For Immediate Release: March 5, 2002

Austin, TX: A little more than a year after more than 200 “Pioneers” narrowly helped put him in the White House, George W. Bush has rewarded at least 43 of these elite fundraisers with federal appointments. The Bush “Pioneers” raised a minimum of $100,000 for Bush by bundling together contributions of up to $1,000 (the legal limit) from other individuals. Bush’s 43 Pioneer appointees delivered more than $4.3 million to Bush’s presidential race. Collectively they also gave $204,000 to Bush’s two gubernatorial races.

“Political patronage is alive and well in the Bush White House,” said Craig McDonald, Director of Texans for Public Justice. “Rewarding big donors with ambassadorships is a sure-fire way to keep the campaign money rolling in. If Congress outlaws soft money, Pioneer bundling will become a blueprint for the future of special-interest politics in Washington.”

The highest-ranking Pioneers are Terrorism Czar Tom Ridge (a former Pennsylvania Governor) and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (an ex-Heritage Foundation Fellow and the wife of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell).

Other Pioneers who received Bush appointments include:

• 19 U.S. ambassadors to countries from Austria to Uruguay;¹
• Five members of the Energy Department Transition Team that first envisioned Bush’s supply-side energy policy (including ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay);²  and
• Two seats on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.


Appointing so many top donors to top positions can make for strange bedfellows, as illustrated by Pioneer-appointee Ken Lay. One of Lay’s fellow Pioneer-appointees, Elaine Chao, is investigating how and why Lay’s company barred its workers from selling Enron stock as investors pushed the company into a nose dive.

A Pioneer nominee for the board of the U.S. Overseas Public Investment Corporation (OPIC) also must step into Enron’s shadow. Enron’s bankruptcy has exposed OPIC to more than $1 billion in risk as a result of the massive loans, loan guarantees and political risk insurance that this federal agency extended to Enron. At Ken Lay’s request, then-Governor George W. Bush urged the Clinton administration to preserve this corporate welfare program, which helped finance such investments as Enron’s troubled Dabhol Power Plant in India.

Doling out public offices to wealthy donors is hardly a merit system but it occasionally results in a good match. W.L. Brown, Jr., Bush’s Pioneer Ambassador to Austria, for example, is the retired head of the company that owns Jack Daniel’s and Southern Comfort. TPJ is confident that Ambassador Brown has the right credentials to throw some of Vienna’s best diplomatic parties.

 A list of the Pioneer appointees follows. For more on their backgrounds see http://www.tpj.org/pioneers/).
 

 

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