DubyaDubyaDubya.theRules
White House Uses Web Site To Help Orient Its Appointees

By: Stephen Barr

When political control of the White House changes, the transition is never long enough to completely educate all of a President's new team. But the Bush White House hopes to leapfrog transition boundaries by going online to package basic information for political appointees.

Using money left over from the transition, the White House has created a new Internet site (www.results.gov) aimed at its appointees. "This allows us to stay in the orientation and team-building business", presidential personnel director Clay Johnson said.

The site includes photographs and contact information for appointees and senior White House staff members; progress reports on the President's management agenda; and important hints on how to handle ethics rules and phone calls from lawmakers.

"If you receive a call from a Member of Congress, check with your legislative affairs staff. Decide who is best suited to return the call, but do it promptly", the site advises. "Generally whatever problem the Member had in the first place will not get better with time."

Johnson envisions the website as an extension of the President's personality and a way for appointees to rally around their leader. When using the website, he said, he wants the appointees to feel "like you are talking to a person - not your department talking to another department".

In that vein, Johnson and Kay Coles James, director of the Office of Personnel Management, sound the alarm about that dreaded Washington disease: Potomac Fever.

Appointees infected with Potomac Fever, Johnson and James write, toss around such lines as: "Let's get one of the cars and drivers here to take us to dinner", and suffer from delusions when "words like million and billion no longer seem so large".

Potomac Fever also causes incoherent speech - "words like paradigm and synergy" - and can lead to memory loss - "they may forget that they serve at the pleasure of the President".

A steering committee, led by Johnson and Albert Hawkins, the assistant to the President for Cabinet affairs, has been rolling out the site in stages over the last few months. Johnson hopes to change and add content every two or three weeks once any bugs are ironed out.

Patricia McGinnis, president of the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, has helped organize orientation sessions for political appointees and served as an adviser on the new website. "The test will be: Is it used, is it current, and will it be institutionalized as a way of giving appointees information and contacts that they need to be successful?" McGinnis said.

Johnson says President Bush needs this extra avenue to reach out to his appointees because it's possible that a third of them will never get a chance to be in the same room with the President during their time in Washington.

"We cannot give them enough of their leader", Johnson said.

In a video welcome on the site, Bush tells his team: "We have to work together and learn from each other. This site will help us do that."