Now that Alan Greenspan has ignited an election year debate over how to fix Social Security, we've drawn from the Bush Files two documents that show the administration's plans for Social Security during the only time -- the fall of 2001 -- when the President was fully engaged on the issue. Read them here.

In this Jan. 22, 2001 memo to the newly inaugurated President, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill outlined a plan to get the president's tax cut swiftly passed by Congress. In this hard-edged political memo, O'Neill advised the president to stick to the tax cuts he promised in the campaign, and to resist attempts by members of Congress to tack on "targeted" tax cuts for their pet projects.

Upon returning from a G-8 climate change summit in Italy in March, 2001, EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman sent a strongly worded memo to President Bush urging the administration to remain engaged in international climate change negotiations. "I would strongly recommend that you continue to recognize that global warming is a real, and serious issues," she wrote. "Mr. President, this is a credibility issue (global warming) for the U.S. in the international community." A few days later, against Whitman's advice, President Bush sent a letter to Congressional opponents of action on global warming. It made clear that the U.S. would pull out of any engagement on Kyoto and not regulate carbon emission from U.S. power plants, as was promised during the campaign.

In February, 2002, Secretary O'Neill sent the president a memo recommending major changes to corporate governance in America. The memo represented the conclusions of the President's working group on corporate governance that had been chaired by O'Neill. Among many suggestions, the group called for firms to be required to disclose all relevant financial information, not just the minimum necessary under accounting rules. "Corporate leaders should disclose the kind of information that occupies their days, and that keep them up at night," O'Neill wrote. "There must be a proactive obligation to disclose information sufficient to enable investors to make informed investment decisions."