PRESIDENT Bush came to Washington as the chosen son of the state of Texas. For those who have never watched American television programmes about Texas (there was a time when nothing else seemed to be on) it is important to note that it is still oil country. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, have both had financial interests in oil, though in Texas the relationship between man and oil often reaches beyond money to the spiritual.
The Bush administration has been crafting an energy policy, something Clinton never got around to doing. The suspicion has been that the big oil companies would be the main beneficiaries, along with their brethren in coal and natural gas, while efforts to promote solar power and energy conservation would suffer. Secret meetings were held to draft a policy. Bush wouldn鈥檛 reveal who attended these discussions, but the suspicion was that they were oilmen. Now an environmental group has won a court battle to find out who has had the president鈥檚 ear on energy.
It will take a while to wrest the information out of the administration, but in the meantime officials are starting to talk. A congressional inquiry revealed that 18 of the energy industry鈥檚 top contributors to the Bush presidential campaign got access to the White House task force that drafted the energy policy.
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Another inquiry, at the Department of Energy, focused on a related issue: stiff new rules proposed to control pollution from electricity-generating power plants. They鈥檝e been delayed for months, during which time the energy department official in charge of the rule-making met with 65 lobby groups to talk about the new rules. Of these, 64 represented energy companies and one worked for an environmental organisation. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was the same group that won the lawsuit to open up the decision-making process.
NO GOVERNMENT likes criticism, especially from within its own ranks. But the Bush administration gets unusually testy when one of its own steps out of line. When the director of the Army Corps of Engineers (those extraordinary dam-builders) dared suggest his budget was a little less than he wanted, he was ushered out of the door faster than you can say Dick Cheney. Tom Ridge, the new director of the Office of Homeland Security in the White House, was a daily fixture on the nightly news in the months following last year鈥檚 terrorist attacks. But when Congress asked Ridge to testify after word leaked out that he differed with the President on some of the budget priorities in the war on terrorism, suddenly he was no longer a key member of the administration but merely an 鈥渁dviser鈥� and therefore could not be compelled to testify.
So the message seems to be: 鈥淲e want you to have opinions, we just don鈥檛 want you to share them if they differ from ours.鈥� With that in mind, here鈥檚 a prediction: the days of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS are numbered. The council has 34 members, 28 of whom were appointed by President Bush. The rest are holdovers from the Clinton administration. With no real authority, the best the council can do is act as a burr under the administration鈥檚 saddle.
At their first meeting with Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson, council members savaged the White House for failing to provide adequate funding for AIDS prevention or the global AIDS fund that is being established. Word was that the Bush crowd wanted to get rid of the council when they took over the White House. Now they probably wish they had.