Can He Fix It?

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Unlike Bill Clinton, Bush has never been one to sweat the details; he prides himself on setting clear goals and letting his lieutenants achieve them. The Administration is loaded with veteran Washington operatives like Card, who launched the drive to create the new Homeland Security agency in mid-April. At the time, Ridge's prestige was at a low ebb: his proposal to consolidate the country's border-control agencies was eviscerated by bureaucratic interest groups, and Ridge was embroiled in a spat with West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd over Ridge's refusal to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Card realized that he had to give Ridge's office broad new powers to mollify congressional critics. "This was a sideshow [we] didn't want to have continue," says a White House adviser. Ridge told Card that any reform needed to be wholesale. At that point, Card took the idea to Bush. The President's instructions were simple: "Come to me with what you think is right," he said.

Bush received only one formal briefing on the working group's progress before May 22, when Card presented him with the final options. "He's not paid to work out the technical details of policy proposals," says a senior White House adviser. Another senior official who worked on the plan says Bush peppered his aides with questions about how the new agency would function in practice. "Have you thought about how putting these different cultures together is going to work?" the President asked.

But by that point, Bush was only fine-tuning a machine whose design had already been determined. By handing the task of devising a vast new Cabinet agency to a few trusted aides, Bush ceded much of his own power to shape the policy. He could have picked the lesser of the options that Card provided him, but his reliance on his aides made it almost certain that he would approve their recommendation. "There were options throughout this paper, and frankly I guided him toward options," says Card. Consolidation of the intelligence agencies, for example, was on the working group's table early but was dismissed as too ambitious--without ever getting to Bush. A senior White House official says, "You aren't going to win that one."

As Bush's style makes him more dependent on his subordinates, it also makes him less willing to get rid of them when they underperform. It's telling that while Bush is proposing a major reshuffling in an attempt to make up for intelligence failures, he has yet to remove any of the officials responsible for them.

2 FIGHT THE BUREAUCRACY

During his campaign for President, Bush cast himself as an outsider tilting against the capital's political establishment. Since becoming President, he has continued to make rhetorical hay against his own employees--and to work around them whenever possible. Last week he shrugged off a report from the Environmental Protection Agency and five other departments and agencies that warns of the dangers of global warming. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Bush said, before declaring that it did not reflect White House policy.