The President's Invisible Cabinet
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson made news recently when he regaled a Dallas audience with a story about canceling a HUD contract because the contractor did not support President Bush. When critics noted that the secretary's conduct appeared to violate federal law, he claimed he had made up the story, which was not really exculpatory, since it still sounded like a warning to his listeners to support Bush or else lose their federal contracts.
The bizarre episode is now under investigation, but regardless of the result, it raises an important question for the Bush administration:
Alphonso who?
Jackson oversees a department with a $34 billion budget, and the lead responsibility for housing the poor in an era of soaring rents, but you probably wouldn't have known that if his mouth hadn't outpaced his brain during that speech in Dallas. That's because he's part of Bush's Cabinet, which consists of Condoleezza Rice, Donald H. Rumsfeld and a group of faceless bureaucrats with the Q ratings of the extras in a Rob Schneider movie. The average member of the witness protection program is arguably more recognizable than Bush's agriculture secretary, who is . . .
"If you give me 15 minutes, I'm sure I'll come up with the name," said New York University government professor Paul Light, an expert in the bureaucracy of the executive branch. "Let me think. It's escaping me right now."
Time's up: It's Mike Johanns.
"That's right!" Light said. "From Nebraska. The former governor. It's funny: You get a position in this Cabinet and you're never heard from again."
Bush's first-term Cabinet had a bit of star power: Colin L. Powell at the State Department, plus familiar politicians such as Christine Todd Whitman heading the Environmental Protection Agency, John D. Ashcroft at Justice, Tommy G. Thompson at Health and Human Services and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. They're all gone now, partly because they've learned that being a Bush Cabinet secretary is not a very powerful job. Today, the head of EPA is . . . any guesses as to who's in charge of the agency responsible for protecting America's air and water?
"I haven't the faintest idea," said Stephen Hess, an executive-branch scholar at the Brookings Institution. "Wait . . . Stephen Johnson."
Impressive!
"Well, I've got a cheat sheet in front of me," Hess confessed. "This is really a Cabinet full of nobodies."
Light and Hess agree that as Cabinets have grown in size, from President George Washington's five-man Cabinet to Bush's 21 Cabinet-level aides today, they have shrunk in stature, a descending line from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to John P. Walters and Jim Nicholson. (What, you didn't know Bush's drug czar and his secretary of veterans affairs?)
With Cabinets now so unwieldy that they barely fit into the Cabinet Room, it's easy to see why presidents no longer bother to hold substantive Cabinet meetings to discuss policy. Bush held 27 Cabinet meetings during his first term, compared with 61 Cabinet meetings held by President Ronald Reagan in his first term. Besides, it's hard to imagine that Bush wants to hear what his labor secretary thinks of the war in Iraq -- no offense to the Honorable Elaine L. Chao, who has managed to spend five years in the Cabinet without making news.
Modern presidents have all run their governments out of the White House. In the past few decades, first-tier Cabinet posts -- State, Defense, Justice and Treasury -- have retained some independent influence, but Cabinet secretaries on the outer rings have often found themselves on the receiving end of marching orders from twentysomething White House aides. Robert B. Reich, President Bill Clinton's Oxford buddy-turned-labor secretary, was so far out of the governing loop that he titled his memoir "Locked in the Cabinet." The White House staff -- once so tiny that President James K. Polk answered his administration's mail when his Cabinet went home for the summer -- became a sprawling army of special assistants, deputy assistants, advisers and analysts who carry out the president's agenda. Policy decisions that Cabinet secretaries used to make are now hashed out in White House offices.
In the Bush administration, those trends of centralized White House power and marginalized Cabinet figureheads have only intensified. The big decisions are made by the president, the vice president, the chief of staff and Karl Rove with whatever title he has at the time. Bush put White House staffers in charge of State, Justice, Education and Homeland Security, although Ridge eventually left DHS in frustration after realizing that his already limited influence had diminished even further after he became a Cabinet secretary. By departing the White House, he had departed the loop. There are no independent power bases in this administration.
Future historians will marvel at Bush's tiny White House inner circle, and the extraordinary message discipline it has enforced. Even first-tier Cabinet secretaries don't seem to matter in this administration; Treasury Secretary John W. Snow remains there at least in part because the White House can't persuade anyone else of stature to do the job. It's no coincidence that independent-minded freelancers such as Powell, who expressed concern about Iraq, and Whitman, who expressed concern about global warming, and former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who expressed concern about the federal deficit, are no longer in the administration.
The result is a Cabinet dominated by deferential yes-men such as Jackson, whose claim to fame before his Dallas miscue was his role as Bush's spokesman in the black community. I interviewed him once, and the topic was supposed to be HUD's response to Hurricane Katrina, but he wouldn't talk about anything but how compassionate and determined the president had been throughout the crisis.
The media played a role in the disappearance of the Cabinet, too. We don't really cover HUD or the Agriculture Department anymore, which is defensible, but we don't write much about housing or agriculture, either, which is a shame. We write about secretaries when they're nominated and when they quit, and not much in between. I profiled Jackson's predecessor, Mel Martinez, after Bush picked him in January 2001; that was the last HUD story I wrote.
Then again, HUD hasn't been in the news much over the past six years because it hasn't done much. Bush has proposed some budget cuts, but Congress hasn't passed them, so HUD still provides rental assistance for about 5 million families, which is about what it did in 2001. There has been a slight shift toward vouchers instead of projects, and a lot of rhetoric about home ownership and faith-based programs, but no significant new effort to help people who weren't already being helped, or any push to deny benefits to people who were already being helped. "Nothing really notable has happened," said Barbara Sard, director of housing policy for the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. "They sort of forgot about housing."
This is the elephant-in-the-room factor behind the Incredible Shrinking Cabinet phenomenon: The federal bureaucracy in the Bush administration has become something of a policy-free zone. The positive spin on this is that the president is a hedgehog, not a fox; he cares only about a few big things -- the war in Iraq, tax cuts and homeland security -- that get the bulk of the administration's attention. (This positive spin may require some additional positive spin about the war in Iraq, tax cuts and homeland security.) The negative spin is that the administration's decision-makers ignore large swaths of the federal government.
Take HUD. In 2001, Bush and his aides did not ask Martinez a single housing-related question before putting him in charge of the department, even though he had no housing-related job experience. Bush wanted a team player -- in this case, a Cuban American team player with a poignant personal story -- who would echo the administration's talking points. Jackson -- a Bush neighbor and prolific Bush fundraiser -- was tapped to be Martinez's deputy. Working together until Rove persuaded Martinez to run for the Senate, they carried the president's message around the country, and kept their agency out of the headlines. They haven't provided the dynamic leadership that Jack Kemp brought to HUD during President George H.W. Bush's administration, but they haven't created the scandals that enveloped Samuel Pierce's HUD during the Reagan administration, either.
This is why the Jackson investigation must be so irritating to the president. He doesn't mind at all that Americans couldn't pick most of his Cabinet members out of a police lineup. But he surely doesn't want them to have the chance to do so.
Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.
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