CARTELS WON'T BE THE NEW DRUG CZAR'S MAIN ENEMY

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's selection of hardliner John P. Walters
as the nation's drug czar prompts plenty of questions about the
direction of the country's anti-drug efforts. They're good questions,
but possibly premature. The immediate question is not what Walters
will make of the job as director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy. Rather, it's what the job will make of Walters.

Odds are, he's going to be eaten alive. Not by the drug cartels, but
by competing bureaucracies -- also known as, his own Bush
administration "allies." No disrespect is intended here for the man
who formerly served as deputy drug office director under Bush's
father. Politically speaking, the 49-year-old Walters presumably
knows where the bodies are buried, the kilos are stashed and the
money is counted.

But deep down, he must also know how bureaucratically tenuous the
Office of National Drug Control Policy really is. The media-bestowed
title of drug czar is entirely misleading; man-in-the-middle is more
like it. And after an unusual run of prominence under the
force-of-nature known as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the office is likely
to be squeezed back into a much smaller box.

For California, this could mean a lot of things. The drug czar's
office administers the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Area, coordinating anti-methamphetamine efforts in a nine-county
region. Important policy questions, epitomized by California
lawmakers' legislation to boost meth treatment programs, will not get
the same kind of centralized handling as under McCaffrey.

Highly decorated, bureaucratically savvy and occasionally ruthless,
McCaffrey made the the Office of National Drug Control Policy
something it had never been before: powerful. That power, though,
cannot be passed like a baton to the next director.

"Because of the force of Gen. McCaffrey's personality, and his
ability to communicate clearly, the White House drug policy office
was able to exercise authority well beyond what it otherwise would
have," said Tom Umberg, a former California assessmblyman who served
as deputy drug office director. "It's going to be a very difficult
act to follow."

The stars aligned to maximize McCaffrey's power. He had the
indulgence of a president who needed to show anti-drug vigor. He had
congressional Republicans eating out of his M-16-calloused hand; at
least, for a while. He enjoyed independent lines of influence and
important back-channels through the Defense Department. And from his
military background, which culminated in four-star leadership of the
United States Southern Command, he knew what it takes to move men and
bureaucracies.

"It has been my own limited experience in this government that
authority is based in some ways on how often you exercise it,"
McCaffrey advised the Senate Judiciary Committee during his
confirmation hearing.

McCaffrey then showed he meant what he said, by insisting on a
tripling in the drug office staff -- to 150 -- and by waging some
well-timed strikes against other agencies.

The stars, though, may now be unaligned for Walters, whose past two
jobs have been with the Washington-based Philanthropy Roundtable and
the obscure New Citizenship Project. Yes, he'll certainly articulate
tough-sounding anti-drug rhetoric in public. Real Washington power,
though, comes not in public speech-reading but in backstage budget
battles and bureaucracy-moving. McCaffrey could -- and did -- squeeze
the Pentagon to deliver up to 50 officers on special detail to the
drug office. McCaffrey could -- and did -- face down Defense
Secretary William Cohen and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna
Shalala.

Walters, by contrast, will find himself hemmed in by much bigger
players. If Washington had a Hall of Fame for Bureaucratic
Infighting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would be a charter
member. Odds are, he won't want to surrender any of his Pentagon
staff; the result, in real terms, will be a shrinking of the drug
office. From his prior 14 years as Wisconsin governor, Health and
Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson enjoys independent stature
and a direct line to the president.

"The nature of the drug policy office is to try to force coordination
among agencies that don't necessarily want to be coordinated," said
Umberg, who's now in private practice in Los Angeles. "It's a
herculean task."

The drug office sprang from the realization that lack of coordination
threatened the federal government's growing anti-drug efforts. As
federal spending increased from $1.5 billion in 1981 to $6.6 billion
in 1989, some 50 different agencies were muscling each other for a
piece of the action. The federal spending is now above $18 billion.

Congress first ordered establishment of an anti-drug coordinating
office in a 1982 anti-crime bill. Justice, State and Treasury
department officials, however, feared the office would undermine
their own authority. President Reagan vetoed the bill, citing
concerns that the new office would "produce friction (and) disrupt
law enforcement."

Reagan's veto did not long impede Congress, and the lack of
coordination kept causing real problems. Some agencies, like the
Customs Service and the Coast Guard, were almost literally fighting
over boats and planes. In 1985, responding to the political demands,
Reagan established a cabinet-level Drug Enforcement Policy Board
under the putative leadership of the attorney general.

The board was all badge, no gun. It lacked authority to compel
changes in departmental budgets. Because the board members were all
the chief representatives of different agencies, it couldn't
eliminate redundancy and competition.

Congress returned with the election-year Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988.
In the last year of a lame-duck term, politically weakened from the
Iran-Contra investigation, Reagan could resist no longer. He signed
into law the measure establishing an office charged with developing a
"national drug control policy." Congress gave the office a grab-bag
of responsibilities, some strictly symbolic. Thus, the statute
identifies the office director as "spokesperson of the administration
on drug issues."

Congress, however, also thrust its own words into the supposed
spokesperson's mouth; for instance, by statutorily mandating the drug
office to "oppose any attempt to legalize" drugs including medical
marijuana.

The drug office is also charged with developing the annual National
Drug Control Strategy. Here, too, Congress imposed its will. In 1998,
election-minded lawmakers required the drug office to include in the
strategy a five-year goal of halving national drug use.

The original legislation spelled out only four items for specific
inclusion in the strategy. That has since grown faster than a crack
cocaine habit. Congress now requires about two dozen specific items
for inclusion in the strategy, from the number of metric tons of
marijuana seized to the annual health care costs associated with drug
abuse. Every congressional imposition reduces the drug office's
discretion.

Paper strategies and speeches aside, the real power of the drug
office is supposed to be budgetary.

All federal agencies must submit proposed drug-control budgets to the
drug office prior to delivery to the Office of Management and Budget.
Proposed budgets deemed adequate get a green light from the drug
office. Budgets deemed inadequate can be "decertified."

Until McCaffrey, though, no drug czar was willing to decertify
another department's proposed drug budget. McCaffrey, by contrast,
knew how to claim terrain and pick a fight. In 1997, McCaffrey
declared that the Pentagon's proposed $809 million drug budget was
"systematically underfunded" and needed an additional $141 million.
The Defense Department demurred, so McCaffrey said he would not
certify the department's budget. After the fireworks, the department
added $72 million to its total.

McCaffrey's immense personal authority and fearlessness thus enhanced
the drug office's power -- but at a price that his successor may end
up paying. A resentful Defense Department, among other agencies,
began quietly resisting drug office entreaties even while McCaffrey
was in charge. The retired Army general's hard-charging ways
contributed to a 27 percent turnover in office staff in 1999 and a 21
percent turnover in 1998, according to an office audit by
PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Consequently, Walters will be walking into an
office that's woefully short of experience.

In public testimony, Walters has shown he knows how to talk tough.
Thus, in a 1996 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he
denounced "the liberals' commitment to a 'therapeutic state' in which
government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation." And in
the Weekly Standard magazine earlier this year, he warned ominously
that "the war on crime and drugs is rapidly losing ground to the war
on punishment and prisons." Tough talk like this works well when the
targets lack political power. The 300,000-plus Americans now doing
time in state and federal prisons for drug offenses aren't much of a
political constituency, and Walters need not worry about them.

But he better be watching his back once he becomes drug czar; the
court intrigue is the real killer.