Washington — One will be remembered for keeping a lid on mad cows. Another's tenure was marked by a controversial and sweeping education reform plan. And a third tried to do the same with energy policy but narrowly failed.
While Colin Powell stole the limelight, three other Cabinet members announced Monday they also were stepping down from less visible posts: Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
The daughter of a peach farmer and former secretary of agriculture in California, Veneman, 55, will perhaps best be remembered for her handling of a single case of mad cow disease that was discovered in Washington state just before Christmas last year.
"They did a good job with a tough issue," said Mark Maslyn, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau, referring to Veneman and her staff.
"They did a nice job of calming the waters, easing the fears."
While the USDA was later criticized for not being aggressive enough in searching for mad cow disease because of its ties to the meat industry, the complaints have been blunted by the fact that there hasn't been another case of mad cow disease since the first one was discovered.
Paige's toughest test
Paige's tenure will largely be defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, a cornerstone of the president's domestic policy that sought to elevate math and reading levels of all students.
"No Child Left Behind is indelibly launched," Paige said in a statement Monday. "A culture of accountability is gripping the American educational landscape."
But while the program sought to hold schools accountable, its reliance on testing and penalties for underperforming schools angered many educators and parents. Many Democrats, meanwhile, complained that the program was underfunded.
Abraham's low profile
Abraham, 52, a former senator from Michigan, managed to keep a comparatively low public profile in his job as energy secretary despite controversies about the administration's attempts to drill and mine in wilderness areas, lax security and possible espionage at national nuclear labs, and skyrocketing oil prices that threatened to damage America's economy.
As a Republican senator from 1995 to 2001, Abraham received large campaign contributions from energy and other extraction industries and was generally considered friendly to their interests on Capitol Hill.
As energy secretary, he was a major advocate of opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.
It was a goal he and the Bush administration failed to achieve in the face of strong opposition in the Senate.
Abraham presided over a continuing series of security problems at his agency's national laboratories, especially at the Los Alamos National Lab.
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