Youth Today Exchange

1989–1992
Accomplishments

Robert Sweet is an unfailingly nice man who took over the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) with enthusiasm and visions of ambitious initiatives. He went through a difficult confirmation process, faced a politically suspicious staff and fought with higher-ups at the Justice Department about awarding grants.

Many staffers and juvenile justice advocates came to see his tenure as a pleasant surprise. Yet he was pushed out right after telling his wife, “I’m not sure I can continue to do this anymore.”

How He Got the Job

Sweet is an educator. He taught high school, ran a summer camp for teens, worked in sales for a national text book company and served in several roles involving education policy in the federal government, including as deputy director of the National Institute of Education (NIE) and as a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration. He also did political work for the Republican Party, including campaigning for Ronald Reagan.

Sweet’s stint at NIE was controversial. Former Education Secretary Terrance Bell, in his memoirs, described Sweet as a “movement conservative” who maneuvered for power within the agency when he didn’t get his way with his superiors. The Washington Post said Sweet pushed for abolishing the Education Department, an idea that Bell opposed.

Sweet later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he got along well with Bell and had disagreements with some staff at NIE, but did not try to remove people who were not ideologically aligned with him.

When President George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan in 1989, Sweet sought a job in the new administration. From a political standpoint, he says:

“I paid my dues.”

He talked with his “old friend” John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. The two had become friends in New Hampshire, where Sununu served three terms as governor, and where Sweet had been an adviser to another Republican governor, headed a chapter of the Moral Majority and had run unsuccessfully for Congress. Sweet says Sununu now mentioned the vacancy at OJJDP:

“I was told I was the nominee if I wanted it.”

It didn’t matter that the 1988 reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) included this language, which was inserted in response to the appointment during the Reagan administration of Alfred Regnery to run OJJDP:

“The Office shall be headed by an Administrator (hereinafter in this subchapter referred to as the “Administrator”) appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, from among individuals who have had experience in juvenile justice programs.”

At OJJDP, some staffers were disheartened to hear that they were going to be led by someone with political connections but no experience in their mission. The story that went around the office, says veteran Buddy Howell of the research division:

“John Sununu pulled the list of vacancies out of his desk and said, ‘Here, pick one.’ ”

Sweet didn’t expect the push-back he’d run into in the office or on Capitol Hill:

“I was naïve about a lot of things. I didn’t know the climate I was getting into.”

Confirmation

Bush administration officials initially told Sweet the Senate confirmation process would be routine. But he soon saw:

“I was stepping into shark waters.”

By the time of the confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1990, Sweet had been derided by much of the juvenile justice community and by liberal organizations as a former text-book salesman with no qualifications to run OJJDP. Opposition even came from groups outside the justice field, including the PTA and the American Psychological Association. As conservatives counterpunched, the nomination turned into a small political battle.

The Democrats now controlled the Senate, and Sweet’s nomination provided a platform for them to vent about the past decade. Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who had been deeply involved with the JJDPA, made it clear that lawmakers on his side of the aisle were not happy with how OJJDP had been run, especially by Republican administrations. Said Biden at the start of the hearing:

“The program has been hampered by weak presidential support and, more acutely, presidential opposition. … The office has suffered through several, I believe, ineffective administrators.”

Before the hearings, two high-ranking OJJDP staffers, Terry Donahue (the acting administrator) and Pam Swain, had compiled briefing materials to help Sweet get up to speed about juvenile justice issues. No matter how much one studies for such a test, however, he is unlikely to be a match for in-depth questions asked by the veteran lawmakers of the Judiciary Committee:

“I didn’t feel very comfortable answering a lot of their questions. Biden asked me what would I do to change the drug problem in this country. I said, ‘Blah, blah, that’s a good question.’ ”

Rather than focus on specific juvenile justice approaches, Sweet stressed broad priorities, including strengthening families, stressing morality and improving literacy. Biden responded that talking about family values was nice but was something to do “on your volunteer time,” because the OJJDP administrator had to fund and promote specific solutions.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) questioned Sweet in a manner that harkened back to how Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) had quizzed Regnery at his confirmation hearing. Kerry asked Sweet if he had ever published an article about juvenile justice, done any research in juvenile justice, etc., to which Sweet answered no. The nominee dealt with the experience question this way in response to concerns expressed by Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.):

“I do feel that my willingness to listen to what other people have to say – some have said I am a fairly quick study on issues that I do not know a whole lot about. … I really want to learn and to make a difference, and I believe I can.”

