Leakproof?: At the Bush White House, mum's the word.

On August 26, the Washington Post ran a front-page story headlined "Bush Plan Could Cut Federal Workers; President Proposes Buyouts, Merit Pay, More Competition." In his weekly radio address the day before, George W. Bush unveiled what might be called his own version of reinventing government, a far-reaching proposal to reduce the number of federal employees and streamline dozens of programs, from food stamps to student loans to federal housing to Medicare. Details of the plan were contained in a 71-page report that the White House released at the time of Bush's speech.

That the story ended up on Page One was no surprise; the Post counts a huge number of government employees among its readers. But there was one surprising-almost amazing-thing about Bush's new management agenda: It didn't leak ahead of time. The report had been finished and printed well in advance of the presidential rollout-in fact had sat around in boxes for weeks-but word never got out. The president's team kept it a secret.

That's a huge change from recent administrations, when leaking sometimes reached epic proportions. "I've had it up to my keister with these leaks," an angry Ronald Reagan said in 1983 after his White House had become a virtual sieve of information about the budget, about squabbles inside the cabinet, about foreign-policy initiatives-about almost everything. Last year, Reagan biographer Edmund Morris told the New York Times that he once sat in on a meeting in which White House chief of staff Donald Regan had a fit over leaks. Morris was astonished to see Regan's words reproduced verbatim in the next day's Times. "Someone had to have had a pocket tape recorder to get it so exactly," Morris told the paper.

Things were little better in the first Bush administration, as Richard Darman and James Baker burnished their reputations as masters of the leak. And there were times when the Clinton White House was so consumed with scandal management that it could not keep anything else a secret. But now there seems to be little if any unauthorized information coming out of the White House. What's going on?

Perhaps the most important reason is one of the least noticed: George W. Bush is the first president ever to have seen the workings of the White House from a staff-level perspective. While he had no official post in his father's administration, he often served as a de facto deputy chief of staff. As such, he saw the leaks that continually bugged the White House. And he learned how to read the newspapers-not for the news, but to divine the identities and agendas behind quotes attributed to "presidential advisers" or "senior officials." Now members of Bush's own White House staff know he has a knack for decoding leaks.

Another reason is what several officials describe as Bush's ability to project a sense of loyalty to his staff. Almost all presidents benefit from the strong allegiance that comes upward from the staff-God knows Bill Clinton's people took bullet after bullet for him-but fewer can give their staff a sense that the loyalty is returned from the top. Reagan, often aloof, couldn't do it. The first George Bush wasn't that good at it, either. And Clinton was legendary for hanging his aides out to dry. But W. seems to have the ability-critical in controlling leaks- of keeping most of the staff happy. "At some point, every senior and mid-level staffer is faced with the opportunity to make himself look better by doing something that is damaging to the president," says one aide. "And the question they ask themselves is, Do I take advantage of this opportunity? One of the big restraints is, I don't want to hurt the president, and one of the reasons you don't want to hurt him is that he's been nice to you."

On top of that, there's also the remarkable cohesiveness-so far-of Bush's senior staff. Top political adviser Karl Rove and communications director Karen Hughes have been working with each other and with Bush for years now and have done an effective job at marking off their own territory. Andrew Card, the chief of staff, goes even farther back; he first worked for a Bush candidacy when the elder George Bush ran for president in 1980. The inner circle's tight control of information has impressed some veterans of White House leak wars. "The Bush loyalists have done an amazing job," says Donald Regan, watching from retirement. "They don't need personal flattery, and they don't need to have their egos stroked, and therefore they don't have to leak to show how important they are."

That said, there have been a few breakdowns. The most notable was a Time magazine story in July that concerned an internal White House debate over the patients' bill of rights. "Karen Hughes didn't like what she was hearing," the story began. The story described Hughes in a staff meeting, as she listened "with pursed lips" to White House legislative chief Nicholas Calio urging Bush to veto the bill then under consideration in Congress. "To Hughes . . . promising to veto a popular bill was sure to be a PR disaster," Time continued. "Bush had to be for the people, not the HMOs. 'This will hurt us,' she warned."

It had all the signs of a classic hit-leak: a one-sided perspective, with a hero looking very smart, trying to warn the other side against stumbling into disaster. (As it turned out, Bush's veto threat played a critical role in helping him reach a deal with Congress.) Card was said to be mightily miffed, delivering stern lectures, but not embarking on the kind of Ahab-and-the-whale search for leakers that has characterized earlier administrations. Even though there have been a few other leaks-White House officials weren't happy when news got out about the planned "Communities of Character" initiative-there has been nothing of magnitude before or since the patients'-bill episode.

Instead, there has been day after day of "message discipline"-and a few deliberate leaks designed to make the president look good. While Bush hasn't engaged in that practice as much as Clinton did-after all, he has fewer friends in the press-he has pulled off one masterful strategic leaking initiative. In the weeks leading up to the decision on stem-cell research, the White House put out story after story about how much the president was agonizing over the decision, about how he brought up the issue with virtually everyone who came into the Oval Office, about members of his staff with particularly deep feelings on the issue. Coupled with Bush's carefully crafted, split-the-difference decision, the leaks were a great success. They portrayed the president as serious, studious, and fair-minded.

Now come the fall battles over spending and the surplus. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Bush, trying to hold the line on spending, is hurt by leaked reports that his staff is bitterly divided over strategy and substance. While that might happen-the smooth-running White House message machine can't run smoothly forever-don't look for a major breakdown. "I don't think they'll ever reach the point of the 'keister' comment," says David Gergen, the aide who announced Reagan's (unsuccessful) anti-leaking crusade back in 1983. "They run a button-up place."