The Bush Deal

Times are indeed strange when you can make the case that the defeat of a liberal Massachusetts Democrat by a conservative Texas Republican in a presidential election will result in a continuing rise in the size, scope and power of the federal government. But that is indeed the situation we're in right now.

George W. Bush made it clear in his first term that he's not your father's (or even his father's) kind of Republican when it comes to the role of government. He was, from the start, at least ambivalent about the libertarian streak that came to dominate GOP thinking during the 1990s. "We need a different approach than either big government or indifferent government," Bush said. "We need a government that is focused, effective and close to the people; a government that does a few things and does them well."

To be sure, Bush's approach to growing government is very different from the New Deal-spawned bureaucracy-building efforts that preceded it. Bush came into office with an "ambitious aim," wrote John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist magazine in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in late October: "To turn the government into an agent of conservative values." That effort was multifaceted, but two elements, heavily emphasized in the first few months of the Bush presidency, stand out-the initiative to open up federal coffers to faith-based organizations and the plan to subject federal organizations and their employees to competition from private firms.

Then came Sept. 11, which, as the president is so fond of saying, changed everything. Barely a month after the terrorist attacks, Bush did what few recent presidents have done: embraced the bureaucracy. In an appearance before members of the Senior Executive Service, the cream of the civil service crop, he said, "In times of war, the American people look to the government, more than they do in times of peace." And not just for protection. The president added, "We will give our best effort to America in the war effort and in all other areas of responsibility as well."

That cautious endorsement of government led to some ambivalence in the Bush administration about exactly how to react to the attacks. Bush's initial response was to use federal power in the only way that unambiguously appeals to conservatives-through the use of military force in Afghanistan and later Iraq. On the home front, Bush at first resisted efforts to create both the Transportation Security Administration and later the Homeland Security Department. Soon enough, though, the president had embraced both new forms of energetic federal activity.

Meanwhile, in the area of education, Bush did precisely the opposite of what "Contract With America" conservatives recommended a decade ago. He put the federal government front and center in the battle over improving the performance of American schools. He reached across the aisle to Democrats to win passage of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and signed off on a 58 percent increase in the Education Department's budget. In health care, Bush committed hundreds of billions of federal dollars to a new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

All indications are that Bush's second term will bring even more aggressive efforts. "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," the president said in his first postelection news conference. He also intends to spend a lot of plain old money as well. Consider, for example, his plan to overhaul Social Security. This would involve transforming the Social Security Administration from a check-writing operation into a money-management colossus. The effort, estimated to cost as much as $2 trillion over 10 years, would mark one of those rare occasions when "privatization" would actually result in the creation of a much larger and more intricate federal operation.

Despite all these initiatives, Bush, not surprisingly, rejects the big government label at every turn-and indeed tried to paste it on his opponent in the presidential campaign. "Government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives," Bush said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last summer. The president walls off his efforts to expand the scope of federal operations into categories-defense, homeland security, education and mandatory benefits programs-that somehow don't count as "government." But at the end of the day, government is government. And right now, it's only getting bigger.