WHITE HOUSE - The Old-Timers

By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, May 22, 1999

	      During a recent hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office 
Building, Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska paid Interior
Secretary Bruce E. Babbitt a telling, if backhanded, compliment. 
Clearly frustrated by Babbitt's practice of skirting the 
jurisdiction of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural 
Resources by slipping far-reaching policy provisions into his 
annual operating budgets, Committee Chairman Murkowski beseeched 
Babbitt to quit circumventing him. 
	     ''So we have a situation, Mr. Secretary, where you are, 
I guess, going to appeal to the appropriators (and) exclude the 
authorization process of the committee,'' Murkowski lectured 
Babbitt. ''I would encourage you to give us an opportunity to sit 
down with your budget folks and see if we can come to grips with 
the reality that this committee has an oversight 
responsibility . . . .'' 
	     Murkowski's tone was somewhere between requesting and 
threatening, but in the very act of reminding Babbitt of how 
things are supposed to work in Washington, the committee chairman 
provided testimony to Babbitt's quiet effectiveness. 
	     The dynamic between Murkowski and Babbitt--between 
lawmaker and regulator, he who would oversee and he who would 
avoid oversight--is not a rarity in Washington these days. 
President Clinton's Cabinet members have now surpassed Ronald 
Reagan's for the longest average time in office of any modern 
President's. The average tenure for a Reagan Cabinet official was 
3.27 years--nearly twice the average in Richard Nixon's Cabinet, 
and almost a year longer than the average in the Cabinets of 
Jimmy Carter and George Bush. Clinton's Cabinet average is now up 
to 3.36 years--and growing, according to Gettysburg College 
political science professor Shirley Anne Warshaw, the scholar who 
unearthed this fact. The Clintonites' duration would be even be 
more impressive if not for the death of Commerce Secretary Ron 
Brown and the unplanned departures of Housing and Urban 
Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros and Agriculture Secretary 
Mike Espy--both forced out by independent prosecutors' invest- 
igations. 
	     ''President Clinton brought in people, I believe, who 
were deeply committed to seeing their initiatives completed,'' 
Warshaw says. ''On average, they're staying longer than anyone 
else (in former Cabinets).'' 
	     Indeed, Babbitt is just one of many Cabinet members, 
Cabinet-rank officials, undersecretaries, and other top political 
appointees who have stayed longer than most of their 
predecessors. Theories abound as to why this is so. One possible 
reason: Democrats, by their orientation toward government 
solutions to national problems, seem more comfortable in federal 
offices than Republicans. Another: Some of the Clintonites were 
so young when they were appointed that this is the best job 
they've ever had. For whatever reason, the top appointees in the 
executive branch under Clinton are part of an unplanned 
experiment in governance. Call it the Rule of the Tenured 
Administration. 
	     Casual observers might be under the contrary impression-- 
that Clinton's Administration has been beset by heavy turnover in 
jobs that are usually stable. After all, this President is now on 
his fifth White House counsel, his fifth spokesperson, and his 
fourth chief of staff. He's had three Secretaries of Defense and, 
with last week's resignation announcement by Robert E. Rubin, he 
will soon have had three Treasury Secretaries as well. 
	     But in some of these moves, there is less than meets the 
eye. Two White House chiefs of staff, Erskine B. Bowles and John 
D. Podesta, were former deputy White House chiefs of staff who 
left the Administration briefly and returned. Another, Leon E. 
Panetta, moved over from his post as budget director; the man who 
held the job first, Thomas F. ''Mack'' McLarty III, stayed on at 
the White House in another capacity for nearly four years. ''No 
one ever leaves!'' former Press Secretary Michael McCurry once 
quipped in mock horror when asked about the lingering 
Clintonites. ''And when new people come in, it turns out they are 
recycled.'' White House domestic policy aide Bruce N. Reed, who 
has been advising Clinton since the 1992 campaign, put it this 
way: ''I'm a Clinton lifer.'' 
	     There are a lot of Clinton lifers, even more in the 
agencies, as it turns out, than in the White House. In some ways, 
this seems unlikely. Clinton rarely even holds Cabinet meetings 
anymore--he's had two in the past year and half--and the 
rationale behind the appointments of the department heads was, at 
least at the start, more about politics than policy. 
