NSA Call-Tracking Program Sparks Alarm
Bush Insists That Citizens’ Privacy is ‘Fiercely Protected’

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 11, 2006; 5:39 PM

President Bush, responding to a newspaper report on a previously undisclosed program to track the phone call patterns of millions of Americans, insisted today that U.S. intelligence activities he has authorized are lawful and aimed strictly at the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

In a hastily arranged appearance before reporters at the White House, Bush reacted to a USA Today report that says the National Security Agency has been secretly using records provided by the three largest American telephone companies to build a massive database of foreign and domestic phone calls. The program was launched shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with the aim of analyzing calling patterns to detect terrorist activity, the paper reported. The effort involves collecting phone numbers but does not entail recording or eavesdropping on phone conversations, it said.

The NSA declined comment, saying only that it “operates within the law.”

In his statement, Bush denied that the government listens to domestic phone calls without court approval and maintained that “the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”

“We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” Bush said. “Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates.”

After his brief remarks at the White House, Bush left the room without taking any questions from reporters.

Earlier, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said the panel will demand answers from America’s leading telephone companies on the reported NSA program.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) vowed to haul the companies before his committee in response to the USA Today report saying that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth turned over data to the NSA on phone calls made by their 200 million customers. The paper said the three were “working under contract with the NSA” on the program. It said another major telecommunications company, Qwest, refused to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of giving the government customer information without warrants.

The report drew alarmed reactions from congressional Democrats, who accused the Bush administration of violating Americans’ civil liberties in its zeal to combat international terrorism. Another secret NSA program — involving eavesdropping without warrants on calls between people in the United States and suspected terrorists abroad — sparked strong controversy when it was revealed late last year. President Bush confirmed the eavesdropping program, insisting that it targeted only international calls and was vital to U.S. efforts to ferret out terrorist plots.

Specter told a Judiciary Committee executive meeting today that in addition to hearings on the eavesdropping program, “the committee will have an additional hearing” on the reported phone call database.

“We will be calling upon AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth as well as others to see some of the underlying facts,” he said. “When we can’t find out from the Department of Justice or other administration officials, we’re going to call on those telephone companies to provide information to try to figure out exactly what is going on.”

Specter said that testimony from telephone company executives was a key element in committee hearings that led to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The act, known as FISA, regulates domestic eavesdropping on the communications of foreign agents.

An NSA spokesman, Don Weber, said in a statement, “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide. However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”

Bush said today he had promised Americans after Sept. 11 “that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack.” He said he authorized the NSA to intercept the international communications of al-Qaeda operatives and that if such people are making calls into or out of the United States, “we want to know what they’re saying.”

“Today, there are new claims about other ways we are tracking down al-Qaeda to prevent attacks on America,” Bush said. He did not explicitly confirm or deny the call-tracking program but said U.S. intelligence efforts “strictly target al-Qaeda and their known affiliates.” Bush said, “Al-Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans.”

He said the intelligence activities he has authorized “are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.”

Bush suggested that disclosure of the database program was harmful to national security.

“As a general matter, every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy,” he said. “Our most important job is to protect the American people from another attack, and we will do so within the laws of our country.”

Senate Democrats reacted sharply to the latest revelation.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, held up a copy of USA Today’s front-page story during the panel’s meeting and said, “Shame on us for being so far behind and being so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does.”

He said that if lawmakers are unwilling to demand answers from the administration, “then this Congress, this Republican leadership, ought to admit they have failed in their responsibility to the American government.”

The Senate minority leader, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said that while the U.S. government “must have every effective and legal tool needed to fight terrorism,” Americans are losing confidence that the Bush “has an effective strategy” for waging that fight or is being candid about its actions.

Reid said the USA Today report illustrates a need for congressional oversight, adding that Hayden’s confirmation hearings on his nomination to be CIA director “present the Senate with an opportunity to explore this and other vital issues regarding the effectiveness of our intelligence community.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she believes “we are on our way to a major constitutional confrontation on Fourth Amendment guarantees on unreasonable search and seizure.” She said the disclosure of the database program constitutes “a growing impediment to the confirmation” of Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be the next director of the CIA. Hayden was nominated by Bush to replacing outgoing CIA chief Porter J. Goss, who announced his resignation last week.

Hayden, who was director of the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005, headed the agency when the call-tracking program reportedly was launched. He left the NSA to serve as deputy director of national intelligence under John D. Negroponte, who was put in overall charge of the U.S. intelligence community last year.

In a brief encounter with reporters as he met with senators on Capitol Hill ahead of his confirmation hearings, Hayden ducked a question about the legal authority under which the NSA call-tracking program was carried out.

