Avoiding a Second Monica

When President Bush sent forth his budget proposal this week to be debated by Congress, he sent a message to the nation by showing his fiscal priorities. Some programs are undergoing spending cuts, while others will be awash in new programs that fulfill promises made on the campaign trail. But amidst the debates over our chief executive’s financial plan, one program has been essentially abolished without the appropriate outrage from our nation’s public interest watchdog groups: the White House Internship Program.

Because of the cutbacks in the program and the administration’s failure to designate staff to coordinate the interns, there are only a few coveted spots for students wishing to gain government experience—and those spots have already been scooped up by organizations with personal connections to the president, leaving little room for independent applicants. Despite Bush’s “compassionate” campaign presence, college students yearning to be gofers in a Republican administration now feel left in the cold.

The loss of the internship program has undoubtedly saddened many Harvard students, who wish that Bush would turn his attention from the China crisis to more pressing matters, such as the crisis felt by those who have worked hard at molding their undergraduate resumes and sweet-talking their ‘sixth-degree’ Washington connections in the hopes of spending a summer in the highest office in the land.

When Bush sent the memorandum requiring full business attire from his staff at all times, we knew that the tone of the office environment was going to shift from the hurly-burly of the Clinton era. But this is simply going too far. Bush’s time-tested aproach to leadership, as is evidenced by his time-nearly-expired cabinet, seems to have crowded the younger generation out of the Old Executive Office Building.

Bush has undertaken to reverse many of the programs of the Clinton administration, but White House internships should not be among them. Just because Clinton had one teensy, tiny problem with an intern—a minor incident, really—doesn’t mean the entire program should be scrapped.