	     ''The vetters called it the 'EGG test'--Ethnicity, 
Gender, Geography,'' Warshaw recalls. ''But in order to meet this 
test, Clinton put together a Cabinet of people he didn't know 
well.'' Warshaw believes that Clinton, in his second term, has 
grown more comfortable with those Cabinet members who've stayed 
on. Or perhaps they've just become more comfortable in their jobs 
on their own. But on the key question of whether tenure 
translates into heightened effectiveness, few observers have any 
doubt. ''Sure, it helps them be more effective--it's got to,'' 
says Bert A. Rockman, a presidential scholar at the University of 
Pittsburgh. ''And it feeds on itself: The ones who are more 
effective tend to stick around.'' 
	     Terry M. Moe, a senior fellow at Stanford University's 
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, adds: ''There 
isn't a lot of controversy among the people who study this. The 
longer (the Cabinet officers) stay in office, the more time they 
have to develop an expertise, gain an understanding of the 
politics, and learn how to deal with civil service subordinates. 
One of the problems of political appointees is that they tend to 
be dilettantes. They make mistakes because they're new on the 
job, they get taken advantage of--by people above them and below 
them--and by the time they figure things out, they're gone.'' 
	     Even University of Texas political scientist Bruce 
Buchanan, noted for his skepticism about the efficacy of 
presidential second terms, agrees there is a value to experience. 
	     ''Historically, in second terms, political viability 
tends to erode, the President's appointees have tired blood, and 
they've all spent their last wad getting (the President) re- 
elected,'' Buchanan says. ''But the learning curve improves, no 
doubt about it. There's institutional memory and a level of 
expertise--at least on the part of those who've stayed.'' 
	     And stay they have. In agency after agency--Education, 
Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency-- 
the current Cabinet Secretaries or top administrators are serving 
longer than any of their predecessors did. ''I've been here 
longer than William Ruckelshaus--and he had two separate stints 
in the job,'' quipped EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner. 
	     Longevity is ''hugely helpful,'' she adds. ''You've just 
got to be here a while to do some of these things.'' 
Keeping the White House at Bay 
	     Browner, with the backing of Vice President Al Gore--her 
patron saint--had a list of things she wanted to do the day she 
arrived in Washington in 1993. The Clean Water Act, passed two 
decades early, had lapsed in 1992, and it needed a 
reauthorization that reflected new science and addressed new 
industrial problems. EPA's Superfund program was bogged down in 
litigation and paperwork, cleaning too few sites, and giving too 
much of its cleanup money to lawyers. Global warming, Gore's pet 
subject, had become an international issue in which the United 
States was going to be forced to take a position--whether it 
wanted to or not. 
	     In the ensuing years, Browner has learned a few basic 
lessons. For one, she learned that the EPA can no longer count on 
Congress--whether it is controlled by Democrats or Republicans-- 
to strengthen or modernize environmental law. And although she 
studiously avoids characterizing it this way, she learned that, 
despite Gore's support, she could not always rely on the 
President to back her on the politically more dangerous 
environmental issues. 
	     Browner's education in this regard started right away. In 
1993, as part of its first budget plan, the White House proposed 
an energy tax, designed not just to raise revenues, but to cut 
consumption. This was very much in keeping with Gore's emphasis 
on lowering the emissions of pollutants that cause smog, acid 
rain--and global warming. In his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, 
Gore characterized the pollution caused by automobiles as ''a 
mortal threat to the security of every nation, that is more 
deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely 
to confront.'' But when oil-state Senators complained about the 
White House-proposed energy tax in 1992, Clinton abruptly pulled 
the plug on the idea--even though it had already passed the 
House--and settled for a modest increase in the federal gasoline 
tax. 
	     That was the last time Browner would lose on her clean 
air crusade, at least inside the Administration. 
	     In November 1996, she proposed a new set of clean air 
regulations so strict that criticism came not just from all the 
usual sources--Detroit, the oil industry, and the conservative 
press--but also from inside the Administration. The White House 
economic team fought her, and not just behind closed doors. In 
early 1997, Gene B. Sperling, director of Clinton's National 
Economic Council, and Kathleen A. McGinty, head of the White 
House Council on Environmental Quality, publicly urged Browner to 
increase by 20 percent the limit on particulate matter allowed 
into the air. When Browner balked, McGinty--who, like Browner, 
was a former Gore aide--said publicly, ''Who does she think she 
is, Joan of Arc?'' Even two members of Gore's staff leaked word 
that the Veep was ''furious'' that his former aide hadn't 
consulted him more closely. 
