As the Bush administration begins a second term, there will be holdovers from the first, but there also will be plenty of replacements -- appointees taking posts everywhere from the West Wing to West Virginia making decisions about foreign policy, food safety, national standards for air quality and for air travel, and everything in between. Like every administration since the birth of patronage, this one will fill those slots with friends, fundraisers and political allies who share common views on social, economic, environmental, security and education issues. Inevitably, those appointees will carry baggage that the public deserves to know about, but seldom learns about. And that's where the press corps comes in -- at a minimum, it's their duty to keep us informed as the candy gets passed out. (After all, it's we the taxpayers who pay for the candy every April 15.)
Last May, Anne C. Mulkern of the Denver Post's Washington bureau documented the presence of a hundred-plus high-level officials in the Bush administration "who helped govern industries [that] they once represented as lobbyists, lawyers or company advocates."
Last May, Anne C. Mulkern of the Denver Post's Washington bureau documented the presence of a hundred-plus high-level officials in the Bush administration "who helped govern industries [that] they once represented as lobbyists, lawyers or company advocates."
[...]
Among them, according to Mulkern: Ann-Marie Lynch, who moved from a job as a drug-industry lobbyist who fought price controls to a post at Health and Human Services, where she helped decide prescription-drug policies; Charles Lambert, a one-time lobbyist for the meat industry who claimed mad cow disease was not a human health threat; and J. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for oil and gas clients, appointed to the number-two job at the Department of Interior, which oversees national parks and rangeland, including the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
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