Essay Database

President George W. Bush acknowledged on March 1, 2002 that the administration had taken comprehensive measures to guarantee "the continuity of government," or COG as it has internally been labeled after it was revealed that about 100 top officials, spanning every executive branch department, have been sent to live and work in two fortified locations on the East Coast. This system, in which high-ranking administrators are rotating in and out of the two sites, represents the first time …

…fourth in the order of succession, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate President Pro Tem Robert Byrd, were not involved or even aware of the government they would nominally head. The Bush administration is apparently in violation of a 1988 executive order on emergency preparedness issued by President Reagan, which instructed the National Security Council to “arrange for Executive branch liaison with, and assistance to, the Congress and the federal judiciary on national security-emergency preparedness matters.”