Closing of the Presidential Mind
by Franklin Foer
The New Republic
Issue date 07.05.04
In February 27, 2001, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. When the president had last ventured to the Capitol for his inauguration 37 days earlier, he had delivered a homily urging the nation to move past the sting of the Florida recount. This time, he dispensed with the magnanimity and unveiled his agenda, delivering a speech filled with promises to cut taxes, pay down the national debt, study Social Security privatization, and deploy national missile defense.
If commentators had been allowed a peek inside the West Wing in the days before Bush's address, they would have noticed that the speech didn't just set policy priorities; it defined the administration's intellectual style. During the Clinton administration, wonks immersed themselves in the preparation of State of the Union addresses. In the months leading up to the speech, academics--from Michael Sandel to Robert Putnam to Alan Brinkley--suggested themes. During the last fevered weeks, speechwriters sat at their keyboards while government economists cycled through their offices to fact-check language and tweak proposals. Michael Waldman, Clinton's chief speechwriter, described the process in his memoir, Potus Speaks, as repeated "grill[ing of] policy experts" and "[boiling] gallons of advice into a few tablespoons of intense sauce."
In the Bush administration, it didn't quite work that way. As former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told journalist Ron Suskind, the administration was so "distrustful of the agendas of expert staffers in the various departments" that they were simply removed from the speechwriting loop. Treasury economists, for example, had no opportunity to double-check the president's numbers and therefore couldn't purge a disingenuous understatement of the amount of redeemable U.S. debt--a $700 billion understatement that conveniently made the president's large tax cut seem less fiscally onerous. According to O'Neill, the phobia of experts led the White House to "circulat[e] final drafts of the State of the Union to almost no one outside the West Wing."
In nearly every corner of the administration, examples of this derisive attitude toward experts abound. Bush has stripped the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of his title "assistant to the president"--a migration down the organizational flow chart that requires him to report through White House aides rather than to the president himself. The Bushies have evicted the Council of Economic Advisers, an office renowned for its nonpartisan calculations, from the White House complex--a relocation that The Washington Post described as the "political equivalent of being sent to Elba." And those are just the symbolic shots. Seemingly everyday, newspapers run stories about experts whose opinions have been either ignored or stifled. Last year, Medicare chief Thomas Scully reportedly threatened to fire one of his agency's actuaries if he provided Congress with accurate estimates of the cost of the administration's prescription-drug benefit. When the administration planned to loosen the regulation of mercury emissions from power plants last year, it never consulted Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) experts. "E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order," according to the Los Angeles Times. And, in May, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) overruled the recommendation of a scientific advisory panel that had reviewed 40 studies and 15,000 pages of data, refusing to permit over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill.
You can even tell the story of the postwar failures in Iraq by recounting the episodes of experts scorned. Throughout 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon prohibited its officials from participating in interagency planning for reconstruction. According to The Atlantic's James Fallows, when the CIA convened Iraq specialists to imagine worst-case scenarios that might follow Saddam Hussein's defeat, the Defense Department forbid its officials from joining the exercise. Across the river in Foggy Bottom, the State Department's Future of Iraq Project produced a 13-volume report, based on a yearlong collaboration with over 240 Iraqi exiles. But, when General Jay Garner--the first head of postwar Iraq reconstruction--wanted to borrow ideas from these findings, his Pentagon bosses ordered him to ignore State's work. A shame, one Garner aide has lamented, since they had desperately needed it. "We had few experts on Iraq on the staff," he told The New York Times last October. Even the shortage of troops on the ground traces back to the Pentagon's dismissive attitude toward experts. In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward documents how General Tommy Franks kept providing Rumsfeld with war plans produced by top military planners, only to receive knee-jerk exhortations to revise the blueprints so they required fewer bodies.
The most common explanation for this animus is that the White House overflows with political hacks uninterested in the nitty-gritty of policy. But the administration's expert-bashing also has deep roots in ideology. Since its inception, modern American conservatism has harbored a suspicion of experts, who, through adherence to inductive reasoning and academic methodologies, claim to provide objective research and analysis. To be sure, this social-scientific approach has its limits. Conservatives have raised genuinely troubling questions about its predilection for downplaying the role of "culture" and "values" in shaping human behavior. But the Bush administration has adopted a far more extreme version of this critique: It takes the radically postmodern view that "science," "objectivity," and "truth" are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda; that experts are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn't even merit a hearing. And the results have been disastrous.
Ever since the progressive era, the American policy establishment has believed, as my colleague John B. Judis put it in The Paradox of American Democracy, "that the way to a disinterested social policy was through the application of social science to national problems." At the close of the nineteenth century, the government began stocking the bureaucracy with economists, sociologists, statisticians, and other experts.
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