	     If Browner was intimidated by this kind of talk, she did 
a good job of hiding it. In interviews, she replied calmly that 
it was Gore himself who had taught her ''to stand up for what I 
believe in.'' 
	     Meanwhile, Browner's allies came to her defense. In Iowa 
and New Hampshire--two states chosen not quite at random--the 
Sierra Club ran ads prodding the President and Vice President to 
''stand up to the special interests (and) protect our children 
from pollution.'' It was language appropriated from the 1996 
Clinton-Gore re-election effort, and it made its point. Clinton 
put in a private phone call to Sierra Club Executive Director 
Carl Pope, assuring him that he would support Browner, and asking 
Pope to lay off Gore. Clinton did ultimately back Browner. 
	     ''I think she put (Clinton) in a box from which he could 
not escape,'' said Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., an opponent of 
the tough standards. 
	     A year later, however, Browner again pushed the 
Administration's envelope. The subject was the international 
global-warming conference in Kyoto, Japan. This time, Gore made a 
public point of backing up his former protegee, flying to Kyoto 
to personally help her negotiate. 
	     These days, when an agency head has used the media or 
public opinion to position the President in a place where he 
might not be entirely comfortable, White House officials might 
describe that administrator as ''pulling a Browner.'' This is not 
intended as a compliment. But it carries with it a grudging 
respect. 
	     Another Cabinet officer recognized inside the 
Administration for pushing the system until it bends to her 
demands is HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala. In 1996, while going 
around the country speaking about welfare reform, Shalala was 
surprised to hear senior citizens routinely express outrage at 
the level of fraud in Medicare. 
	     Shalala started looking for a way to finance a huge 
enforcement effort against health providers who were gouging the 
government. She settled on a plan of borrowing money from the 
Medicare trust fund and paying it back from fines, on a revolving 
basis. This effort, Operation Restore Trust, has been a success 
story, retrieving upwards of eight dollars for every one spent on 
enforcement costs. Moreover, in putting the fear of God into the 
nursing home industry and other providers, HHS has positively 
affected the long-term solvency of Medicare, according to the 
Medicare trustees. 
	     ''That would not have happened,'' Shalala says bluntly, 
''if we had come in and out of here in 18 months.'' 
	     It almost didn't happen at all. ''We convinced Congress, 
after a bitter fight at (the Office of Management and Budget), to 
let us use the trust fund in a revolving account,'' Shalala 
recalls. ''The Republicans were always more enthusiastic about 
the way we wanted to finance this than the OMB. The OMB has 
rules!'' 
	     But those rules, as well as the whims of skittish 
political aides working for the President, can sometimes be 
overcome by a little dose of tenure. 
	     ''What a Cabinet officer does has changed 
dramatically .. . starting with Nixon, when the White House took 
command and began to micromanage everything,'' says Babbitt. 
''All the energy was sucked out of the Cabinet agencies by 
20-somethings in the White House who thought they knew 
everything.'' 
	     In an interview in his spacious office at the Interior 
Department, Babbitt says that what he learned was that there is 
an ''inverse relationship'' between what's important in the 
agency and what White House political aides are interested in. 
''If you conceptualize your job as being about big issues--and 
not about what's in the newspapers today--you have almost total 
freedom.'' 
	     Babbitt recalls receiving a call in 1996 during a bad 
forest fire season from an agitated Chief of Staff Panetta, who 
in turn had been roused to action by a frantic Long Island member 
of Congress. ''There was a fire up there. Leon wanted to know, 
'What are we going to be doing in the next 24 hours? How many 
tankers can we get up there? How many helicopters?' ''
	     It seemed as good a time as any to tell the White 
House chief of staff that in the previous two years, Babbitt and 
Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman had completely revamped the 
government's entire approach to fire fighting on federal lands. 
''Let it burn'' was now Administration policy--and Babbitt had 
money quietly appropriated by Congress to prove it. 
