"… still smells." And I wouldn’t use the word ‘sweet.’

The Bush White House memo on "hiring controls" --issued just hours after the inauguration on Jan. 20 -- is creating confusion and anger among agencies, employees and organizations representing those employees.

"It was the federal workforce that kept the government running while the two candidates were running for office, while they didn’t know who won," said Phil Kete, director of the Office of Labor Management at the American Federation of Government Employees.

He said the memo both concerns and disappoints him.

"For the new administration to start out with an across-the-board ban on reassigning employees is a slap at the federal workforce," Kete added.

The original memo, sent by Andrew H. Card Jr., the assistant to the president and chief of staff, basically stated that hiring would cease until White House appointees -- those agency heads who could make "personnel decisions consistent with President Bush’s goals for government reform" --were in place. But what agency heads need to be in place is definitely anyone’s guess. And because specifics aren’t included in the memo, federal managers feel decidedly uncomfortable about the real purpose behind this.

"The memo refers to the president’s campaign pledge to cut federal manager positions," said Federal Managers Association officials. "We would like to see clearer guidance as to whether this is the first step in working towards that goal."

Most federal employees, particularly the ones immediately impacted by the controls, would simply like to know when it will end. But that isn’t really in the memo, either.

Perhaps this is naïve, but one would think that if it’s just a case of waiting until agency heads are in place, the Office of Personnel Management would have sent a memo to all agencies stating: "Okay, your boss is in, you can hire," or "You have to wait until your guy is sworn in Tuesday," or something to that effect.

But the OPM memo simply reiterated Card’s memo except for the last paragraph, which I’m sure made everyone stop and reflect for a moment: "We will keep you informed as we work with the Office of Management and Budget to further define the parameters of these controls as well as exception procedures."

If this is, as the first memo suggests, just a question of waiting until the top agency person is sworn in, why are OPM and OMB officials defining parameters? Can’t we assume that this is a question of days and not weeks, and, if so, why are they spending so much time defining anything? Why haven’t any individual agencies, like the civilian personnel officials here at West Point, been given any real guidance, even something as simple as what agency head needs to be in place before we can hire someone? What kind of game are we playing here? And, finally, the most important question of all …