Advantages cited for the creation of czar type posts are the ability to go outside of formal channels and find creative solutions for ad hoc problems, the ability to involve a lot of government players in big issue decision-making, and the ability to get a huge bureaucracy moving in the right direction. Problems can occur with getting all the parties to work together and with managing competing power centers.[18]

---

The increase in czar positions over time may be because as the size and role of the federal government has grown, so too has the difficulty of coordinating policy across multiple organizational jurisdictions.[19] Indeed, czar positions sometimes become important enough that they become permanent executive offices, such as the Office of National Drug Control Policy or the United States Trade Representative.[19]

Two legal scholars have also questioned whether Congress has contributed to the proliferation of czars.[20] From 1939 to 1984, Congress had authorized the president to consolidate functions and agencies within the Executive branch, pursuant to the Reorganization Act, which minimized the president's administrative burden "of trying to coordinate disparate functions operating under equally disparate authorities." But Congress allowed this authority to expire at the end of President Reagan's first term, leading these scholars to conclude:

Absent reorganization authority, what was a president to do? The president cannot personally coordinate all disparate functions and agencies in the massive federal government. Yet, if a policy fails because of poor coordination, the president is held to account. So it is no coincidence that as the complexity of government machinery has grown, presidents have responded by increasing the number of assistants or "czars" to help with the management and coordination of the executive branch.[1]

Recent presidents have had influential senior advisers charged with coordinating policy across the executive branch, said Stephen Hess, a veteran staffer of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and now senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution.

---

When Hess began his career in government during the Eisenhower administration, "government did a lot less," and coordinating policy across departments wasn't as difficult as it is today, he said. "Where there were conflicts, Sherman Adams, chief of staff, simply brought in the secretary of Commerce and the secretary of Labor and locked them in a room and told them not to come out until they had reached whatever compromise. That was about it."

But when Hess joined the Nixon administration to serve as deputy to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon's urban affairs czar in today's parlance (a moniker Moynihan would have disdained, Hess said), the federal government had grown into a lot of cross-cutting issues that demanded better coordination.

Moynihan was successful because he was able to vet and get buy-in for policy proposals before Nixon announced them. "For administration-wide proposals it was a very good way to operate -- better than things just being handed down," Hess said.

---

Franklin Reeder, a consultant and management expert whose 35 years of public service included more than two decades at the Office of Management and Budget, said presidents of both parties have long created senior advisory positions to solve seemingly intractable problems for which no single agency or individual held responsibility.

---

Creating high-level coordinators allows a president to concentrate attention on a problem without expending a lot of resources or creating a large bureaucratic memorial to what might be a transitional issue, Reeder said.