Jerry Brown may have no chief of staff

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It would seem an essential position to fill in a Jerry Brown administration. During his first two terms in the office, the sometimes-flaky Brown relied on his then-chief of staff, detail man Gray Davis, to keep operations from floating astray.

The 72-year-old Brown still slips off-message constantly and seems to have little use for schedules and plans. But he’s flirting with the idea of not having a chief deputy to keep his administration focused.

Brown said Wednesday that he wanted to ‘review the very nature’ of the chief of staff role in the governor’s office.

‘Let’s get off this chief of staff stuff,’ he told reporters. ‘Chief of staff kind of conjures up Eisenhower’s Cabinet. I want to rethink the structure. I want to flatten the administration. I’m going to look through ways of organizing state government to make it leaner, to make it more responsive and to make it more coherent.’

-- Evan Halper and Michael J. Mishak