“All I would want to say is that everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done, and that the appropriate members of the Congress — House and Senate — are briefed on all NSA activities, and I think I’d just leave it at that,” he said. He then turned and walked away.

In the House, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee circulated a letter demanding a hearing on the program. “We are very concerned about this practice and the privacy questions it raises,” said the letter, which was drafted by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and addressed to the committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.).

The letter also questioned why the Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act, which the committee recently passed unanimously, was pulled from a scheduled floor vote on May 2. The bill, intended to prevent telecommunications companies from sharing consumers’ phone records without their consent, was yanked “because of undisclosed concerns of the House Intelligence Committee,” the letter said.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, “Americans are alarmed — and rightly so — because this administration continues to operate parts of the NSA program in violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment.”

She said 14 members of the House intelligence and judiciary committees introduced legislation today to require that “all aspects of the NSA program comply fully with FISA.”

Harman described the White House as being “in free fall” and charged that Americans have “lost trust” in it for withholding information from Congress and insisting it is “above the law.”

In a commencement speech today at American University, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) called for a “full and vigorous debate” on Hayden’s nomination as CIA director in view of the latest disclosures.

Saying that “the NSA isn’t just listening to international calls but is collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans who aren’t suspected of wrongdoing,” Kerry asked, “How many times will government secrecy shield decision-makers from any kind of accountability?”

He added, “Enough is enough. It is long overdue for this Congress to end the days of roll-over and rubber stamp and finally assert its power of advise and consent” before Hayden becomes CIA chief.

But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, traveling with Bush on a flight to Mississippi, rejected the idea that the database story was impeding the Hayden nomination.

“The feedback has been positive and we’re full steam ahead on his nomination,” she told reporters.

Without confirming or denying the USA Today story, Perino said, “The government has no interest in knowing what innocent Americans are talking about on their domestic phone calls. So if you are calling to make reservations at a restaurant, and if you are calling your daughter at college, or if you are calling to plan your wedding, the government has no interest in knowing about those calls. The government is interested in finding out if al-Qaeda is planning an attack in America — you can bet that we want to make sure that we get ahead of that to prevent that and to save lives.”

She refused to comment when asked if there had been any effort to persuade USA Today not to publish the story.

At today’s Judiciary Committee meeting, a leading Republican member, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, cautioned against overreacting to the report on the database program and offered a general defense of the administration.

“This is not somewhere where the president or the intelligence community is running like a rogue elephant . . . trampling our civil liberties,” he said. “I think we ought to lower our language and our rhetoric a little bit and be conscious of what’s at stake, and what’s at stake is the safety and security of the American people.”

The telephone companies today declined comment on the USA Today story, saying they would not get into national security matters. The companies would say only that they are assisting government agencies in accordance with the law, the Associated Press reported.

“We have been in full compliance with the law and we are committed to our customers’ privacy,” said Bob Varettoni, a spokesman for Verizon.

USA Today, citing sources who refused to be identified, said the NSA program “reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime.” It quoted one source as saying the NSA’s aim was “to create a database of every call ever made” in the United States and that the result was “the largest database ever assembled in the world.”

The paper said the phone companies are not turning over the names, street addresses and other personal information of customers, but that the phone numbers being collected enable the NSA to obtain such information easily by cross-checking with other databases.

The data collection, intended to help the NSA analyze terrorist networks, has been conducted in the past, but never on such a large scale, USA Today quoted a U.S. intelligence official as saying.

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Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The NSA record collection program

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency’s operations. “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide,” he said. “However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government “are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” All government-sponsored intelligence activities “are carefully reviewed and monitored,” Perino said. She also noted that “all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States.”

The government is collecting “external” data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting “internals,” a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it’s been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for “social network analysis,” the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Carriers uniquely positioned

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest’s refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest’s region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named “Shamrock,” led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of “data mining” — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn’t necessary for government data-mining operations. “FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,” said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.

The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

The NSA’s domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer’s calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell’s bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. “No court order, no customer information — period. That’s how it was for decades,” he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of “violation.” In practice, that means a single “violation” could cover one customer or 1 million.

In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Companies approached

The NSA’s domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their “call-detail records,” a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”

Verizon, the USA’s No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.”

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: “We can’t talk about this. It’s a classified situation.”

In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales’ reply: “I wouldn’t rule it out.” His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.

Similarities in programs

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA’s procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation’s citizens.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, “I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. … I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest’s financial health. But Qwest’s legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio’s successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Contributing: John Diamond

The Hackocracy
Why our MBA president can’t manage the government.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006, at 3:34 PM ET

Recent personnel changes under Joshua Bolten, the new White House chief of staff, have already begun to follow a pattern. An anonymous official speaking for the president indicates that the time has come for a senior head to roll—be it that of Scott McClellan (ushered out last month as White House press secretary), John Snow (still clinging to his job at the Treasury Department), or—in the drama that has been played out over the last several days—Porter Goss at the CIA. The unnamed senior administration official avers that we need someone competent and qualified in this important position, as if this novel idea had just occurred to the president and his advisers.