Among his readings, he cited Injustice for Juveniles, by former OJJDP Administrator Ira Schwartz.

There were concerns on Capitol Hill that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration before it, wanted to eliminate OJJDP. Sweet assured the senators:

“I am not there to zero out the program.”

After eight years of the Reagan administration running OJJDP, Senate Democrats and juvenile justice advocates were looking for a youth advocate to run the agency, more of along the lines of the first administrators, Milton Luger, John Rector and Schwartz. Law professor Robert Shepherd Jr., who served on the National Coalition of State Juvenile Justice Advisory Groups, laid out a criteria for OJJDP administrator that many in the field would share:

“We need as an administrator someone who is, number one, knowledgeable about such programs; and, number two, is known in the community as having this sort of expertise, so that the administrator can assume a leadership position on this critical issue of dealing with juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.”

Particularly harsh was Bill Treanor, a national expert on youth policy who had worked in the Senate (and who later started Youth Today). He said of Sweet:

“He couldn’t even be the P.O. [probation officer] in Fresno,” referring to a job taken by the previous administrator, Verne Speirs. “The man doesn’t even know what a status offender is. … This is an insult to an entire honorable profession who are trying to help kids in trouble in this country, that the best President Bush can do is to find a leftover appointee who failed in the Reagan administration and try to recycle him through our little office.”

Knowing the nomination was in trouble, the Bush administration had drafted an ace in the hole: Robbie Callaway, director of government relations for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). Callaway was one of several people, including missing kids’ advocate John Walsh and former Deputy Attorney General Arnie Burns, who the administration invited to meet with Sweet in an effort to win their support.

Callaway, Walsh and Burns all came out in Sweet’s favor. Callaway was so torn that he called his boss at BGCA, who left the decision up to him. Callaway told the committee that he met with Sweet and “grilled him for three solid hours,” then took him to some Boys & Girls Clubs. He was impressed by Sweet’s interactions with kids, and said:

“We find Bob Sweet to be open, accessible and willing to consider opposing viewpoints.”

Sweet credits Callaway’s testimony with helping to secure the nomination. Callaway says Biden cursed him out the next time they saw each other:

“The senator said he was going to hold me personally accountable if Sweet failed to support the program. A year later Biden agreed that we had done the right thing in supporting Sweet.”

Staff Relationships

Sweet did not walk into a happy office. Much of the staff  felt the agency had been neglected by the Reagan administration and was in for more of the same under President Bush. An unofficial newsletter produced by Justice Department employees said this, after Sweet’s tenure:

“Bob Sweet arrived at OJJDP when staff was exceedingly unhappy. People were depressed, in some cases resulting in actual physical illness. Morale was at a very low ebb.”

By the time he was confirmed, Sweet had been running the office for several months and knew that much of the staff, which has always leaned liberal, was skeptical about him, if not outright opposed. He recalls his first day:

“I came out of my office. They were standing behind these gray dividers. You could see their eyes” peeking over the cubicles. “I said look, I know you have expectations about what I’m going to do and not going to do. Many of you have knowledge about juvenile justice that I do not have.

“I will do my best to defend your programs to the degree they are consistent with this administration and attorney general.”

Sweet was immediately tested. Donahue and Swain, who had helped him prepare for the confirmation hearings, had drawn up a plan for how to run the office. As first explained to Sweet:

“Pam and Terry would run the office,” leaving big-picture matters to the administrator. “That seemed reasonable.”

