Foxes guarding the henhouse. That is how Ruth Marcus recently characterized the personnel approach of the Bush administration. Another way of saying the same thing is to ask what will happen when people who don't believe in much of a role for the government get a chance to run it without opposition or oversight. The answer, obviously, is that they will run it down.
Marcus's list of recent episodes supporting her fox-guarding-the-hens theory includes the sudden resignation of Eric Keroack, the man whom Bush appointed in November to run the federal government's family planning program (called the Office of Family Planning). Keroack's qualifications and expertise for this role appeared to consist of his fanatic belief in the practical workability of sexual abstinence, his work for an anti-abortion and anti-contraception group, and his high standing with the Christian right. The man once compared premarital sex to heroin and germ warfare, and has applied research on prairie voles to women in order to hype the dangers of sex outside of marriage.
This astonishing range of qualifications, of course, must have been checked before Keroack was appointed. But whoever did the checking never found out about the Massachusetts Medicaid suit against Keroack. The suit accuses him of insurance fraud and of prescribing medications to individuals who were not his patients; dealing with it will leave him too busy to also manage the federal family planning program. Thus his recent resignation. We will now never learn how he would have allocated the $283 million annual budget that the Office of Family Planning controls.
Keroack is hardly unique. Anyone who has closely followed Bush administration policies in the field of women's health and reproductive health could have told Marcus a great deal about foxes guarding hens. When it comes to malign and ideologically driven staffing policies, federal positions dealing with women's health and reproductive lives have been -- to continue with the animal metaphors -- the canary in the coal mine during the Bush years. The same patterns now so evident in the federal prosecutor scandal, for example, have long been visible in the fields of women's health and reproductive policies: Appointments that seem intended to guarantee the worst possible mismatch between a function of the federal government and the person in charge of that function, appointments that prioritize extreme right-wing beliefs over the stated objectives of the office, appointments that are made with little heed for the expertise, competence, or reputation of the candidate. Add to this approach a punitive use of federal budgets, and you have a fairly good summary of the problems women's health policies have suffered during the Bush era.
To be even blunter in summing up the point: The fundamentalist Christian base of the Republican Party is waging what one might call the uterus wars -- wars over abortion and sexual activity. The arena for these wars consists of federal offices intended to cater to the health and contraceptive needs of American women. Any detrimental health consequences from this war are deemed acceptable collateral damage by the true believers.
An excellent example of these wars is the recent skirmish over the funding for the Office of Women's Health (OWH). OWH carries out many important tasks with a very modest budget, including the overseeing of research into osteoporosis and menopause, but it is currently best known as the federal office which advocated that the emergency contraceptive known as Plan B be made available over-the-counter.
Earlier this year, Andrew van Eschenbach, the Bush-appointed head of the Food and Drug Administration, threatened to withhold the rest of OWH's annual budget ($1.2 million out of a total of $4 million). Had he succeeded in this (congressional action managed to forestall the move), the office would have had to shut down all its operations. Some pro-choice observers argue that the threatened budget freeze was payback for the OWH's role in promoting plan B, which had not been appreciated by the GOP's conservative base If these observers are right, of course, the planned punishment would have fallen not just on the offending agency but also on the women who benefit from its general services.
The saga of Plan B and the FDA goes back several years. In 2004, an evangelical Bush appointee to the agency's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs named David Hager helped influence the FDA's decision to refuse to make Plan B available over the counter; he resigned the next year in light of revelations that he sexually abused his wife.
Shall we continue with the animal metaphors? For a very short time in 2005, the OWH was managed by … a veterinarian, with no relevant experience in women's health. Women's groups protested, and the interim appointment was quickly changed to someone more suitable. You hardly need a vet to know the dangers of foxes guarding hens; you just need to know the Bush administration.
J. Goodrich is a recovering economist and the sole proprietor of the political blog Echidne of the Snakes. She also blogs for Tapped.
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