TPM provided a link entitled "Policy Of Director Henshaw: Employers Are Our Client," which included this tidbit:
After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.
"In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay," Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency's director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.
Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.
This is from the Washington Post, not Mother Jones or The Nation. It underlines that with a President comes a bureaucracy and all the rest, even if you don't like the person that much, or wouldn't mind having a drink with his opponent (if said opponent drank). And, it suggests (as my WaMu story last time) that it all has policy making implications. Really.
Sort of good to know this before you vote for the people, or vote for them again.