This morning, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a guest on Wolf Blitzer’s Sunday morning interview show on CNN, defending the Pentagon’s development of new Web sites designed to provide information to a global audience. Blitzer asked whether these sites violated President Bush’s new edict forbidding payment to PR agencies in order to promote the administration’s political agenda. Rumsfeld responded that these sites had nothing to do with a political agenda.

Whether that’s true or not, we are going to see more unintended consequences of the Ketchum-Williams-DOE controversy. I’ve encountered one myself. I’ve been doing work for a large PR agency that has a government agency as an account. Without naming names, I can say that this assignment has nothing whatsoever to do with political policy. The PR agency’s job is simply to use its skills to communicate with the target audience of this particular agency. This parallel works: The Federal Emergency Management Association hires a PR agency assemble Web content designed to help victims make the right choices when disaster strikes.

My most recent assignment was to craft a white paper about trends in marketing to the audience using the World Wide Web. I also identified a series scholarly journals to which we might submit the white paper. I called last week to find out if the agency had narrowed the choice of journals. I learned instead that there would be no placement of the white paper; it was now to be used as an internal resource. The reason? The agency has become sensitive to the risk of appearing to violate Bush’s no-PR-to-promote-policy mandate.

In other words, the agency (and probably hundreds of others) are so worried about being painted with the Armstrong Williams brush that they’re suspending legitimate work designed to achieve noble goals.

The unintentional consequences of one agency’s ethical lapse could have far greater repercussions than we ever imagined as ethical PR work is suspended lest it be perceived as part of the same unethical practice that has drawn so much attention lately. And any agency work commissioned by the government could wind up out of bounds.