As is typical with most presidential panels, the President’s Social Security commission, convened in spring of 2001, was stacked from the beginning to produce the results the White House wanted. (As I noted in my book, The Price of Loyalty, all members were pre-approved by the White House’s chief economic and political advisers, Larry Lindsey and Karl Rove. This distressed Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, who wanted more balance on the panel.) But to an unusual degree, the White House felt free to strong-arm commissioners who deviated from the Bush game plan, and the commission’s co-chairman, legendary Senator and original thinker Pat Moynihan, didn’t like it.

In a memo to O’Neill dated Oct. 15, 2001, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Kent Smetters reported that Moynihan, New York’s Democratic Senator, was upset at White House’s interference with the work of the bipartisan commission Moynihan lead examine the reform of Social Security.

A later, revised version of the Smetters memo includes a passage in which Moynihan expresses the he “is very concerned” that the Commission not appear to doing anything radical.

In this November 29, 2001 memo, Smetters and treasury official Chris Smith tell O’Neill that Moynihan's staff is “miffed at attempts to introduce new options into the mix at this point.”