The House Health Care Bill — Transparent or Not?
The House health care bill is reportedly coming to the floor this weekend, and House Speaker Pelosi committed in September to a 72-hour delay between the time the bill is posted online and a final vote.
Is that 72-hour delay happening? Some say yes. Some say no.
On the “yes” side are some folks at the Sunlight Foundation. John Wonderlich wrote a post last Sunday called “72 Hours is Now.” He hailed the posting of the health care bill well in advance of a vote.
“Public outcry, partisan pressure, and rising expectations are forcing Congress’s hand,” he wrote, ”and it’s now (apparently) taken as a matter of course that this bill is online for a long weekend before its final consideration.”
Paul Blumenthal followed that up mid-week, sounding slightly more cautious notes but hailing the posting of the “final manager’s amendment.” His post restarted the 72-hour clock.
Which brings us to the folks who say no.
On the Weekly Standard blog, John McCormack says that Speaker Pelosi plans to violate the promise to post the health care bill online for 72 hours.
House members are still negotiating important issues in the bill — whether it will provide taxpayer-funding for abortions, for example. Pelosi is pushing for a Saturday House vote, and a number of big changes will be introduced, likely less than 24 hours before the vote takes place (if in fact it does).
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Paranormal Legislative Activity?
Here’s an entertaining and timely video from the Sunlight Foundation:
Readthebill.org is where you can learn more about H. Res. 554.
Have a transparent Halloween everybody!
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Federal Reserve as Cash Cow
Scheduled for consideration before the House Financial Services Committee this week is a draft bill creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
While there is a lot wrong with the bill — after all it is based on the premise that somehow consumers were tricked into not making a downpayment or re-financing thousands out of their homes, and then walking away — perhaps the most important provision, and the least discussed, is funding the agency by a transfer of cash from the Federal Reserve. Section 119 of the bill requires the Federal Reserve to transfer an amount equal to 10 percent of its expenses to the new agency’s Director.
This I believe is the first time in history that Congress is using the Federal Reserve to simply fund another agency. Why stop there, how about have the Fed just prints trillions of dollars to pay for the rest of the government? If Congress believes this agency will benefit the public, then the agency should be funded by the public, by a direct appropriations raised by taxes.
Of course after watching Ben Bernanke turn the Fed’s balance sheet into a slush fund for Wall Street, it was only going to be a matter of time before someone in Congress decided to use that slush fund for their own purposes. So much for transparency in government.
What Does the State Department Not Want Us to Know about Honduras?
Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina recently traveled to Honduras and found—no surprise—a peaceful country and broad support for the ouster of President Zelaya among members of civil society, the supreme court, political parties and others. In an op-ed in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, DeMint describes his trip in light of Washington’s continuing support of Zelaya and its condemnation of what it calls a “coup.” U.S. policy is mystifying since the ousted president’s removal from office was a rare example in Latin America of an institutional defense of democracy as envisioned by the constitution and interpreted by the Supreme Court that ruled that the president be removed. (For independent opinions on the case, see here and here.)
However, the Senator reports a legal analysis at the State Department prepared by its top lawyer that apparently has informed Washington’s policy but that has not been made public nor even released to DeMint despite his repeated requests. In the interest of democracy and transparency, the State Department should immediately release its legal report. Maybe then we (which includes much of the hemisphere) will be less mystified about what is driving Washington policy toward Honduras. Or at least we’ll have a better insight on the administration’s understanding of democracy.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; International Economics and Development
Senate Health Regulation Bill Includes National ID Plan
Thanks to the push for a more transparent Congress, we’re getting a better look at what new health care regulations might shape up to be. Alas, not a very good look: with weak justifications, the Senate Finance Committee is working on a strange “plain language” description of the bill, and apparently not planning to read or release the final language.
I’ve found something worth noting, though, in each of the bill versions I’ve seen. The Senate Finance Committee’s Rube Goldberg plan for health care in America has a provision establishing paragraph talking about “Eligibility Verification.”
If you want to access the “state exchanges” or collect the federal tax credits created by the bill, your eligibility will have to be verified. Here’s what it says:
Eligibility Verification. In order to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing the state exchanges or obtaining federal health care tax credits, the Chairman‘s Mark requires verification of the following personal data. Name, social security number, and date of birth will be verified with Social Security Administration (SSA) data. For individuals claiming to be U.S. citizens, if the claim of citizenship is consistent with SSA data then the claim will be considered substantiated. For individuals who do not claim to be U.S. citizens but claim to be lawfully present in the United States, if the claim of lawful presence is consistent with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data then the claim will be considered substantiated. Individuals whose status is expected to expire in less than a year are not allowed to obtain the tax credit. Individuals whose claims of citizenship or lawful status cannot be verified with federal data must be allowed substantial opportunity to provide documentation or correct federal data related to their case that supports their contention.