Going Around Congress 
	     All modern Presidents and their aides have an instinct 
to make policy on their own, but the 1994 elections that swept 
Republicans into power in both houses of Congress wonderfully 
concentrated the minds of Clinton officials on new ways of doing 
business. According to former top aide George Stephanopoulos, the 
turning point in this regard may have come in late January 1995. 
	     ''He had just had his head handed to him'' in the midterm 
elections, Stephanopoulos recalled in an interview. In that 
unpromising moment, an unwelcome problem presented itself--the 
precipitous fall of the Mexican peso. Clinton called an Oval 
Office meeting to hear his options. Seated on a couch were 
Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, National Security 
Adviser Anthony Lake, and the new Treasury Secretary, Robert E. 
Rubin. Republican leaders Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich had 
originally promised widespread GOP support for a quickly cobbled- 
together bailout bill. But rumblings of GOP mutiny swiftly 
changed their minds, and they sheepishly informed the President 
that they could deliver only half their caucus--and that he would 
need to pin down roughly half the Democrats. This was going to be 
a tough sell, but doing nothing, the trio of advisers on his 
couch was telling Clinton, was a prescription for a real 
disaster. 
	     But there was one way out, according to Rubin. As the 
Treasury Secretary explained it, Clinton had the authority on his 
own to commit some $ 20 billion in loans to Mexico. ''The 
President just thought about it for a brief moment,'' 
Stephanopoulos recalled, ''then said, 'Let's do it.' '' 
	     And that's what they've been doing. 
	     In 1993, when Babbitt took office, the White House had 
already taken aim at a host of statutes related to Western land 
use that environmentalists had wanted to change for years. The 
two that received the most attention concerned mining and 
grazing. The Mining Act of 1872 allows mining companies, many of 
them foreign-owned, to take title to federal lands for as little 
as $ 2.50 per acre--and to pay no royalties. Grazing law allows 
ranchers to run cattle on Bureau of Land Management acreage while 
paying only $ 1.86 per month per cow. OMB, seeking to raise 
revenue--at least on paper--calculated that tripling the grazing 
fees and charging royalties of 12.5 percent on mining claims 
could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Treasury. 
	     These estimates seemed fanciful--even Babbitt scoffed at 
them--but the real impetus for the changes wasn't coming from 
OMB--it was coming from environmentalists. The environmentalists' 
strategy was to place high enough hurdles in the paths of mining 
companies and cattle growers to make mining and cattle grazing on 
arid and easily damaged public lands unprofitable. Then the land 
could be taken out of production, and set aside for conservation. 
	     Western Senators picked up on this ploy pretty quickly-- 
and forced Clinton to back down on his legislative proposals. Six 
and a half years later, however, environmentalists are well on 
their way to accomplishing both of their original policy goals-- 
without legislation. All across the West, the BLM is moving to 
curtail grazing, and doing so in a way that hasn't brought a 
concerted response from Western Senators, who seem content with 
knowing that the grazing fees have actually dropped to $ 1.35 per 
month. But radical change is being accomplished, one grazing 
lease at a time. The method is simple. As these leases come up 
for renewal, BLM administrators are cutting the numbers of cows 
allowable under the allotments on fragile parcels of land-- 
sometimes by as much as 85 percent. This policy is being 
bolstered by other strategies: Urban Western counties are 
themselves buying up leases and ranch lands; environmental groups 
are bidding on state-owned allotments; the USDA's Forest Service 
is tightening its adherence to the Endangered Species Act. 
	     The upshot? ''They're squeezing us out,'' says Cliven 
Budy, a rancher in southern Nevada. 
	     On mining law, the Administration has employed a wide 
array of strategies to block big, open-pit mines in the West. In 
1996, Interior paid Noranda Inc., a Canadian conglomerate, some 
$40 million for a huge mining claim near Yellowstone National 
Park. On Feb. 3 of this year, apparently to stop the efforts of a 
Wyoming miner who took out 120 claims in Montana, Forest Service 
chief Michael P. Dombeck proposed a two-year moratorium on mining 
on 429,000 acres in Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. 