However, he soon saw that their plan essentially left him with little authority or involvement. Maybe they were protecting the agency from a political passer-by; some saw it as a power play intended to take advantage of a leader who didn’t have much support. Sweet came to believe:

“If I put Terry and Pam in charge, I would have lost the battle. … I would not be in charge of my own agency.

“I was not going to be rolled by a couple of bureaucrats that wanted power. I got them transferred out of my office.”

His relationship with the staff improved markedly over time, based on an apparent mutual respect for each other’s points of view, Sweet’s long days at the office –  “I was there early and left late” – and the fact that his policy and funding decisions, while clearly conservative, were not as extreme as some had feared.

Says longtime staffer Emily Martin:

“We liked Bob Sweet.”

His Mission

While the Reagan administration had tried to eliminate OJJDP by providing it with no funds in its annual budget proposals, the Bush administration proposed barely keeping it alive. Its first budget proposal included $15 million for OJJDP, down from the $72 million appropriated by Congress for fiscal 1990.

As with the Reagan administration, in the Justice Department under Bush, Sweet says:

“Prevention was not in their priorities at all. It was law enforcement.”

However, Sweet had made it clear in his confirmation hearings that he was sympathetic to youths in trouble; he said status offenders should not be locked up and talked about the need for services for youths who are arrested.

Considering his background in education, it’s not surprising that Sweet wanted to promote literacy in juvenile justice programs, noting that illiteracy was a major problem among juvenile delinquents. He also wanted to bring “a moral component” to programs funded by OJJDP. For example, Sweet recalls giving $75,000 to a program to teach values such as honesty to incarcerated youths, even though the proposal had not been rated high by OJJDP staff.

Relationship with the Field

Like all OJJDP administrators, Sweet had occasional conflicts with some of the agency’s constituents and partners, like the State Advisory Groups – “I usually didn’t agree with them” – members of Congress looking for grants for home-state programs – “House members came to see me to put their oars in the water” – and programs that had grown accustomed to OJJDP funding, like Cities in Schools – “They felt it was an entitlement.”

But overall, the juvenile justice field’s relationship with Sweet evolved in the same way as the staff’s: He wasn’t who providers and advocates would have preferred, but considering their initial fears, they were pleasantly surprised by his moderation and found most of his decisions to be within reason.

A Built-In Conflict at Justice

Sweet’s tenure, however, was dominated by conflicts with his higher-ups at the Justice Department – conflicts that stem from the way OJJDP is housed in the department, and that are reminiscent of battles that Administrator John Rector had years earlier and that Administrator J. Robert Flores would have years later.

The clash played out between Sweet and Assistant Attorney General Jimmy Gurulé. Says Sweet:

“He had his own agenda. He and I just didn’t hit it off.”

Says Gurulé, now a professor at Notre Dame Law School:

“Bob had a different agenda. The agenda didn’t coincide not only with the initiatives I was pushing, but also [with those] that the deputy attorney general and Attorney General Bill Barr were pushing.”

Sweet and Gurulé agree on this: The root of their conflict lies in the Justice Department structure. Several department agencies – including OJJDP, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office for Victims of Crime – are under the Office of Justice Programs, which is headed by an assistant attorney general who is presidentially nominated and Senate-approved. So are the heads of those offices. Says Gurulé:

“The problem becomes, who’s in charge? On paper, there is a chain of command. But there was some conflict, because the view [among some heads of the offices] was, ‘I’m a presidential appointee as well and therefore I can do what I want to do.’ ”

As a result, “When I came into that office, the coordination between the various agencies and the assistant attorney general was virtually nonexistent. It was a real problem.”

Gurulé set out to coordinate the offices under the same priorities in grant making. But one administrator’s version of getting everyone on the same page can come off to another administrator as forcing everyone to do what you want. The heads of the offices had their own visions of what they were brought on to accomplish at the behest of the White House, and several pushed back at Gurulé, saying they had the authority to control their grants.

