Transparency: Good News / Bad News
Last week was an interesting week for transparency, with some good news and some bad news.
On the “good” side of the ledger, the administration rolled out “Data.gov,” a growing set of data feeds provided by U.S. government agencies. These will permit the public to do direct oversight of the kind I discussed at our “Just Give Us the Data!” policy forum back in December.
My metric of whether Data.gov is a success will be when independent users and Web sites use government data to produce new and interesting information and applications. The Sunlight Foundation has a contest underway to promote just that. Get ready for really interesting, cool, direct public oversight of the government.
Also under the White House’s new “Open Government Initiative,” an Open Government Dialogue “brainstorming session” began last week. The public can submit ideas for making the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This is important stuff, an outgrowth of President Obama’s open government directive, issued on his first full day in office.
That directive called for the Office of Management and Budget to require specific actions of agencies “within 120 days,” which meant the final product was due last week. And that missed deadline is where we start to slide into the “bad” on the transparency ledger.
Last week, President Obama gave an important speech on national security (which I blogged about here and here). But you couldn’t find the speech in the “Speeches” section of the Whitehouse.gov Web site. It’s buried elsewhere. That’s “basic Web site malpractice,” I told NextGov.com. And I cautioned my friends in the transparency community not to forget Government 1.0 for all the whiz-bang Gov 2.0 projects flashing before our eyes. Whitehouse.gov should be a useful, informative resource for average Americans.
The current top proposal on the “brainstorming” site referred to above is to require a 72-hour mandatory public review period on major spending bills. This is reminiscent of President Obama’s promise to hold bills five days before signing them. But, as Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times, the president signed several more bills last week without holding them the requisite time.
The White House protests that they posted links to bills on the Thomas Web site at the Whitehouse.gov blog. But that does not give the public meaningful review of the bills in their final form, as they have come to the president from Congress. “Posting a link from WhiteHouse.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it,” says John Wonderlich at Sunlight.
President Obama signed nine new laws since we last reviewed his record on the “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. Alas, it’s been a case study in pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
Five of the bills were held by the White House more than five days before the president signed them, but they weren’t posted! Simply posting them on Whitehouse.gov in final form would have satisfied “Sunlight Before Signing.”
President Obama’s average drops to .043, and that’s crediting him one win for the DTV Delay Act, which was posted at Whitehouse.gov in its final form for five days after Congress passed it, but before presentment, which is the logical time to start the five-day clock.
Here is the latest tally of bills passed by Congress, including the date presented, date signed, whether they’ve been posted or linked to at Whitehouse.gov, and whether they’ve been posted for the full five days after presentment. (Corrections welcome – there is no uniform way that the White House is posting bills or links, so I may have missed something.)
Transparency and National Security Are Not in Tension
Penny-wise and pound-foolish. That is my take on the “balance between transparency and national security” President Obama claims to have struck with regard to photographs of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib.
Taking it as a given that release of the photos would inflame enemies in Iraq and threaten our troops there, failing to release the photos will warm anti-American sentiment the world over for far longer as people assume that the U.S. is concealing far worse than what is already known.
Not lancing a boil is a way to avoid pain, but failing to lance that boil is potentially much more painful over the long haul. By not releasing the photos, President Obama protects troops today at a cost to more troops in the future.
The damage was done at Abu Ghraib. All that remains is to let sunlight heal the wounds or to let the infection continue to fester.
Bank ‘Stress Tests’ Need Transparency
As the bank stress tests are released, it is vital that the public receive specific and detailed information on each financial institution. The Administration’s and the Federal Reserve’s continued policy of attempting to disguise the differing health of each bank has been a failure. What is best for the taxpayer and the investing public is sufficient information to separate the good banks from the bad.
For those institutions which lack sufficient capital to remain solvent, they should seek private capital or else be closed and resolved. Too many taxpayer dollars have already been wasted keeping alive failed institutions. The Administration’s policy of keeping failed institutions on taxpayer-financed life-support only serves to retard the market’s ability to move assets away from those who do not, or cannot, make productive use of them toward those who can. It is time to remember that the unparalleled wealth-creating engine of the market depends as much on allowing failure as it does in encouraging success.
