One of the reasons the New Yorkers who voted for George Bush did so was the hope that, as a former governor and a Republican at that, he might be a little more sympathetic to the plight of state and local governments than Vice President Gore. Maybe. But a growing number of examples suggest that Mr. Bush is either unwilling or unable to control the federal bureaucracy as it harasses New York City and the State with more expensive mandates and groundless lawsuits.

The Texan had been in office only weeks when a spokeswoman for his Environmental Protection Agency was quoted insisting that New York City build a $1 billion plant to filter water from the Croton watershed. This ambrosia is already clean. New Yorkers have been drinking it for decades. A filtration plant would be a perfect target for terrorists. No matter. EPA spokeswoman Mary Mears told the New York Times back in February of 2001: “Our bottom line is that the Croton watershed must be filtered. . . . That bottom line isn’t one that comes from any particular administration. . . .That’s not going to change.”

The Bush administration’s next hit to New Yorkers also came from the EPA. It was the decision to dredge the Hudson River to remove PCBs. The nearly half-billion dollar bill for this project is to be foisted upon General Electric, but the people who end up paying the price are the New Yorkers who live along the river and whose lives will be disrupted by the dredging. Not to mention the shareholders of GE, which, incidentally, include the New York State Common Retirement Fund, to the tune of some 34 million shares, at the last accounting.

The EPA’s decision, perhaps, could be explained as an attempt by a former governor of New Jersey, now the EPA administrator, to make headlines at the expense of New York. But it’s hard to find any reason behind the decision by the Mr. Bush’s Justice Department to file a civil rights lawsuit against New York City for a supposed pattern of discrimination in hiring and promotions in its parks department under Commissioner Henry Stern. The parks department staff was more than half blacks and Hispanics, according to press reports. The New York Times, in its news article on the lawsuit, reported that “in 1999, there were only 2 African-Americans among 31 top managers, according to a department chart.”

Note the artful use of the word “only.” The parks department had a higher percentage of blacks and Hispanics among its employees than the Times newsroom does. And the diversity among the parks department’s managers — to go by the reported figure of 2 African Americans among 31 — exceeds that of the United States Senate, where the number of blacks now stands at zero out of 100. Basing civil rights lawsuits on the differences in racial composition of entry-level employees and managers is a surefire way to discourage the hiring of minorities at the entry level.

Once again, those left to pay for the Bush administration’s theatrics are the taxpayers of New York, who will have to mount a legal defense against the Justice Department and then will have to pay the settlement costs of the separate lawsuit against the city by the Parks Department’s disgruntled employees. The case of those disgruntled employees is only bolstered by having the bean-counters of the Bush-Ashcroft Justice Department weigh in on their side.

The point here is not that vigorous enforcement of federal environmental and anti-discrimination laws should stop the moment a Republican president comes into office. But these kinds of politically motivated lawsuits and mandates are something else. The instinct of New York politicians in dealing with Washington seems to be to treat these sorts of offenses by the Bush administration as minor matters, and to approach the White House instead mainly as supplicants, seeking additional infusions of money to bail the city and the state out.

It’s a nice racket Washington has going — impose massive legal and compliance costs on New York that stretch city and state budgets to the brink, then swoop in to provide, and take credit for, “disaster assistance” and other federal grants. The next time the former Texas governor comes to New York to crow about his tax cut and the disaster aid he has provided the city, it wouldn’t be surprising to see New Yorkers asking for his explanation of why his EPA and his Justice Department are imposing their own taxes on New York.