Translation: Every American who wants to access a “state exchange” or get the tax credits in the bill would have to submit data about themselves to the Social Security Administration or Department of Homeland Security for verification. If you don’t do it, no exchanges or tax credits. If your data doesn’t match, no exchanges or tax credits, unless you can convince SSA or DHS bureaucrats that you are who you say you are.
Sound familiar? Then you probably read my Cato Policy Analysis “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.” The paper discusses how verification of immigration status for employment eligibility would plunge Americans into a Kafka-esque bureaucracy and deny many law-abiding Americans the ability to work. Ultimately, the system requires a national identification card.
The same goes with a health care “eligibility verification” system. If you’re one of the millions of people about whom the Social Security Administration has bad data, plan to spend long hours waiting in line to plead with indifferent federal bureaucrats for health care access. When attacks and complications on the verification system break it down, they’ll move to “strengthen” the system. Get ready to dig up your birth certificate—they’ll want to scan it into their computers—plan to be photographed and fingerprinted, and get ready to stand in line for your national ID card.
It was refreshing to see Joe Wilson heckle the president the other week—the president is our employee, after all—but in their enthusiasm to generate differences with President Obama, Republicans may be coalescing behind plans to push a national ID and federal background check system that all freedom-loving Americans should reject.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Carper: We Trust Our Staff So You Can Trust Us
A deep fissure between federal lawmaking practices and the Internet-fueled expectations of the people is just starting to open.
Here’s a fascinating interview with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), in which he justifies not reading the legislation that he votes on.
He’s right that the bills Congress passes are almost incomprehensible, but he draws the wrong conclusion from it. It’s not OK to pass bills that you can’t read and literally don’t understand.
Congress and the bureaucracy will come to learn a lesson that other parts of our society have learned: The Internet changes things.
Because it is now possible to see legislation before Congress passes it, Americans now expect to see legislation before it passes. And they will come to expect that their representative understand it—in detail.
A machine has grown up in Washington over the past two hundred years where representatives rely on colleagues who rely on staff to write bills. This has not produced a desirable body of federal law, and it is not a process that the public will accept for much longer.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Hey G-20! Here’s How You Curb Protectionism
Last week I recommended reading a new paper published by the Lowy Institute in Australia, which proposes an utterly sensible reform for the G-20, if curbing protectionism is a serious aim.
Using Australia’s own successful experience as an example, the authors recommend other countries adopt “domestic transparency” programs, which would essentially include analysis from an independent, apolitical board or agency that measures the real costs and benefits of proposed trade restrictions.
The findings of these independent reviews would be accessible to the public—and probably published in newspapers and other popular media—in advance of any decision to impose or reject the proposed trade restrictions. The findings wouldn’t legally bind the authorities to take any particular action, but would help chase from the shadows the real costs of protectionism, so that those ultimately making the decision know that the public at large is aware of the costs.
When a politician knows that he/she can benefit politically by imposing import duties, the costs of which are hidden in higher prices paid by consumers, who are unlikely to make the causal connection, there is a profound asymmetry of incentives and disincentives. The politician is much more likely to choose to secure the political benefit of imposing duties since the costs are hidden. But if light is shone on those costs, through domestic transparency initiatives, that asymmetry is reduced or eliminated. Politicians, under these circumstances, can go back to the special interests and say how much they’d like to help out with a tariff, but the costs don’t justify the measure. And the protection-seekers know the politician’s hands are tied because the public is aware of those costs.
Well, Alan Mitchell of the Australian Financial Review on Monday supposed how the presence of a domestic transparency regime would have affected President Obama’s tire tariff decision. It is very instructive:
The “Read the Bill” Debate and Government Growth
There’s an interesting back-and-forth over at the Volokh Conspiracy about whether legislators should have to read the actual legislative text of bills they vote on. Most people’s intuitive reaction is: “Duh, of course!” But if you’ve ever actually spent time poring over legislative text, you know that reading the bill itself seldom leaves you with a very good sense of what it does. Legislation is typically a tangle of modifications along the lines of “Strike paragraph 2, replace the period with a semicolon, insert the word ‘reasonable’ in the following sentence…”—which is why legislators have staffers who prepare plain-English summaries of the effects of legislation. Now certainly it would be possible to render bills somewhat more readable to ordinary people. Saving paper is not a huge concern in the digital era, so there’s no good reason legislation couldn’t simply contain the full text of the statutory provisions it amended, perhaps including a side-by-side comparison highlighting the changes. Even this, however, wouldn’t necessarily be all that illuminating. I’ve got a reference book on my desk that contains the 80-or-so pages of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and then a few hundred pages explaining what it actually means. It’s not enough to know what the verbatim text says; you need to understand how it interacts with other statutes, how key terms are defined in the law, how courts have interpreted the law’s provisions, and so on.
