Plum Positions book for Bush administration

Thursday, April 03, 2008
Plum Positions
Pottersville

Have you ever wondered where George W. Bush finds the unqualified lackeys that he does and what percentage of them make up these federal positions? The answer to the second one may surprise you.

A list of these federal positions can be found in the Plum Book, which is published every four years after a presidential election. Bloomberg.com discovered in 2005, for instance, that political appointees of Bush rose by 15%, according to the 2004 Plum Book, while falling by 5% under Bill Clinton's second term. In fact, this is a telling paragraph:

Under Bush, political appointees have penetrated deeper into agencies, creating more levels of bureaucracy. The biggest growth has been in jobs that don't require Senate confirmation, which rose by almost one-quarter between 2000 and 2004.

Water and evil both seek the path of least resistance.

Far from being a mere listing of government appointments up for grabs, the Plum Book is also an information management tool that controls the administration's policy messages. It began in the Eisenhower administration after the Republican party insisted on a list of the bureaucratic appointments the president could make. Under Bush, the Plum Book has almost been turned into Mao's Little Red Book.

This is how Simona Perry, writing exclusively for Truthout.org, sums up Bush-era cronyism:

However, these are not only the cabinet-level and senior executive service positions. They are also "Schedule C" positions requiring no Congressional approval, and subject to no conduct-based or performance-removal procedures. "Schedule C" positions are involved in making or approving substantive policies according to the agency's mission, but such employees work only for other political appointees who have a "confidential or policy determining relationship with the president or agency head." Because of this role as an intermediary between the White House and agency personnel on substantive policy decisions, these "Schedule C" political appointees may also exercise direct authority, or pressure, over how career federal employees undertake their professional responsibilities.

The bottom line is that, under Bush, there are fewer career positions that formerly were not dependent on the caprices or cronyism of an incoming administration. This means less legal council, scientists and policy advisors to help inform the agency heads put over them by George W. Bush, who obviously has been using the government as a staffing agency for the corporate sector so they can toe the administration's line, which is to say the line of the corporate ruling elite that owns them.

The results have been less than positive. We've seen the suppression of information taken to ridiculous levels within NASA, the Surgeon General's Office and the EPA, often over the objections of the career professional staff who aren't hidebound by whatever political ideology happens to be in vogue.

In fact, the EPA under its administrator Stephen L. Johnson, has been trying to block 17 states from getting waivers of the Clean Air Act despite strenuous protests from its scientific and legal staff. In essence, this would prevent California and 16 other states to regulate its own greenhouse emissions and to improve fuel economy. So much for the Republican mantra of state's right, smaller, less intrusive government.

Johnson, who apparently doesn't have a problem using human subjects, including children, for pesticide testing, lied in recent Congressional testimony when he claimed the decision to block the Clean Air waivers, "was mine and mine alone. And it was the right decision." Documents obtained by Congressional investigators proved otherwise.

Far from filling the government with qualified, non-partisan professionals who actually have administrative experience in running important government agencies such as the EPA as in the Clinton years, the Bush administration has subverted the entire idea of government appointments. The ultimate goal is not so much to wage war on scientists or even to management and shape the flow of information to the point of suppressing it and punishing those who resist:

The ultimate goal is to benefit corporations, plain and simple. And we all know how much corporations care about the environment and the common good.