ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

had experience working in government and ties to organized labor; and
Clark was a former oil industry executive and a business school dean. By
comparison, the staff recruited to serve on the first Council was comprised
of “[e]conomists who integrated government experience and academic
training” … almost all of whom “could be called government careerists”
(Naveh 1981).
The shift toward hiring more academic economists commenced under
the Burns Council, and intensified during the Heller Council. In part, Burns
started hiring academic economists due to a scarcity of available labor:
“Burns had a hard time finding qualified economists who at the same time,
were not too closely identified with the previous administrations, would
agree to work for President Eisenhower, [and] would stay in Washington
at the time [of] Senator McCarthy’s investigations.” Meanwhile, academic
institutions were a “convenient supplier of temporary personnel” (Naveh
1981). Burns also saw hiring academics as a means of depoliticizing CEA
and establishing its credibility, which was especially important since CEA
had come to be viewed as excessively political during Keyserling’s tenure.
Institutional Advantages and Challenges
CEA’s economic perspective and academic character have, as Burns
intended, helped to insulate it against politics to some extent. As discussed
above, the Council has held a number of the same positions under both
Democratic and Republican administrations. In large part, this is because
CEA tends to reflect the policy views of the economics profession, and on
many (but not all) issues, “there is a distinct consensus among economists”
(Schultze 1996). Murray Weidenbaum notes that when Congress in 1995
was debating whether to continue to fund CEA, “every active Republican
ex-chairman came to the defense of the CEA as well as the Democratic
economists who served on the [C]ouncil” (1996). When the administration
changes, the leadership of CEA changes too, but there is a tradition
of its staff continuing to serve through the first summer of the subsequent
administration.
Some former CEA chairs have claimed that the institutional structure
of CEA can help to reinforce its economic perspective. For example, Joseph
Stiglitz argues that the fact that CEA is composed of “citizen-bureaucrats”
who know they will be returning to their academic perches shortly means
that they “have a long-term incentive to maintain [their] professional
reputations” (1997), and that this creates an incentive for CEA staff to
ensure that its recommendations are economically defensible. This point is
echoed by former CEA Chairman Martin Feldstein (1992) and former CEA
Member Jeffrey Frankel (2003). Of course, CEA’s perspective is not unique,
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