Legislation could be written in a somewhat more transparent way, but in light of all these complex interactions, it can’t actually be that much more transparent, for the same reason computer programs are a lot longer and more impenetrable than a plain-English description of what the program does. Achieving a result in a complex rule-based system requires a level of precision and sensitivity to how terms are used within the system that’s at odds with colloquial description. Of course, for precisely the same reason that summaries will give an ordinary person a better understanding of a law than scrutiny of the verbatim text, they also give a very incomplete understanding. An ordinary language description will tell you what a computer program is supposed to do. If you want to know whether it’s going to crash or open up a security vulnerability under certain conditions, perhaps when it interacts with other software running simultaneously, you need to have a look at the source code. Again, if you’ve spent any time digging through legislation, you know that the staff summary of a bill often glosses over many interesting little details and ambiguities you can ferret out while reading the text.
Most legislators, of course—even those with legal training—cannot possibly have the kind of expertise needed to undertake meaningful scrutiny of the details of legislative text outside a tiny number of issue areas. So does it make sense to insist that every member of Congress literally “read the bill”? Probably not. The actual text will contain important details not captured in a summary, but only an expert will really understand what those are on the basis of the text anyway. Crucially, this is not a function of needless obscurantism on the part of Congress: it is a necessary feature of legislation in a legal system as complex as ours. Which means that there’s a pretty basic tension between the value of democratic transparency and a large, complex government. Past a certain point, it’s more or less impossible for any individual legislator—let alone ordinary citizens—to really understand the vast majority of bills Congress takes up in any detailed way.
Transparent Health Care Legislating?
Will Americans get “quality time” with proposed health care legislation before it passes?
Some say no: The Senate Finance Committee recently turned back an effort to put Chairman Max Baucus’ bill online for 72 hours before the committee’s vote. The Committee is on the wrong side of history.
Transparency shifts power away from the center, so it’s favored by those out of power. It’s no wonder that Republican representative John Culberson, a member of the minority party, is putting H.R. 3400 (a significant health care bill) online for comment, using a tool called SharedBook.
Transparency won’t be a gift from government. It is something we have to take. That’s why I think the action lies in private efforts like OpenCongress, GovTrack, and (my own) WashingtonWatch.com. (Links are to sites’ H.R. 3400 pages.)
The public has a way of conforming their expectations to what’s possible, and transparent law-making is entirely possible today. Closed processes like the Senate Finance Committee’s consideration of health care legislation will not satisfy the public, and it will emerge from the committee with one strike against it irrespective of the merits.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
State Secrets, State Secrets Are No Fun
Despite Barack Obama’s frequent paeans to the value of transparency during the presidential campaign, his Justice Department has incensed civil liberties advocates by parroting the Bush administration’s broad invocations of the “state secrets privilege” in an effort to torpedo lawsuits challenging controversial interrogation and surveillance policies. Though in many cases the underlying facts have already been widely reported, DOJ lawyers implausibly claimed, not merely that particular classified information should not be aired in open court, but that any discussion of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of detainees to torture-friendly regimes, or of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, would imperil national security.
That may—emphasis on may—finally begin to change as of October 1st, when new guidelines for the invocation of the privilege issued by Attorney General Eric Holder kick in. Part of the change is procedural: state secrets claims will need to go through a review board and secure the personal approval of the Attorney General. Substantively, the new rules raise the bar for assertions of privilege by requiring attorneys to provide courts with specific evidence showing reason to expect disclosure would result in “significant harm” to national security. Moreover, those assertions would have to be narrowly tailored so as to allow cases to proceed on the basis of as much information as can safely be disclosed.
