Obama assembles 'super Cabinet'

Washington: President-elect Barack Obama is assembling a new and influential cadre of counsellors just steps from the Oval Office whose power to direct domestic policy will rival, if not exceed, the authority of his own Cabinet.

Presidents have long tried to centralise influence in the White House, often to the frustration of their Cabinet secretaries. But not since Richard Nixon tried to abolish the majority of his own Cabinet has a president gone so far in attempting to build a West Wing-based clutch of advisers with a mandate to cut through - or leapfrog - the traditional bureaucracy.

Obama's emerging "super Cabinet" is intended to ensure that his domestic campaign priorities - health reform, the environment and urban affairs - don't get mired in agency red tape or brushed aside by the ongoing economic meltdown and international crises. A half-dozen new White House positions are already filled by well-known leaders with experience navigating Washington turf wars. But others see the potential for chaos within the administration.

"We're going to have so many czars," said Thomas Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce. "It's going to be a lot of fun, seeing the czars and the regulators and the czars and the Cabinet secretaries debate."

Carol Browner, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, is taking on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama's ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change. Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion is expected to serve in another new White House post implementing Obama's education and housing agenda for cities. Former senator Tom Daschle will become the first Cabinet secretary in decades to have an office in the West Wing and a separate, newly-created White House title: Director of the Office of Health Reform. Daschle's confirmation hearing to become Health and Human Services secretary began on Thursday.

Several top Obama advisers said they are extending to domestic affairs a model of governance that has long been used in foreign policy, where the National Security Adviser manages diplomatic and military matters from a perch in the White House that offers ready access to the president.

"Given the enormity of the challenges we face, it is critical to have someone in the White House every day, reporting to the president, coordinating policy and giving these issues the important focus they deserve," said Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.

But Bruce Herschensohn, a professor of foreign policy at Pepperdine University who was deputy special assistant to Nixon, said Obama's plans for the White House could do the opposite.

"It's adding a layer of bureaucracy rather than really eliminating one," said Herschensohn, recalling Nixon's failed attempt to eliminate all but four Cabinet agencies. "Everyone will be fighting with everybody. You'll have conflict with every Cabinet officer who will now have a superior in the West Wing or" adjacent Old Executive Office Building.

If executed poorly, empowering a small team inside the White House can lead to insular decision-making and the alienation of those Cabinet secretaries outside the loop, said historian I. M. Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland's public policy school.

"It tends to lead to disruption, and sometimes chaos, in terms of how the larger government works," Destler said.