ABSTRACT

In August 2003, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (2003), who is an award winning author and professor of economics at Princeton University, wrote an essay critical of the Bush administration where he expressed concern that all its decisions, including those that should have been based on the technical competence of experts in different fields, had been politicized. He cited examples from the Treasury Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Critics have also charged that the Clinton administration, where advisors constantly evaluated public opinion polls before the president defined his positions on issues, functioned in a similar way.