That’s the theory, at any rate. The ACLU is skeptical, and argues that relying on AG guidelines to curb state secrets overreach is like relying on the fox to guard the hen house. And indeed, hours after the announcement of the new guidelines—admittedly not yet in effect—government attorneys were singing the state secrets song in a continuing effort to get a suit over allegations of illegal wiretapping tossed. The cynical read here is that the new guidelines are meant to mollify legislators contemplating statutory limits on state secrets claims while preserving executive discretion to continue making precisely the same arguments, so long as they add the word “significant” and jump through a few extra hoops. Presumably we’ll start to see how serious they are come October. And as for those proposed statutory limits, if the new administration’s commitment to greater accountability is genuine, they should now have no objection to formal rules that simply reinforce the procedures and principles they’ve voluntarily embraced.
Why Chile Is More Economically Free Than the United States
In the 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Report, Chile is now #5, one place ahead of the United States.
In 1975, of 72 countries, Chile was No 71. How did this happen? The explanation lies in what I call the “Chilean Revolution,” because it was as important and transformative to my country as the celebrated American Revolution that gave birth to the United States.
The exceptional political circumstances of this period have obscured the fact that from 1975 to 1989 a true revolution took place in Chile, involving a radical, comprehensive, and sustained move toward economic and political freedom (from a starting point where there was neither one nor the other). This revolution not only doubled Chile’s historic rate of economic growth (to an average of 7% a year, 84-98), drastically reduced poverty (from 45% to 15%), and introduced several radical libertarian reforms that set the country on a path toward rapid development; but it also brought democracy, restored limited government, and established the rule of law.
In 1998, The Los Angeles Times described the importance of the Chilean Revolution to the world:
In a sense, it all began in Chile. In the early 1970s, Chile was one of the first economies in the developing world to test such concepts as deregulation of industries, privatization of state companies, freeing of prices from government control, and opening of the home market to imports. In 1981, Chile privatized its social-security system. Many of those ideas ultimately spread throughout Latin America and to the rest of the world. They are behind the reformation of Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union today… which demonstrates, once again, the awesome power of ideas.
Australian Trade Scholars Offer Perfect Cure for ‘Protectionitis’
Earlier this month, the Lowy Institute in Australia published a paper offering some very sound and, obviously, very timely advice about how to contain, and ultimately, eradicate protectionism. The paper is being circulated among the G20 delegations, who will undoubtedly discuss the topic of trade and protectionism in Pittsburgh next week. So for those of you interested in getting a sense of what will probably be the single best idea on (or at least near) the table at the G20 summit, I highly recommend this 20-pager.
The solution proposed by the authors boils down to a two-word phrase: “Domestic Transparency.” What is meant by that phrase is that “defeating protectionism begins at home.” And by that slogan, the authors mean that the key to reducing, and ultimately eliminating, protectionism is not external pressure from other countries, mercantilist trade negotiations, or filing trade complaints at the WTO, but rather greater awareness at home of the real costs of protectionism. I couldn’t agree more. (In fact better transparency is one of our recommendations in this paper).
When governments impose trade barriers at the behest of special interests, they usually justify that protectionism with diversionary rhetoric concerning some vague conception of the “national interest,” and the imperative of shielding domestic business from unfair competition and other vagaries of the globalized economy. That the protectionist measure itself—the product of special interests diverting productive resources from economic to political ends—forces involuntary and usually unknowing subsidization of those protection-seekers by the same citizens at large who are expected to buy into the national interest canard is a detail about which most people remain in the dark.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
Why Wall Street Loves Obama
Was it just me, or did there seem to be a whole lot of applause during Obama’s Wall Street speech? Remember this was a room full of Wall Street executives. The President even started by thanking the Wall Street execs for their “warm welcome.”
While of course, there was the obligatory slap on the wrist, that “we will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess,” but there was no mention that the bailouts were a thing of the past. Indeed, there is nothing in Obama’s financial plan that would prevent future bailouts, which is why I believe there was such applause. The message to the Goldman’s of the world, was, you better behave, but even if you don’t, you, and your debtholders will be bailed out.
The president also repeatedly called for “clear rules” and “transparency” – but where exactly in his plan is the clear line dividing who will or will not be bailed out? That’s the part Wall Street loves the most; they can all say we’ve “learned the lesson of Lehman: Wall Street firms cannot be allowed to fail.” At least that’s the lesson that Obama, Geithner and Bernanke have taken away. The truth is we’ve been down this road before with Fannie and Freddie. Politicians always called for them to do their part, and that their misdeeds would not be tolerated. Remember all the tough talk after the 2003 and 2004 accounting scandals at Freddie and Fannie? But still they got bailed out, and what new regulations were imposed were weak and ineffective.
As if the applause wasn’t enough, as Charles Gaspario points out, financial stocks rallied after the president’s speech. Clearly the markets don’t see his plan as bad for the financial industry.
