Is the Bush Bureaucracy Any Different? A Macro-Empirical Examination of Notice and Comment Rulemaking under “43”

Abstract

Much has been made in the popular press of President George W. Bush’s status as the “first MBA President” (see Pfiffner 2007; Breul 2007; and see Lewis chapter two). The implication is that Bush’s two years at Harvard Business School well equipped him to transform, or to transformatively lead, an inefficient, unwieldy, and unacceptably independent federal bureaucracy. Bush himself, at a campaign stop in 2000, ridiculed then vice president Gore’s efforts to “reinvent government” as mere “reshuffling”:

Today, when Americans look to Washington, they see a government that is slow to respond, to reform, ignoring changes that are taking place in the private sector and in some local and state governments. (Mitchell 2000)