All change for all the president’s men

Date: 21/12/00

Unlike most EU countries, the US sees an overhaul of the senior civil service every time an election takes place.

This means that not only will George W. Bush appoint a cabinet with a treasury, commerce and labour secretary but he will have to fill more than 7,000 unit-chief jobs including many of vital importance to business.

Consider Bill Clinton's trust-buster, Joel Klein, for example. Although he was as well-known in global anti-trust policy circles as Competition Commissioner Mario Monti, Klein was merely an assistant attorney-general at the Department of Justice. Yet he was a political appointment by Clinton and required Senate confirmation.

Given what Bush has said about anti-trust policy and hints he has dropped about the Microsoft case, all eyes will be on his choice for this sensitive post. One name already doing the rounds is Timothy Muris, a law professor at George Mason University who heads Bush's working group on regulatory reform issues.

First among equals in the Bush economic team is Lawrence (inevitably 'Larry') Lindsay, the man who devised his tax plans and formerly an economic policy official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, before serving as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board until 1997. He appointed most of the rest of the team, and is likely to shape business policy over Bush's four-year term.

Allan Hubbard, chief executive of Indianapolis chemicals firm E&A Industries, acts as the team's informal policy coordinator. Hubbard, who served on former Vice-President Dan Quayle's Council on Competitiveness anti-red tape panel, is Bush's former Harvard classmate.

In the background providing business advice is Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a key figure in Newt Gingrich's take-over of Congress during Clinton's mid-term lows in 1994.

Barbour has been tipped as a liaison with Congressional Republicans, but he has also been an astute lobbyist for Philip Morris, US Tobacco Company and RJR Nabisco and spearheaded Microsoft's PR fight-back in Congress after Klein launched his lawsuit.

Apart from 'big oil' supporters and fund-raisers such as Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay and TXU chief Erle Nye, Bush attracted pre-election advice from captains of the 'new economy' often thought to be Democrat-leaning. These include Michael Dell, former Netscape supremo James Barksdale, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and Microsoft COO Robert Herbold.