\jeff{krimmel}

More and More Bureaucracy Under President Bush

Dahlia Lithwick has written an article hosted at Salon that discusses Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Ms. Lithwick describes a particular chart that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse showed near the end of the testimony:

…The chart compares the Clinton protocol for appropriate contacts between the White House and the DoJ on pending criminal cases with the Bush protocol. According to Whitehouse, the Clinton protocol authorized just four folks at the White House to chat with three folks at Justice…Out comes the Bush protocol, and now 417 different people at the White House have contacts about pending criminal cases with 30-some people at Justice…

It doesn’t surprise me that one can find an example such as this where bureaucracy in the Bush administration has increased by orders of magnitude over that in the Clinton administration. It’s been widely known for a long time now that Bush conservatism does not equal small government conservatism. In fact, by several metrics, the federal government has never been larger and more encompassing than it has been under President Bush. It seems more government is the solution to almost every problem President Bush finds, except of course when it comes to funding life-saving medical research.