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The Office of Special Counsel (7 employees): After Elaine Kaplan, a Clinton-appointee who headed the U.S. Office of Special Counsel - the agency that investigates federal whistleblowers' allegations - failed to be reappointed to a second term by President Bush, she tendered her resignation stating, "in these times of heightened concern about national security, it is very important that OSC be viewed as a credible, non-partisan advocate on behalf of whistleblowers." She was replaced by Scott Bloch, a Bush appointee who has been called "a gay-hating, secretive, partisan, political hack" and previously served as deputy director of the Task Force for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bloch, reports the Project On Government Oversight, went on to order "more than 20 percent of his headquarters legal and investigative staff to relocate or be fired. According to a letter of protest filed… by three national whistleblower watchdog groups, those targeted for forced moves [were] all career employees hired before Scott Bloch became Special Counsel, as part of a purge to stifle dissent and re-staff the agency with handpicked loyalists." Most refused to uproot their lives and, within a mandatory 60-day time limit, move from Washington, D.C. to Dallas, Oakland, or Detroit and were dismissed as a result. Fired, 2005.
Individual Ready Reserve (73 soldiers): Members of a special reserve program of "inactive troops" who are still under contract to the armed forces and were called back to service due to the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they "defied orders to appear for wartime duty, some for more than a year, yet the Army has quietly chosen not to act against them." Refused service, 2005.
Brent Scowcroft: A retired Lieutenant General, national security adviser to President Gerald Ford, and longtime friend and former national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, Scowcroft served as the chairman of President George W. Bush's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). This group advises the chief executive on "the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence activities" and is composed, says the White House, of "distinguished citizens outside the government who are qualified on the basis of achievement, experience, independence, and integrity." In August 2002, Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal whose title made its point abundantly clear: "Don't Attack Saddam." As a result, "his old friends in high office - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and so forth - stopped speaking to him" and his appointment to the PFIAB was not renewed when his term expired in 2004. Failed to be reappointed, 2004.
John J. DiIulio Jr.: The first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he quit his post after only seven months on the job. In an interview with Esquire magazine DiIulio disclosed, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything - and I mean everything - being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism." Resigned, August 2001.
David Kuo: After serving in the White House for two-and-a-half years as a Special Assistant to the President and deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he left his post in 2003. Kuo wrote, "I have deep respect, appreciation, and affection for the president," but went on to say that "[t]here was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda" and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the 'poor people stuff.'" Resigned, December 2003.
Marlene Braun: A 13-year veteran of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), she was appointed manager of Carrizo Plain National Monument - 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred sites, located about 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Once the Bush administration came to power, the BLM, under Interior Secretary Gale Norton, "began crafting a grazing policy that lifted protections for wildlife and habitat across 161 million
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