	     Then, earlier this month, in an unexpected bureaucratic 
move that jolted the mining industry, the Interior Department and 
the USDA announced in a joint letter that their reading of the 
1872 mining law precludes the construction of the proposed Crown 
Jewel Mine in northernmost Washington state. Theirs is a 
stunningly broad--some would say imaginative--reading of the 
statute and, if upheld by the courts, it could essentially end 
open-pit mining in the West. 
	     Citing wording in the law that limits each mining claim 
to five acres for ''mill sites''--the ponds in which tailings are 
stored--two government lawyers said that the proposal by Battle 
Mountain Gold Co., a Houston-based mining outfit, exceeds that 
limit by some 500 acres. 
	     ''This has very little to do with the Crown Jewel 
project and everything to do with Secretary Babbitt and his rogue 
solicitor trying to leverage mining law reform,'' fumed Laura 
Skaer, executive director of the Northwest Mining Association. 
Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., became so unhinged by the 
Administration's power play that he publicly berated Babbitt and 
then threatened to attach a rider undoing the policy to the 
appropriations bill for Kosovo refugees. 
	     This example raises a point that must be made, however: 
At one level, increased effectiveness is in the eye of the 
beholder. Frank Murkowski, for example, might say--in fact, in an 
interview he did say---that although Babbitt and Browner are 
certainly effective, they are effective in pursuit of an agenda 
he finds extremist, elitist, technophobic, and hostile to the 
legitimate aspirations of miners, loggers, fishermen, native 
Alaskans, and others who'd like to make their living off the 
land. 
	     But Babbitt is proud of what he is doing--and proud of 
how he's doing it. 
	     ''When I got to town, what I didn't know was that we 
didn't need more legislation,'' he says. ''But we looked around 
and saw we had authority to regulate grazing policies. It took 18 
months to draft new grazing regulations. On mining, we have also 
found that we already had authority over, well, probably two- 
thirds of the issues in contention. We've switched the rules of 
the game. We're not trying to do anything legislatively.'' 
	     At the EPA, Browner--also without the benefit of 
authorizing legislation--has streamlined the procedures for 
cleaning up the abandoned inner-city industrial sites known as 
''brownfields''; nearly doubled the list of chemicals whose 
release into the atmosphere companies must disclose publicly, 
under the EPA's community ''right-to-know'' regulations; and, 
under a directive from Al Gore, teamed with USDA to write a 
blueprint for water cleanup that is nothing short of an 
administrative rewrite of the Clean Water Act. 
	     ''We completely understand all of the executive tools 
that are available to us,'' says Browner. ''And, boy, do we use 
them.'' 
Getting Along 
	     Another approach to the business of making friends and 
influencing people in Washington might be called the Southern 
Gentleman model. Its most successful practitioner is probably 
Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. 
	     The Education Department does not have 500 million 
acres of land, doesn't have the power to shut down a state's welfare 
system or take over its prisons. It contributes no more than 7 
percent or 8 percent of the money used for the education of 
America's elementary and secondary students--and only marginally 
more for college. Thus Riley can wield neither dollars nor brute 
power to get his way. Instead, he employs as his primary weapons 
his close relationship with the President and his longtime 
command of the subject matter. But perhaps most of all, Riley's 
success depends on his manner, which rests on a willingness to 
listen to--and thus to do business with--those who don't always 
share his policy views. 
	     ''I know, in practically every state, the key education 
people,'' Riley says, ''Republicans and Democrats--and know 'em 
well. That all takes time. The key here is relationships. You 
don't have any more power after you've been here a while. You 
just don't. The statutory authority is the same. But you derive a 
degree of effectiveness from the relationships you build.'' 
	     Those relationships have enabled Riley to encourage 
states to address the idea of setting standards for students at 
various grade levels. Even while only a handful of states have 
been willing to embrace Clinton's call for standardized national 
testing, every one of the 50 is currently engaged in codifying 
its own way of identifying educational successes--and Riley 
believes that the states eventually, inevitably, will have to 
embrace a uniform set of standards for measuring progress. 
	     ''He has extreme credibility because he's never backed 
away from hard-nosed efforts to improve schools, but he's also 
never scapegoated educators for political gain,'' says Andrew 
Rotherham, director of education projects for the Progressive 
Policy Institute, a reform-minded Democratic think tank. ''He 
occupies some rarefied space: He's respected in schools across 
the country, but also in Washington.'' 
