals are oriented toward their bureaucratic organizations and functions, while political leaders want to meet objectives of parties and pressure groups. Under Secretary of Housing and Urban Development John Rhinelander addressed the matter of the interface bluntly: "very clearly, 99 percent of the people in the Federal government are in the career service. In his introductory remarks on the political-career interface, Donald Nuechterlein of the Federal Executive Institute questioned whether training of new political appointees is desirable. A political appointee in the Jimmy Carter adminstration told a group of career executives from the Federal Executive Institute that his major contribution to government was to "conceptualize" policy options because the "bureaucracy does not do a good job at the conceptual level."