It would seem the best investment Goldman has made in recent years was in its employees deciding to become the largest single corporate contributor to the Obama Presidential campaign. That’s an investment that continues to yield massive dividends.
A Bizarre Privacy Indictment
Page one of today’s Washington Times—above the fold—has a fascinating story indicting the White House for failing to disclose that it will collect and retain material posted by visitors to its pages on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. The story is fascinating because so much attention is being paid to it. (It was first reported, as an aside at least, by Major Garrett on Fox News a month ago.)
The question here is not over the niceties of the Presidential Records Act, which may or may not require collection and storage of the data. It’s over people’s expectations when they use the Internet.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information.
Of course, the White House is free to disclose or announce anything it wants. It might be nice to disclose this particular data practice. But is it really a breach of privacy—and, through failure to notify, transparency—if there isn’t a distinct disclosure about this particular data collection?
Let’s talk about what people expect when they use the Internet and social networking sites. Though the Internet is a gigantic copying machine, some may not know that data is collected online. They may imagine that, in the absence of notice, the data they post will not be warehoused and redistributed, even though that’s exactly what the Internet does.
There can be special problems when it is the government collecting the information. The White House’s “flag@whitehouse.gov” tip line was concerning because it asked Americans to submit information about others. There is a history of presidents amassing “enemies” lists. But this is not the complaint with White House tracking of data posted on its social networking sites.
People typically post things online because they want publicity for those things—often they want publicity for the fact that they are the ones posting, too. When they write letters, they give publicity to the information in the letter and the fact of having sent it. When they hold up signs, they seek publicity for the information on the signs, and their own role in publicizing it.
How strange that taking note of the things people publicize is taken as a violation of their privacy. And failing to notify them of the fact they will be observed and recorded is a failure of transparency.
America, for most of what you do, you do not get “notice” of the consequences. Instead, in the real world and online, you grown-ups are “on notice” that information you put online can be copied, stored, retransmitted, and reused in countless ways. Aside from uses that harm you, you have little recourse against that after you have made the decision to release information about yourself.
The White House is not in the wrong here. If there’s a lesson, it’s that people are responsible for their own privacy and need to be aware of how information moves in the online environment.
Public Information and Public Choice
One of the high points of last week’s Gov 2.0 Summit was transparency champion Carl Malamud’s speech on the history of public access to government information — ending with a clarion call for government documents, data, and deliberation to be made more freely available online. The argument is a clear slam-dunk on simple grounds of fairness and democratic accountability. If we’re going to be bound by the decisions made by regulatory agencies and courts, surely at a bare minimum we’re all entitled to know what those decisions are and how they were arrived at. But as many of the participants at the conference stressed, it’s not enough for the data to be available — it’s important that it be free, and in a machine readable form. Here’s one example of why, involving the PACER system for court records:
The fees for bulk legal data are a significant barrier to free enterprise, but an insurmountable barrier for the public interest. Scholars, nonprofit groups, journalists, students, and just plain citizens wishing to analyze the functioning of our courts are shut out. Organizations such as the ACLU and EFF and scholars at law schools have long complained that research across all court filings in the federal judiciary is impossible, because an eight cent per page charge applied to tens of millions of pages makes it prohibitive to identify systematic discrimination, privacy violations, or other structural deficiencies in our courts.
If you’re thinking in terms of individual cases — even those involving hundreds or thousands of pages of documents — eight cents per page might not sound like a very serious barrier. If you’re trying to do a meta-analysis that looks for patterns and trends across the body of cases as a whole, not only is the formal fee going to be prohibitive in the aggregate, but even free access won’t be much help unless the documents are in a format that can be easily read and processed by computers, given the much higher cost of human CPU cycles. That goes double if you want to be able to look for relationships across multiple different types of documents and data sets.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
A Transparency Reality Check
David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Obama, emailed me yesterday (along with perhaps several million others) to tell me about a new effort on Whitehouse.gov to dispel “rumors and scare tactics” from people opposing even more government regulation of the health sector. I think the opponents of expanded regulation have the better arguments on the merits.
I was struck, though, by the effort that has gone into creating an entirely new section of Whitehouse.gov for a “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check,” complete with fancy graphics and videos. (I have modified one of those graphics to illustrate this post. Fun!) Meanwhile, the White House still hasn’t brought itself to do something that President Obama promised on the campaign trail: post bills online for five days before signing them.