	     Riley's most important ally is probably the President 
himself. In 1992, when Clinton proposed ''100,000 new cops on the 
beat,'' this was a slogan in search of a policy--and one that 
Clinton left to the Justice Department to decipher after the 
election. 
	     But that was not the case with Clinton's 1996 clarion 
call for policies that would ensure every American child was 
reading by the third grade. That policy was based on hard data 
supplied by the Education Department. The upshot was a $ 260 
million grant program signed into law last October, with 
bipartisan support--the Reading Excellence Act of 1998. In its 
final form, the legislation was heavily shaped by House Education 
and the Workforce Committee Chairman William F. Goodling, R-Pa., 
who frequently criticizes the Administration, but worked closely 
with Riley. ''You can agree with Dick Riley or disagree on 
policy, but you can't not like him,'' says Goodling's top aide on 
education, Victor F. Klatt III. ''He's just a good guy.'' 
	     Riley's influence also stems from his 20-year friendship 
with Clinton, dating back to their early days when both were 
Governors of small, Southern states and both were fixated on 
improving education for poor and minority students. ''The one 
thing with this President is that he doesn't have a learning 
curve on education,'' Riley says. 
	     To illustrate, Riley relates a wisecrack he made 
recently to his old Arkansas friend. ''I give a talk on the state 
of American education each year, and I spend a lot of time on it,'' 
he says with a slight smile. ''I told the President this year 
that in the last two State of the Unions, he's given my speech, 
and that if he did it one more time, I was going to give the 
State of the Union, and he could give the State of American 
Education speech.'' 
	     Also representing the Southern style in the 
Administration is Federal Emergency Management Agency head James 
Lee Witt, one of the few Arkansans who arrived with Bill Clinton 
in 1993 and is still around. Witt's success--and he may get the 
best press of anyone in the Administration--comes from his 
willingness to get on an airplane at a moment's notice and convey 
sympathy for disaster victims, as well as his work in 
streamlining paperwork in an agency whose primary function is 
writing checks to Americans who have just lost everything. 
	     Within days of the deadly tornadoes that struck Kansas, 
Oklahoma, and Texas earlier this month, Witt urged residents of 
tornado-prone areas to construct ''safe rooms'' in their homes. 
''The deaths and devastation caused by the tornadoes . . . are 
heartbreaking,'' he said. ''While we can't stop tornadoes, we can 
build secure, easily accessible rooms in homes that can keep 
families safe from harm.'' Witt drew attention to such a safe 
room, built in Del City, Okla., that apparently saved the lives 
of a homeowner and her daughter. And he noted that the room cost 
less than $ 4,000 to build. 
	     ''He's the first FEMA director who wanted to be FEMA 
director,'' Charles Harper, a Wichita Falls, Texas, expert on 
disaster recovery told The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City's 
dominant newspaper. ''It was a political parking place before he 
came in.'' 
Caveats 
	     If there is one overarching theme that binds together 
these different approaches, it is that of autonomy. Clinton's 
most successful tenured Cabinet Secretaries get things done 
because they have learned how to do them, and they are left alone 
to do them. But nothing in life, or at least in Washington, 
always works as it is supposed to. Sometimes, top appointees 
misuse their ability to make policy on their own. 
	     The Justice Department, for instance, recently employed 
guerrilla tactics in the appropriations process to divert $ 4.3 
million out of its operating funds to finance a $ 5,000 per person 
settlement to Japanese nationals rounded up in Latin America 
during World War II. In so doing, political appointees in the 
Civil Rights Division managed to reverse Justice's previous legal 
position, override the stated intent of the Commission on Wartime 
Relocation and Internment of Civilians, and ignore the clear 
legislative history of the 1988 Japanese-American reparations 
bill. 
	     Such stealthy and high-handed actions strike many 
congressional leaders as nothing less than abuses of power. The 
critics have a point. Murkowski has added up all of the Interior 
Department's requests for appropriations to fund the 
Clinton Administration's never-passed-into-law Lands Legacy 
Initiative; he came up with a figure of $ 417 million. ''That kind 
of policy is not supposed to be decided at either the Department 
of Agriculture or Interior,'' he says. ''That is an executive 
branch raid.'' Murkowski has began offering bills to prevent such 
strategies. 
