WASHINGTON — A growing Republican chorus is calling for a staff overhaul inside President Bush's beleaguered White House, but some conservatives say such a change would stop far short of fixing what they view as a serious flaw: an unfocused domestic agenda.
The war in Iraq is dominating the attention of Bush and his top aides, these critics say, while the recent departure of the president's top domestic policy advisor after just one year has left the White House without an obvious conductor to direct the sometimes disparate policy-making machine.
"You mean they have a domestic policy?" quipped Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Tanner, an author of the failed Social Security plan that was Bush's No. 1 domestic priority last year, lamented the lack of a "policy czar" setting clear goals. He described the administration as "exhausted" and "rudderless" on the domestic front.
"There doesn't seem to be an endpoint for what they're doing," he said. "They need to decide what they're going to do for the next three years.... Staff changes are necessary but not sufficient. If they're just rearranging chairs and office plaques, that's not going to do anything."
Although Bush first campaigned on a largely domestic agenda, experts either said he had achieved much of what he had set out to accomplish or said he had put aside priorities at home to devote time, energy and government resources to the war on terrorism.
His once-sweeping ideas of giving every young worker a private retirement account as part of Social Security and completely rewriting the tax code have been sharply scaled back. On healthcare, with prices rising and tens of millions of uninsured, Bush's major ideas are creating tax-advantaged health savings accounts and computerizing medical records, hardly the broad overhaul sought by many advocates.
Michael Petrilli, who left the Department of Education in 2005 after four years working on school choice issues, said the administration never settled on an education agenda after Bush's No Child Left Behind Act passed in his first term.
One idea buried in Bush's proposed budget would spend $100 million on a national school voucher program. The proposal might appeal to conservatives still angry over some big-spending elements of the No Child Left Behind plan, but experts said it stood little chance of winning support this year in Congress.