For example, Gurulé says Justice set anti-gang programs as a priority, but among the administrators under him:

“Some didn’t feel that gang violence was a priority and didn’t feel they should have to limit their discretion on grant funding” to that.

Sweet recalls getting these kind of directions:

“I got a call from some guy in Chicago. Jimmy had said, ‘This guy’s a good guy. You need to give him a grant.’ He wanted 18 to 20 thousand [dollars]. I said, ‘Send a grant proposal.’ He sent me something almost unintelligible. I said no.”

Aside from being told what to fund, Sweet saw some of his own choices rejected:

“I was in this constant battle.”

Sweet put his argument in writing and sent it up the organizational ladder:

“I wrote a brief for the office of legal counsel on the decision-making authority of the [OJJDP] administrator over the assistant attorney general. I saw the way the law was written. I knew Jimmy did not have the authority” to direct OJJDP grant awards.

At issue was internal political reality as much as legal authority. John Wilson, a longtime Justice Department attorney who was involved with OJJDP since its first days and eventually became acting administrator, recalls:

“Bob wanted to do certain things and had the authority, but Gurulé said, ‘No. I don’t want you funding defender services. We’re a prosecutorial outfit.’

“Sweet tried to kind of go over Gurulé’s head. You can’t do that. The department backed Gurulé.”

Exit

Sununu, the old friend who had offered Sweet the OJJDP job, resigned as chief of staff in 1991 – leaving Sweet with no significant White House backing for his battles at Justice:

“That took away all my clout. I couldn’t invoke the name of John Sununu anymore.”

At one point in 1992, he told his wife:

“I’m not sure I can continue to do this anymore. It’s too much.”

Gurulé recalls:

“There was a lot of meeting beforehand [with Sweet]. Can’t we get along and work this out? Eventually, we got to the point where it wasn’t possible.”

One day Gurulé made appointments to see Sweet and Wilson separately. Wilson recalls:

“I got called up to met with Gurulé at 10 o’clock in the morning. I called Bob, who had been trying to bring me on as OJJDP’s in-house counsel, but Gurulé wouldn’t permit it. I called Bob and said, ‘Gurulé called me to come up.’ He said, ‘That’s interesting, because I got a call to go up and meet with Gurulé at 10:30.’ ”

When Wilson arrived:

“He [Gurulé] said, ‘This morning I am going to advise Bob Sweet that he is relieved of his responsibility in OJJDP. Jerry Regier will be the acting administrator. I am going to designate you as counsel to the administrator.’

“He knew that people in the field would be upset, because Sweet was very well-liked. He felt that by putting me down there,” those people would see that “he wasn’t trying to destroy the office.

“I was not to say anything to anybody. I got the hell out of there.”

Sweet was transferred to the U.S. Marshal’s Service:

“I was given the bum’s rush.” He was in an office that “overlooked some diner. They assigned me some paper to write. It was very painful.”

Sweet suggests that the law be changed to make more clear who has authority for awarding OJJDP’s grants:

“It’s a no-win situation for anybody. You give the legal responsibility to one person [the administrator] and you give another person political power.”

The administrators “come with the expectation that they are going to be able to run this agency.”

Again, Gurulé agrees with Sweet:

“Congress didn’t do us an favors in terms of how they set this up. That should be revisited by Congress.”

In several key respects, Sweet’s reflections on his time are similar to those of former Administrator Rector: Both describe themselves as “naïve” about some political realities of the job, both confided in their wives that they might not want to continue in the job much longer and both lament that their tenures did not turn out as they had hoped. Says Sweet:

“My frustration was, and remains, that the true needs of juvenile offenders get lost on the politics of it all.

“Congress earmarks the office to death; the Justice Department is not interested in ‘prevention’ because of its very nature; and the organizational structure makes it impossible for anyone to do an adequate job … no matter how dedicated or knowledgeable about juvenile justice programs they are.”

A decade after leaving the job, Sweet was the senior staffer on the House Education and Workforce Committee, where he was instrumental in pushing through reauthorization of the JJDPA.

Tags | Sweet Era