As I understand it, the “Drug Czar” heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Is this government division of the same style/structure or on the same level as, say, the State Department or the Defense Department? Is it a “Department”?
Why or Why not?
Why isn’t there a “Department of National Drug Control”?
How does the position of “Czar” compare to the position of “Secretary” in general?
And, on the news today there was talk of creating a “War Czar” position. What would this person do and how would the position relate to the Secretary of Defense?
Since 1917 (Russia) and 1946 (Bulgaria), there has never been an actual job title of “Czar” anywhere. It’s a short, easily recognizable four letter word for “person with authority” and hence popular with newspapers and from them other media.
Ordinarily, someone named to a job that is christened “Drug Czar,” “Energy Czar,” etc. by the press, is given the authority to give orders, make decisions, etc., relative to the problems they’re assigned to combat, across departmental lines.
In the absence of someone in such a job, only one person has the authority to compel cooperation from a congeries of Army Intelligence, the CIA, the Coast Guard, the Forest Service, the FDA, and the DEA: the President. Like most other aspects of his job, he can delegate authority as he sees fit. When a President assigns someone to deal with a pressing problem and gives him authority that crosses departmental lines, that person ends up designated [Problem] Czar in the popular press.
So a Czar is a presidentially appointed assistant who focuses on a particular issue, acts across departmental lines, and really only answers to the president.
The word “Czar”, it has a catchy ring to it. I bet the media heads just love that title: “Czar”. I bet they just love saying it while their faces wear an expression that says, “See how hip and informed I am? I just threw that word, ‘Czar’, out there like it was nothing. I do that.” :rolleyes:
Actually, neither Russia nor Bulgaria ever had Czars. They did, however, have Tsars. The use of Czar instead of Tsar dates to a 16th Century work on politics in Moscow, written in Latin. The transliteration of the sound “ts” with “cz,” so far as I know, is not based upon any contemporary usages among slavic languages which utilized the Latin alphabet. “Czar” has disappeared from Enlgish usage for at least a century everywhere but in America, where it has taken on a life of its own.
Yep, John A. Love, appointed by Richard Nixon to head the Federal Energy Administration, was the first American “czar.” He’s actually not the one I remember, though–I remember his replacement, William Simon. Now does anyone know if Nixon himself coined the title “Energy Czar”?
While each “czar” is going to vary based on the legislation or executive orders that created the position, for the most part these positions have very little statutory authority as compared to a cabinet secretary. A secretary can set departmental budgets and priorities, issue orders to subordinates, etc, and has an immense bureacracy at his disposal. The Drug Czar (technically the Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy), by contrast, is only authorized to, “evaluate, coordinate, and oversee . . . anti-drug efforts of executive branch agencies” and has only a fraction of the staff of a department. The authority of the “czar”, and the ability to receive compliance with his wishes, derives (as Polycarp notes) from the fact that he acts as the President’s representative vis-a-vis the relevant policy area. A czar can’t give a cabinet secretary an order, but the secretary has an incentive to cooperate because the czar (presumably) has the President’s ear.
If you search the board for “energy czar” you’ll find several earlier threads discussing the origin of the usage. Short answer: Garry Trudeau coined the term energy czar to describe William Simon, in a series of Doonesbury strips starting in February 1974.