The saddest legacy of the Bush Administration's six-year trail of cronyism and corruption is that it contributes to the public's already cynical view

Politicizing Government Service Rahm Emanuel April 26, 2007

President Bush came to the White House with an entirely different understanding.
Not since the days of Watergate, when our judicial system and intelligence community were deployed by the White House in the service of partisan politics, have we seen such abuses. And in many ways, what we have seen from this administration is far more extensive than that scandal.

Partisan politics has infiltrated every level of our federal government—from scientific reports on global warming to emergency management services to the prosecutorial power of the federal government itself. Even the Iraq War—from our entry to the reconstruction—has been thoroughly politicized and manipulated.
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And this is no accident. It's all by design. The incidents I will list today are not a laundry list of one offs or isolated cases of corruption. There is a common denominator. Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
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Under this Administration, the federal government has become a stepchild of the Republican Party. And in promoting its partisan interests, absolutely nothing is out of bounds—from our national security to our justice system and everything in between—places that in past Administrations were off limits to political influence.
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Politics And Cronyism In Iraq
Let's begin with the biggest issue facing our nation: the war in Iraq. We now know that when the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to find evidence to justify the President's rationale for war, the Administration browbeat the CIA to tailor its intelligence. Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld even set up their own intelligence arm to provide the desired evidence.

And when former-ambassador Joseph Wilson cast doubt on the Administration's contention that Saddam was trying to obtain uranium in Niger for a nuclear weapon, Cheney's chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, embarked on a smear campaign by leaking the identity of Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA officer.
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The person chosen to oversee Iraq's health care system was the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan. The man he replaced was a physician with a master's degree in public health and post-graduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and UC-Berkeley and taught at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health where he specialized in disaster response.

A 24 year-old with a background in commercial real estate was hired by the Authority to reopen and manage the Iraqi stock exchange.

The daughter of a prominent neoconservative was tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion annual budget.

Nothing was free from political influence.
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Sold Out To Business

Everyone knows about Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force meetings with top executives from Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell Oil and BP America. But science and sound policy have also taken a back seat to political considerations when it comes to the government's findings on global warming. The New York Times reported that when Philip Cooney served as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, he removed or adjusted descriptions of scientific research to downplay links between emissions and global warming. Before joining the Bush Administration, Cooney worked for the American Petroleum Institute. After resigning his government post, he went to work for Exxon-Mobil. Bush Administration officials even vacation with energy lobbyists. The Justice Department's former top environmental prosecutor, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, recently bought a beach house with an energy lobbyist and J. Steven Griles, a former Bush Administration official who pled guilty in the Abramoff case.
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An even more egregious misuse of public funds took place around the Administration's budget-busting Medicare prescription drug program. The non-partisan General Accounting Office concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services illegally spent federal money to produce videos made to look like news reports and distributed them to TV stations across the nation.

After the bill was passed it was revealed that the Administration purposely withheld information from Congress on the true cost of the prescription drug program. Richard S. Foster, Medicare's chief actuary for two Administrations said Bush Administration officials threatened to fire him if he disclosed that the drug plan would cost hundreds of billions more than what President Bush was telling Congress. In short, he would be fired if he did his job.

Perhaps the most thoroughly politicized bureau in the federal government is the General Services Administration, the mammoth agency charged with procuring supplies and managing federal properties. Its former chief of staff, David Safavian, was convicted of covering up his efforts to assist Jack Abramoff in acquiring two properties controlled by the GSA.

Safavian was also convicted of concealing facts about a lavish weeklong golf trip he took with Abramoff to Scotland and London—a trip that included Congressmen Bob Ney.
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The Katrina Disaster
The most vivid example of this Administration's corruption—and the one that revealed its true cost to the American people—was the fumbling of the Katrina disaster. Under President Clinton, FEMA was run by James Lee Witt, a political appointee and a man with years of experience in disaster management. But the Bush Administration chose to staff that sensitive agency with unqualified political appointees.
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Polititization At Justice
Sharon Y. Eubanks, the 22-year veteran career Justice Department lawyer who led Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies, told the Washington Post that three political appointees in Attorney General Gonzales's office undermined the government's case in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, which cost the federal government billions of dollars.
Now we've learned that political considerations were behind the dismissal of eight U.S.

Attorneys across the country, including some who were actively investigating Republican Members of Congress. Recently released emails between staff at the Justice Department and staff at the White House show that loyalty to President Bush and pressure from political figures led to the firings.
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The saddest legacy of the Bush Administration's six-year trail of cronyism and corruption is that it contributes to the public's already cynical view of government. This makes it even more difficult for those of us who believe that the purpose of government is to secure a better future for our country and all of its people. Repairing this sorry legacy is the first challenge our next President will face.