The governor has a number of important tools for controlling the bureaucracy including limited appointment power, rhetorical power inherent in the highest office in state government (the "bully pulpit"), the ability to promote legislation for public programs, and the line item veto.
Appointment power is limited for the chief executive of Texas state government, as many of the most powerful executive branch positions are elected independently of the governor. These independently elected positions include many more than those handful of offices specified in the Texas Constitution (lieutenant-governor, comptroller of public accounts, treasurer, commissioner of the general land office, and attorney general). They also include the Commissioner of Agriculture, the three Railroad Commissioners, and fifteen members of the State Board of Education. All three of these commissions and boards were create by legislative statute. The members of still other boards and commissions are appointed by the legislature and by boards themselves. This chapter's table A Taxonomy of Leadership in Texas Agencies describes the mode of leadership selection for different types of bureaucratic bodies.
Nevertheless, over time, the office of the governor has accumulated extensive appointment powers to literally hundreds of executive branch positions. Some are plum positions, while others more humdrum. Despite the variation in prestige and influence, these positions are highly coveted, and many confer substantial power over key areas of commercial regulation and state governance.
The governor's control over the bureaucracy and regulatory organizations through executive appointments may function in actuality as a means for special interests to capture specialized parts of the bureaucracy for their own benefit, to use the term discussed in the previous section. The governor of Texas has very limited power to remove officials once they are appointed, so once an official friendly to an industry is named to a regulatory board, an appointee may be able to defy the governor's will. Though governors are perpetually criticized for naming friends and associates to these positions, this autonomy provides an incentive to governors to name appointees they trust not to defy them.
The governor has two other powers for controlling the bureaucracy: the ability to call special sessions of the legislature and the line-item veto on spending bills.
At any time after the regular 140-day biennial legislative session, the governor may call a special session of the legislature. Once called, the governor can specify a considerable number of issues to be addressed by the legislature. The exclusive authority to set the agenda for these special sessions gives the governor considerable power. In the three special sessions called by Governor Perry in 2003, a total of forty-nine topics were "proclaimed" by the governor, including a long list of topics that impact or deal with programs and procedures in the bureaucracy. Among these topics were proposals to modify the organization, scope, operation, and qualifications for membership of a number of state boards and commissions. Special sessions were relatively rare during a couple of decades (the 1940s and the 1990s), but have been called relatively regularly throughout Texas history, as this chapter's feature Special Sessions of the Texas Legislature illustrates.
The line-item veto is an especially direct (if negative) means of controlling the bureaucracy. This authority gives the governor the ability to veto individual items from the biennial budget bill approved by the legislature. It is intended as a check on profligate spending by the legislature, but can quite easily be used to ensure the loyalty of the various bureaucratic departments and agencies in the executive branch, even those with elected heads.
Governor Rick Perry provided a particularly vivid demonstration of this power in June of 2003, when Comptroller of Public Accounts, Carole Keeton Strayhorn refused to certify the budget that was passed by the legislature and was to be signed by the governor. Under the constitution the comptroller must certify that each two-year budget is balanced.
Comptroller Strayhorn said the contentiously developed $117 billion biennial budget for 2004-2005 was about $186 million short of being balanced. Some days later Governor Perry used his line-item veto to eliminate approximately $212 million from the budget of the Office of the Comptroller of Public Accounts. Since the budget was now in balance, Strayhorn certified the budget. But their 2003 confrontation signaled an escalation in a conflict that would lead to a direct political clash in the 2006 gubernatorial election.
