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investigation into the alleged misuse of bank funds and assertions that he had acted
unethically to secure large personal loans.)
Perhaps no recent president has come under more fire for cronyism than George W. Bush.
The most serious criticism has concerned appointments linked to the most significant
challenges of his presidency: Hurricane Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast and inundated New Orleans in August 2005, was
the most destructive hurricane ever to strike the United States. The federal rescue and
relief effort that followed was widely regarded as inept, and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) was singled out for blame.8 Many critics of the administration
charge that 2001–03 FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who had been Bush’s 2000
presidential campaign manager, was given his job as an act of patronage and was not
qualified for the position. The same accusation was directed at Allbaugh’s close friend and
successor, Michael Brown, who had no background in emergency management and who
was discovered to have padded his resume.9 Brown appeared uninformed during media
interviews after Katrina struck, and did not help matters by sending several e-mails in the
immediate aftermath of the hurricane in which he complained that he wanted to go home
and seemed excessively concerned with finding a dog-sitter.10 He resigned two weeks
after the storm made landfall.
Following the Katrina debacle, a Time magazine probe into cronyism in the Bush
administration focused on three high-level administrators who might have owed their
appointments to political connections rather than merit, and whose decisions may have
compromised the competence and independence of the agencies they helped run.11 One
was Scott Gottlieb, a 33-year old doctor turned stock-picker who was viewed by many as a
friend of the pharmaceuticals industry. Bush had appointed him as deputy commissioner
for medical and scientific affairs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a position
typically reserved for career scientists.12 The magazine questioned Gottlieb’s efforts to
second-guess two decisions by career scientists at the FDA: their withholding of approval
for a drug that was expected to yield $1 billion a year for the drugmaker Pfizer, and their
move to halt clinical trials of another drug after some of the subjects experienced
complications, from which one patient died. Time also highlighted former lobbyist David
Safavian, who was put in charge of government contracts and procurements despite
having virtually no relevant experience. He was indicted in connection with the Abramoff
scandal in October 2005, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison a year later.
The third administrator noted by Time was Julie Myers, whose inexperience and
background as Bush’s personal assistant made Senate approval of her appointment as the
top immigration official at the Department of Homeland of Security highly unlikely. In
2005, Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio went so far as to say, “I’d really like
to have [Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff] spend some time with us, telling us
personally why he thinks you’re qualified for the job, because based on the resume, I don’t
think you are.”13 Unable to get Myers’s nomination through the Senate, Bush sidestepped
the process by installing her during a congressional recess in January 2006.
Some accusations of cronyism have centered not on patronage hires, but on the awarding
of no-bid contracts. Generally, federal agencies are required to award contracts based on
open and competitive bidding. But a month into the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort,
the New York Times reported that FEMA had awarded more than 80 percent of the $1.5
billion in new contracts without competitive bidding.14 Many of the contractors were said

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