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Richard M. Powell
Member, Board of Directors, GOPUSA
Richard Powell brings a wealth of political and business experience to GOPUSA.com. He is the founder and president of JPX Interactive Technologies, Inc., a comprehensive technology integration firm offering consulting, deployment and integration services in the business, government and education market segments. The firm has a specialty practice area focusing on the development and implementation of web portals that channel best practice content to educators and students. Richard also consults privately for political candidates and policymakers, helping them develop their education message and K-16 education reform policy initiatives. He is a former policy advisor to Texas Governor Rick Perry, and is active in national, state and local political and civic causes. Richard is a graduate of St. Edward's University. He resides in Austin, Texas where he likes to spend his free time running competitively, traveling and working with at-risk youth.
Dina Powell, the West Wing's Hire Power
By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; Page C01
In Dina Powell's nicely appointed West Wing office there are two boxes.
One is silver, intricately crafted, and sits atop a table. She will let you admire it and readily talk about how she bought it on a return visit to Cairo, where she was born to middle-class Egyptians who came to Dallas for a better life.
White House personnel chief Dina Powell with the president and vice president in the Oval Office. (Paul Morse -- The White House)
The other, sturdy and squat, sits on the floor. She won't say much about it, except to laugh and allow "it can come in handy." It is a safe, for locking up files.
Powell is the president's headhunter, charged with filling hundreds of jobs in the next several weeks -- ambassadors, Cabinet heads, undersecretaries, commissioners. She is the soul of discretion. What's in the safe? Forget it.
Those new people tramping the corridors of federal power will have left some part of themselves with Powell, who at 31 is the youngest person ever to direct the presidential personnel office and its roughly 35 employees.
These appointees, if they are high enough in the hierarchy, will have perched on the edge of her upholstered "interview chair" -- she prefers the gold couch, beneath the large photographs of President Bush. At the very least, some paper part of them will have passed through her hands. Right now, there are about 100,000 résumés in the office's database. During Christmas, guests to the White House parties could stroll by and have a little schmooze with her.
"It's the largest fire hydrant to drink out of in all of Washington," says G. Calvin Mackenzie, a presidential historian at Colby College who specializes in the personnel office. "It's the center of a political maelstrom all the time. There are more than 4,000 jobs" to be filled with each new presidency, "and each one is a little drama of its very own. You have to have a thick skin, to work very hard, and more importantly than anything, you have to have the ear of the president."
About this, Powell will say only that she meets with the president "regularly." In this disciplined White House, there are usually only four people, outside the legal vetters, who know which people have gotten the nod -- Bush, Vice President Cheney, political adviser Karl Rove and Powell. Asked if Powell simply prepares the paperwork or actually makes recommendations on hiring, Office of Management and Budget director Josh Bolten says, "Both."
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