The process and perils of coming around: The assimilation of political appointees into bureaucratic agencies

Abstract The tendency for political appointees to assimilate into the bureaucratic agencies that they lead is a recurring source of tension between appointees and the executives who appoint them. This paper employs a formal model to explore how appointees come around to the views of the civil servants whom they oversee. We conceptualize a bureaucrat as providing a cheap‐talk message about privately known, policy‐relevant conditions to an appointee who uses that information to update her beliefs and set two types of policy. Though the bureaucrat's and appointee's preferences are aligned conditional on beliefs, the appointee's prior beliefs about the likelihood of various states of the world differ from the bureaucrat's. In equilibrium, truthful reporting and inducing belief convergence may be at odds and we identify when the bureaucrat will strategically choose to issue false reports. We apply the model's insights to the budget process and agency recommendations during the COVID‐19 pandemic.