Legacy Of Incompetence

When bush exits the White House in January, he will leave behind a federal government in shambles.

Since his first term, Bush has pressed forward with a radical view of the executive branch. Beyond adopting autocratic positions on foreign policy and taking broad liberties to subvert the Bill of Rights, Bush has waged a quieter — and perhaps more damaging — war at home against the very agencies under his charge.

From formaldehyde-soaked FEMA trailers, tainted pharmaceuticals and politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys, to allegations of retaliation against government whistleblowers and an exodus of career officials from key regulatory positions, the bush administration has lorded over a highly politicized and increasingly ineffective federal bureaucracy.

Policy analysts and legal scholars paint a picture of an executive intent on controlling every aspect of the federal bureaucracy, in particular the agencies tasked with regulating industry and commerce.

Taken as a whole, the president’s rejection of international law and his consolidation of administrative oversight are representative of a decades-long effort by conservatives to implement a so-called “unitary executive theory” — a euphemism for virtually unlimited presidential power.

But for such a creation to succeed, the executive must assert its influence over all aspects of government, from the top down, through the ranks of the roughly 3 million civilian employees that today work in government jobs at more than 100 agencies and sub-agencies.
Even his detractors say this is something bush has been especially adept at.

“Despite their ineptitude in a lot of other areas and how poor they are at governing, one of the things the bush administration has been very good at is using administrative mechanisms to control policy outcomes,” says Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at the nonpartisan watchdog group OMB Watch.

bush didn’t invent this theory, but regulatory experts say his administration has worked harder than any other to perfect it.

“I have worked on regulatory issues inside the Beltway since 1976, and have watched five presidents come and go,” says Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor at University of Maryland Law School. “The bush administration is the most hostile and aggressive toward these agencies by a couple of orders of magnitude, making the Reagan era look relatively benign.”

Steinzor says the next president will face a daunting task in putting the house back in order: “No matter who is elected in November, it will take years to repair this damage.”

The damage is evident in almost every federal agency and characterized most visibly by dwindling morale among career civil servants. None have suffered more than those in the scientific community, which has been forced to confront a growing cadre of inexperienced political appointees bent on pursuing a pro-business agenda.

An April survey conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly two-thirds of responding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists said they experienced political interference with their work.

“Politics is injected and elevated into decisions where science and rational judgment should prevail,” Melberth says. “Politics supersedes scientific and technical information that is critical to protecting our environment and health and safety at home and in the workplace.”

What’s more, research by political science professor David E. Lewis of Vanderbilt University shows that politicization results in lower agency competence and that political appointee-run programs earn systematically lower grades in most management areas.

Says Lewis: “Many of the politicization scandals in this administration came from cases where unqualified or inexperienced people got into key jobs … often with the power to hire others or control information flows.”