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, ...