About National Journal's 'Grading the Cabinet' project

Pick up the paper, and you'll probably see a mention of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Colin Powell. But Education Secretary Roderick Paige or Interior Secretary Gale Norton? Weeks might go by. The same goes for other members of the Cabinet.

We thought it would be useful to devote an issue of National Journal to assessing the performance of President Bush's Cabinet-both the high-profile stars who regularly turn up in the news and the lower-profile secretaries who toil outside the spotlight. But what's the best way to examine performance? We didn't want to pass judgment on the merits of a Cabinet secretary's policy proposals or regulatory actions. And we wanted to avoid measuring a Cabinet secretary against some idealized notion of what his or her job should be.

In the end, we settled on four ways of looking at their performance:

• Their influence within the Bush administration on matters related to their departments.
• Their clout on Capitol Hill.
• Their success in helping the president politically.
• Their management of their departments.

Recognizing the limitations of any grading system, we want to be as open as possible about how we ended up with these report cards. Here's how the process worked: A team of three reporters was assigned to each Cabinet secretary. Each team interviewed upwards of 30 people-administration officials, members of Congress, Capitol Hill aides, interest-group representatives, and others. Working from a common set of instructions, the teams graded the Cabinet members, then justified the grades to a panel of National Journal editors and reporters. In some cases, the review panel adjusted grades slightly to try to ensure that grading standards were consistent from one team to another.

We examined the performance of the 14 Cabinet secretaries, and of the heads of three agencies with Cabinet-level status (Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Management and Budget, and U.S. Trade Representative). We added the director of the CIA to the list because of the agency's increased importance in the wake of 9/11.

We did not grade three other officials with Cabinet-level status (Vice President Dick Cheney, Office of National Drug Control Policy Director John Walters, and Office of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, although we did write about Ridge), because their responsibilities inside the White House placed them outside our four categories.