WASHINGTON — With his second-term Cabinet all but selected, President Bush clearly intends to exert an even firmer control of his activist agenda than he did during his first four years, relegating the agencies to the role of carrying out his decisions.
Bush's nomination Thursday of Jim Nicholson, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and a former Republican Party chairman, as secretary of Veterans Affairs -- and the White House's announcement that the secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor and Transportation would stay on -- means that 13 of the 15 Cabinet positions have been selected. Nine Cabinet members will be new.
But the remake of the Cabinet belies the extent to which Bush is seeking to extend his grip by dispatching some of his most loyal aides to key agencies, including the departments of State and Justice.
"There's no question that the president intends to keep the policy-making locus within the White House," said Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative public policy center in Washington.
"That's definitely his intention," said Kenneth F. Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University.
Even the dispatching of trusted confidants to the departments "doesn't mean that it's going to strengthen the Cabinet agencies," Ornstein said. "It'll just extend the long arms of the White House even further."
Warren said Bush's second-term Cabinet suggested an architect who wanted to correct what he perceived as "disloyalty problems." He cited the tenure of Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, who proved far too independent-minded for the White House and was fired after two years -- and then was the source for a book critical of the administration.
The administration is now "prioritizing loyalty over the best they can get," Warren said.
But White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan disputed the notion that the second-term Cabinet would lack genuine clout.
"The president is putting in place a strong, experienced and very capable Cabinet team that consists of people whose views he trusts and advice he values," McClellan said. "Cabinet secretaries are very involved in the policy decision-making process in addition to being instrumental in the implementation of the decisions the president makes."
The latest round of personnel announcements leaves unfilled only a handful of top White House and administration jobs as Bush prepares to launch an ambitious second-term agenda that includes an overhaul of Social Security and the tax code.
