The four horsemen of Bush economic policy: an emerging system of seemingly obscure officials takes over.

• Author: Barnes, Fred

Glenn Hubbard is the most influential chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in two decades. His job is to provide economic analysis for the White House, primarily on domestic issues such as taxes and jobs. The sudden popularity of eliminating the taxability of stock dividends--that's Hubbard's doing. As a young U.S. Treasury Department official ten years ago, he circulated a fifty-page study advocating the change, and he followed up this year by prevailing on President Bush and his senior aides to support the idea. And Hubbard was also active in feeding information and analysis to the presidential commission that looked at one of Bush's pet projects, reforming Social Security and creating individual investment accounts.

But Hubbard, 44, has stretched his role far beyond tinkering with the tax code and overhauling the pension system. When an international bankruptcy system was being talked up at Treasury and the International Monetary Fund, he crafted his own proposal for a new global arrangement. He also weighed in with his take on bailouts for Brazil and Argentina. Hubbard, a free-market economist from Columbia University, "is an impressive guy and his views are respected across the range," says a top Bush assistant.

That's putting it mildly. Hubbard exemplifies what's happened to economic policymaking in the Bush Administration. From the start, Bush's national security team--Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA director George Tenet--have performed dazzlingly. But the economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Economic Council chief Larry Lindsey, stumbled. O'Neill was out of sync ideologically with Bush, and Lindsey failed to run the NEC to Bush's satisfaction.

The result: little-known officials quietly stepped up to fill the gap. Josh Bolten, 48, the deputy White House chief of staff, took charge of the underperforming economic apparatus and the task of sharpening ideas for the president's consideration. Hubbard emerged as a major player in administration policy circles. At Treasury, the undersecretary for domestic affairs, Peter Fisher, a 46year-old Democrat, became the person the White House relies on. And Karl Rove, Bush's top adviser on politics and practically everything else, has involved himself as a kind of overseer of economic policy. "Everything crosses his desk," says an economic aide.

Even...