GovernmentExecutive.com

As a second-term innovation to more effectively integrate President Bush's Cabinet secretaries into White House operations, Chief of Staff Andrew Card recently overhauled space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and invited Cabinet members to each spend at least two hours a week working just a stone's throw from the Oval Office.

Heidi Marquez Smith, who was director of presidential correspondence before her promotion to special assistant to Bush, will head the five-person Cabinet Liaison Office. Shortly after Smith took the reins on February 24, Card convened the Cabinet in its new conference suite on the first floor of the EEOB and encouraged the members to conduct regular business there. The conference room, with sophisticated audiovisual capabilities, seats 17. An adjoining office is sized for one visiting honcho.

The White House says that all Cabinet members have used the space already. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who is learning the D.C. ropes, schedules his White House office hours every Tuesday afternoon.

The Cabinet heads, particularly the nine newcomers, can use the opportunity to meet with Bush's senior advisers, attend West Wing meetings, eat in the White House mess, and hold meetings with interest groups and constituents in a more dazzling setting than their offices across town.

White House officials explain that Card wanted Bush's lieutenants to work face-to-face with his tightly knit West Wing team, especially because the president holds formal Cabinet meetings only four or five times a year.

COMMENTS

• Instead of sitting in some office building, how about the Agency heads actually go out to the field and see first hand what their employees do!! In the four years Ridge was Secretary of Homeland Security, he never visited employees in the field. Oh, he would do "home town" meetings in headquarters but never once with employees in the field. It was like there was an invisible force field around Washington D.C. preventing him from leaving D.C., unless it was to suck up with the politicians and get the photo ops. The mayor of L.A. saw Ridge more than the employees did, in fact the DHS employees in Los Angeles, never saw him nor heard him. GovExec.com reader Posted March 25, 2005 1:06 PM
• Um, who cares? This deserves a story? Alfie Posted March 24, 2005 4:36 PM
• Curious that the MSM and the liberal among us were so rapturous about the long hours in the West Wing by the Clintonites and their sycophants... y'know? The correct way to run a country? (I didn't want to use the term "right" and inflame your sensibilities any worse.) I personally could care less about the office's location but it makes sense to me to give them an opportunity to have a specific time that it will be guaranteed available for use. The only problem I see is making it mandatory - not always possible for one with the kind of responsibilities that a Cabinet Secretary enjoys - even when responding to the dictates of the President of the US. Skeptical Posted March 23, 2005 12:27 PM