	     Last Friday, a federal appeals court issued a warning of 
another kind when it tossed out Browner's hard-won toughening of 
clean air standards. Judges Stephen F. Williams and Douglas H. 
Ginsburg, writing for a three-judge panel in Washington, said 
that EPA ''construed (sections of) the Clean Air Act so loosely 
as to render them unconstitutional delegations of legislative 
power.'' The Administration promises to appeal. 
	     And autonomy doesn't work for everyone. Not everyone is 
Dick Riley, with his gracious, gentle touch. Some operate with 
sharp elbows. One of these is Housing Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo, 
who served as Henry Cisneros' deputy, took over HUD in 1996, and 
wants to reform the culture of his agency every bit as much as 
James Lee Witt did his. But Cuomo is a bullheaded New Yorker, 
younger and a little rougher around the edges, and when his 
inspector general expressed doubts about Cuomo's ambitious plans 
for reorganizing HUD, Cuomo launched a nasty little jihad against 
her. Cuomo may well have been right on the merits, and his IG, 
Susan Gaffney, may have been wrong. But the result was that 
Gaffney now feels so ill-used by the Secretary that she has 
publicly vowed to stay in her job as long as Cuomo is there. It 
is not a prescription for a smooth-running department. 
	     At the Energy Department, the talents of Federico F. 
Pena, a popular former mayor of Denver, seemed unequal to the 
Herculean task of reining in an agency that has historically 
defied reform. And at Agriculture, nothing that Glickman can do 
could make him hugely popular with farmers, for the simple reason 
that crop prices--something he can hardly control--are 
distressingly low. 
	     Experience did not save Clinton's foreign policy team, 
especially Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and National 
Security Adviser Samuel R. ''Sandy'' Berger, from approving a 
policy in Kosovo that miscalculated the response of Serbian 
President Slobodan Milosevic to a NATO air war. Moreover, they 
apparently had no backup plan in mind. 
	     In some ways, however, the most notorious blunder of this 
Administration remains the 1993 carnage wrought by federal agents 
at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. In a twist that 
might prove instructive for future Cabinet Secretaries, Attorney 
General Janet Reno actually solidified her reputation with the 
public by swiftly accepting the blame for what went wrong--and by 
publicly demonstrating her anguish over the results of her 
decisions. 
	     Reno's learning curve on another visible issue has been 
easy to see--even if she won't talk about it. A fervent supporter 
of the independent-counsel law when she took the job in 1993, the 
Attorney General--along with nearly every other prominent 
Democrat in Washington--has in the ensuing years seen that 
earlier Republican complaints about the abuses of the statute had 
considerable merit. But because Reno had fearlessly appointed an 
independent counsel to look into the activities of the 
President--and expanded his role in the face of new allegations-- 
she got criticism from only a handful of conservative Republicans 
when she declined to go that route on the Democrats' 1996 
campaign finance abuses. 
	     ''It seems to me that it all depends on the category of 
the person,'' says Thomas E. Cronin, president of Whitman College 
in Walla Walla, Wash., and a scholar who has written about the 
executive branch. ''If you have people of the high caliber of 
Babbitt and Rubin, or people like Riley who have the trust of the 
President, that's one thing. If you have weaker people, it's 
problematic. But overall, if you ask my opinion--does it help a 
President to have a group in the agencies who've stayed the 
course with him?--I'd have to say it's an asset--absolutely.'' 
	     Perhaps the last word should go to Shalala, a Cabinet 
official who battled Clinton rigorously on one of his signature 
pieces of legislation, welfare reform, and who had the temerity 
to scold him about the Monica Lewinsky affair. Yet, she has 
stayed on--and stayed loyal. 
	     ''Even though I'm an academic who has studied how 
government works, I hadn't thought about this until I decided to 
stay for the second term,'' she says. ''But the average stay (at 
HHS) before me was 18 months. And you just couldn't do things 
like pass welfare reform, monitor how it was being carried out in 
the states, and fix what wasn't working, in 18 months. . . . 
Look, you get credit in Washington for legislation. Everybody 
wants a bill-signing ceremony at the White House. But real change 
comes when you change the culture of a government agency, or the 
behavior of industry it regulates--or the attitude of the 
public--and all that takes time, time on the job.''