Perhaps Bush is to be commended, even at this late stage, for attempting to place more capable people in positions of authority in his administration. But for a presidency that has already entered its graveyard spiral, this human-resources initiative comes too late. Bolten’s belated focus on better leadership merely points up what a travesty Bush’s vaunted management style has been. Entirely aside from debates over his policy and spending choices, the first president with an MBA has proved inept as the federal government’s CEO.

In Bush’s sixth year, the executive branch resembles a smoldering landscape after battle. The staffs of various agencies and departments have been routed by a combination of political interference, neglect, and failed leadership. The CIA is a prime example of how Bush has botched it. Despite its failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency was populated with a corps of able spies and analysts, some of whom actually got the story about the absence of both Saddam’s WMD and links to al-Qaida correct before the Iraq invasion. After silencing and ignoring these professionals, Bush sent a loyalist from Congress to purge the survivors. Porter Goss brought his own flunkies from Capitol Hill to help him squelch leaks and improve the agency’s PR. In just a year and a half, the former congressman nearly completed the work of demoralizing the agency and driving out a generation of senior talent. Now the Bushies want to repair the damage without owning up to their role in causing it.

This is by no means an isolated failure. New agencies that Bush has launched, from the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to the Department of Homeland Security, have failed to find their footing, to put it charitably, primarily because Bush has not structured them properly, found competent leadership, or otherwise followed through on his plans. (In a 2005 survey, employees ranked the newly formed DHS second-to-last among the large federal agencies as a place to work.) While there is little in the way of longitudinal data that can prove a decline under Bush, anecdotal evidence in the Washington Post every day points to declining morale and an exodus of top people from various departments. At some agencies, performance has deteriorated to an extent that it will take decades to restore their capability.

Bush is often charged with undermining federal workers by politicizing what are supposed to be objective and analytic functions. He has done this, among other places, at the CIA, the FDA, and NASA, where a 24-year-old college dropout was until recently in a position to order senior officials to make references to the Big Bang compatible with the possibility of “intelligent design.” Politics per se, however, is not the enemy of effective public-sector management. Those presidents who have run the federal government most effectively—I would cite FDR, JFK, and Clinton—have balanced their policy wonks with capable hacks while cultivating youthful idealism and more positive feelings about public service. Politics, more than money, is what creates accountability and motivates performance in the executive branch. But for the government to work, the hacks have to be fundamentally competent. Former FEMA Director James Lee Witt was a Clinton buddy from Arkansas, just as Michael Brown was a Bush crony. But unlike Heckuvajob Brownie, Witt knew how to run the agency in a way that would make his boss look good to voters.

Bush’s stated management model—appointing good people, delegating authority to them, and holding them accountable for results—reflects some common-sense notions he picked up at Harvard Business School. His actual management practice, however, has not followed that model. In practice, Bush tends to appoint mediocre people he trusts to be loyal, delegates hardly any decision-making power to anyone beyond a few top aides, and seldom holds anyone accountable. These failures are related. If you don’t give people real authority, you can’t reasonably hold them responsible for what follows. What has grown up around the president as a result is not an effective political machine, but a stultifying imperial court, a hackocracy dominated by sycophants, cronies, and yes men.

Under Bush’s actual management system, decision-making is concentrated in the White House political office, with Cabinet secretaries and the heads of agencies functioning as figureheads and mouthpieces. That this disempowers and often humiliates nominally top officials has not been lost on potential recruits, which is why Bush has so far been unable to persuade a top Wall Street executive to replace John Snow as treasury secretary. On Meet the Press, I recently saw one of the administration’s interchangeable, largely unknown senior officials defending Bush’s inconsistent position on high gas prices. Even Tim Russert, the program’s hard-hitting inquisitor, seemed to take pity on this poor shill, recognizing that his role was to be a piñata for a policy he obviously had no control over. Only after some time did it dawn on me that the guest was in fact Bush’s energy secretary, Samuel Bodman. I had never seen him before.

Both liberals and conservatives sometimes profess surprise that Bush, who spits out the term “bureaucrat” with as much scorn as Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich did, has increased government spending as a share of the U.S. economy faster than any president since Roosevelt. In fact, Bush has chosen what may be the far more effective strategy for fighting big government. Frontal attacks of the past have failed, but Bush’s sabotage seems to be hitting its mark.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

May 11, 2006

A Rolling Stone Leaves Hospital After Surgery