Since I last updated the chart, President Obama has signed seven more bills. None of them were posted online for five days, though two were held at the White House for that long before they got the president’s signature.
It’s the president’s prerogative to use Whitehouse.gov for PR, of course. The site and the PR on it would have more legitimacy, though, if it were also a basic resource for information about the legislative business the president conducts — as he promised.
Because the White House has established no uniform location for posting bills, there’s always a chance that I missed postings. I welcome corrections.
In my search for posted bills I did find this blog post, which says “The President believes that a piece of legislation as important as the Recovery Act must be implemented with an unprecedented degree of transparency.” But as you can see below, he denied the public a chance to review the Recovery Act as he promised, making it Public Law 111-5 within a day of its presentment.
Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Transparency: Obama’s Waterloo?
“When congressmen scoff at the notion of reading legislation because they aren’t qualified or they aren’t competent to understand it, how can we be confident that those congressman are competent to reengineer the entire health care system?”
So asked a citizen at a town hall meeting where Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) held forth before a cantankerous crowd.
It’s a fair question. And President Obama offered an answer during his campaign. He promised that he would post bills coming to him from Congress online for five days before signing them. Rather than relying on Congress, the public should have more oversight of it.
(Alas, it’s a promise he has violated thirty-nine forty-one times. He signed two more bills into law last week within a day of receiving them.)
Under President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” pledge or the 72-hour-hold in Congress preferred by the Sunlight Foundation, members of Congress and senators would be more reticent to introduce potentially controversial amendments, and they would be more obliged to know and defend what is in the bills they vote on.
President Obama set the standard—if not the precedent—by which lawmaking practice will be judged. He will have to rise to that standard as the public has more leisure to take the measure of his presidency. Congress will too.
(It’s not the president’s Waterloo, of course. I just put that in the title to attract your attention.)
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Broken Promises — to Voters and the New York Times
“[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye for her June 22 story on President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign pledge. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
The story, titled “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” was about the White House effort to walk back from President Obama’s campaign pledge to post bills he receives for five days before signing them.
When the New York Times published the story, five bills had been presented to the president and were awaiting his signature. Four more were presented to him after the story’s publication. All nine are now law.
And for the life of me, I can’t find where any of them have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. Surely it was clear to the White House that the five bills it had and the four soon to come would reach the president’s desk.
I disagree with arguments for releasing President Obama from his pledge to sign bills only after he has posted them for a full five days after receiving them. It would have the same effects as the 72-hour hold the Sunlight Foundation is seeking from Congress — also a welcome legislative process reform.
And it’s becoming more clear that the five-day promise could be implemented. At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. (The DTV Delay Act was actually not held five days after formal presentment, but the White House posted it after the final version had passed Congress.) Twenty-four other bills have been held at the White House five days or more before the President has signed them. They just haven’t been posted.
To repeat, over 60% of the legislation coming out of Congress waits five days for the president’s signature as a matter of course. The only thing preventing implementation of the president’s promise as to these bills is the White House’s inexplicable reluctance to do what it says it will do.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
One Web Site: $18,000,000
A company called Smartronix will get $18,000,000 to redesign Recovery.gov, the federal Web site intended to track where federal Recovery Act spending goes.
The government purchased technology for a similar site (with a somewhat smaller scope), USASpending.gov, from the non-profit group OMB Watch for only $600,000. A private company already provides information on Recovery Act spending to the public for free.
I wrote here enthusiastically about the plans of the Sunlight Foundation to go after this contract, saying “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risks of awarding the contract based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism. Transparency in all things.”
Sunlight did not ultimately bid. Instead, it took some lessons about the government contracting business. The transparency I wrote about materialized, though, and we can take a lesson, too: The federal government will pay $18,000,000 for one freaking Web site.
Ron Paul at Cato: ‘Audit the Fed’
When Texas Congressman and former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul speaks about transparency in the Federal Reserve, he sums up his argument with one simple question. Why not?
“Why in the world should this much power be given to a Federal Reserve that has the authority to create $1 trillion secretly?” Ron Paul asked a standing room-only crowd today at the Cato Institute.
Paul was on a panel of speakers, including Gilbert Schwartz, former associate general counsel to the Federal Reserve, to discuss a new bill that will audit the Fed for the first time in its history. This comes at a time when the Fed’s balance sheet has almost tripled, from just over $800 billion before the financial crisis to almost $2.3 trillion now.
“We will only win when the people wake up and realize that transparency is what we need,” said Paul. “When we know exactly what’s happening, there will be monetary reform.”
Watch the rest of Paul’s comments below:
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