Adrian Northrup

President Bush has an interesting philosophy of running federal programs – he hires people with goals in direct contradiction to run them.

He hired a U.N. ambassador who said in 1994, “There is no United Nations.” He appointed energy-industry sympathizers to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Most recently, he appointed the former medical director of a crisis-pregnancy center that condemned contraception to – you guessed it – oversee the federal family-planning program.

And now, it’s all crashing down.
Let’s start with John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who resigned Monday. Bush appointed him during a congressional recess in March 2005, after Democrats in the Senate filibustered his confirmation, and he has been serving unconfirmed ever since. According to The New York Times, he resigned knowing he wouldn’t win Senate confirmation.

The Times reported that while he earned praise for his efforts to deal with Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs and to strengthen the Security Council, critics called him a hard-line conservative who stood up for U.S. interests over collaboration. A column in The Guardian, a London newspaper, described him as “a polarising figure who intimidated others to support his hawkish views.”
He opposed multilateral programs like the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the International Criminal Court.

But now, faced with imminent rejection, he’s gone.

Then, there’s the EPA, which faced off against a group of 12 states in oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Nov. 29. In a change of stance since the Clinton years, the EPA denied requests to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks. The organization says the Clean Air Act didn’t define carbon dioxide as an “air pollutant” and said the science was still up in the air (so it speak) on the gas’ role in global warming.

Global warming, mind you, is a cumulative problem that is worsening rapidly. The Union of Concerned Scientists predicts that, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, the number of 100-degree days in the Northeastern United States will increase tenfold by the year 2100. Cataclysmic predictions aside, this kind of climate change will have ramifications on water supply and agriculture and will eventually affect all the industries lobbying so hard to fight pesky pollution regulations now.

It remains to be seen for sure whether the Supreme Court will side with the EPA, but for the 12 states facing off against it, support for Bush cronies in the EPA is gone.

After the election, Bush was, understandably, not happy with the way things turned out. So, as the keystone to the pro-abstinence policy, he appointed Eric Kerouac, formerly the head of a family-planning group that says the only acceptable way to prevent pregnancy is abstinence until marriage, as the deputy assistant secretary of population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services – the head official in the nation’s program to provide poor women with family-planning services.

The teen birth rate has gone down since 2000. But, according to Gutenmacher Institute, which collects information from abortion providers, the 11 percent of women who don’t use contraception account for 52 percent of unplanned pregnancies – and about half of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion.

And possibly as a reaction to recent reports that 40 percent of babies are now born out of wedlock, the DHHS will fund abstinence messages targeting all unmarried people under 30. Now there’s a way to solve the problem.

The bottom line is that filling federal departments with political cronies is only grounds for miserable failure. Some areas of policy, like public health and the environment, are too important to politicize.

An intelligent leader knows that the best people to help him run things are not always the people who agree with him. A more cooperative-minded U.N. representative could have helped find common ground with countries upset with the United States’ decision to go to war in Iraq, and maybe even found some help. A de-politicized EPA would think about long-term consequences to the environment, not just short-term savings. And the person entrusted to run the nation’s family-planning program should realize that in the real world, the best way to decrease the numbers of unplanned pregnancies and abortions is to increase access to contraception – or at least to give women accurate information so they can decide what’s best for themselves.

But all these failures are coming to light. Top-secret memos seem to leak out on a daily basis, and the Bush administration’s failed cult of loyalty continues to unravel. Let all future presidents learn from this past six years – picking a team of yes-men is no way to run a country.