When he moved from Utah to Washington to become administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency two years ago, Mike Leavitt brought along a core group of advisers from his days as governor.
Now that he has settled in at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, he is once again luring the team to follow him.
With 67,444 employees and an annual budget approaching $600 billion, HHS is a big leap for Secretary Leavitt and his inner circle. At the EPA, they oversaw 18,000 workers and a budget of less than $8 billion. The budget for the state of Utah this year is about $4 billion.
Leavitt, 54, has created a command structure and policy blueprint to help him direct the sprawling department, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly, poor and disabled.
He is surrounding himself with a group of "senior counselors," a new title at the department that gives his most trusted aides the visibility and latitude to tackle high-priority matters. The counselors meet several times a week, sometimes with Leavitt, and serve as gatekeepers to the secretary.
For a road map, they are relying on Leavitt's 500-day plan ( http://www.hhs.gov/500DayPlan/500dayplan.html ), an ambitious set of goals and some steps for tackling them. The plan includes obvious areas such as modernizing Medicare and Medicaid and protecting the homeland, along with newer ones such as "Protect Life, Family and Human Dignity" and "Improve the Human Condition Around the World."
"The first principle of Leavitt management is offensive or proactive rather than defensive," said Chief of Staff Rich McKeown. "He positioned himself as governor, as administrator of EPA and secretary of HHS by doing things he can uniquely do and that are the most important things."
In particular, Leavitt is devoting much of his time to promoting the use of information technology in the health arena, preparing for a possible flu epidemic and fulfilling President Bush's mandate to make the Medicaid insurance program for the poor more efficient, McKeown said.
Here is a brief look at the key members of Leavitt's inner circle at HHS:
· Rich McKeown , 58, chief of staff, was a Democrat until 2000 and once ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Salt Lake City.
His move to Washington to become Leavitt's chief of staff at the EPA was "an interesting round trip" for the D.C. native. McKeown spent his childhood in Arlington and taught in Fairfax County for four years.