Banks passing the stress tests should be allowed and encouraged to re-pay their TARP funds as soon as possible, and with no additional strings attached. More importantly, the Administration should use any returned TARP funds to pay-down the increasing government debt, rather than be diverted to bailing-out other failed companies.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.
- Marian Tupy discusses African aid in his new Development Policy Analysis, “The False Promise of Gleneagles: Misguided Priorities at the Heart of the New Push for African Development,” and an op-ed in the Washington Times.
- Swaminathan Aiyar argues against a global currency in The Guardian.
- Daniel J. Mitchell calls for abolishing the death tax in USA Today.
- Will Wilkinson argues for more liberal immigration policies in The Week magazine.
- In the Christian Science Monitor, Benjamin Friedman says the United States should cut military spending in half.
- In Monday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Jim Harper explains why Obama’s record on following through with his campaign promise to post bills online for five days before signing is worse than the Washington Nationals’.
Obama’s Transparency Average Drops
On the campaign trail, President Obama promised to post bills online for five days before signing them.
Last week, President Obama signed three new bills into law. None of them received the promised “Sunlight Before Signing” treatment – at least, not as far as our research reveals. (The White House has yet to establish a uniform place on its Web site where the public can look for bills that the President has received from Congress.)
The new bills put today’s podcast on Obama’s five-day pledge slightly out of date. He is not batting .091 on his transparency pledge. He’s batting .071. The substance of the podcast remains true, however: This is still a worse record than the Nationals.
President Obama waited more than five days to sign two of the three bills he passed into law last week. The simple matter of posting them on Whitehouse.gov would have fulfilled the promise as to those bills – and would have brought his average up to .214.
The current list of new laws, with presentment date and signing date, is after the break.
Transparency for Thee but Not for Me
It appears that the Obama administration is high on transparency for everyone but its own allies. There are a lot of good reasons to reduce federal regulation, but if the Labor Department is going to push coercive unionism, it should require unions to disclose their activities and finances to their members.
Not in today’s world, however. The Obama administration is moving backwards. Reports the Washington Times:
The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.
The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. Instead, union officials will now be allowed to file older, less detailed conflict reports.
The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor, who also worked on the Obama transition team on labor issues.
The only people served by this move are union officials who want less oversight over their use of dues payments, much collected from unwilling workers. The new policy certainly runs counter to the president’s promise to set a new tone in Washington.
Does Transparency Inspire Terrorism?
The debate over the Obama administration’s release of the torture memos took an important turn during the past week, as reflected in discussions on the Sunday morning shows.
The economy was the lead story on Fox News Sunday, but in the second segment Chris Wallace led his questioning of Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) as follows:
The Pentagon now says that it’s going to release hundreds of photos of alleged abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel – this, after, of course, the release of the interrogation memos. Senator Bond, how serious is the threat of a backlash in the Middle East and the recruitment of more terrorists, possibly endangering U.S. soldiers in that part of the world?
Revelation! The idea that abusive practices on the part of the United States would draw people to the side of its enemies.
In the media, most of the debate up to now has centered on the tactical question of whether torture works, and to some degree the moral dimension. (Here’s David Rittgers on the former and Chris Preble on the latter.)
There’s an ineluctable conclusion from understanding that torture drives recruitment which endangers our soldiers: It is strategic error to engage in abusive practices. Abuse on the part of the United States adds heads to the hydra.
But wait. Wallace’s question may imply that it is release of the photos – not commission of the underlying offenses – that risks causing a backlash. This cannot be.
Given the governments they’ve long experienced, people in the Muslim and Arab worlds will generally assume the worst from what they know – and assume that even more than what they know is being hidden. Transparency about U.S. abuses cuts against that narrative and confuses the story that the United States is an abuser akin to the governments Arabs and Muslims have known.
Abusive practices create backlash against the United States. Transparency about abuses after the fact will dispel backlash and muddy the terrorist narrative about the United States and its role in the Middle East.
As the question turns to prosecution of wrongdoing by U.S. officials, such as lawyers who warped the law beyond recognition to justify torture, transparent application of the rule of law in this area would further disrupt a terrorist narrative about the United States.
New at Cato
Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe, here.
- “Bright Lines and Bailouts: To Bail or Not To Bail, That Is the Question”: Vern McKinley and Gary Gegenheimer have a new Policy Analysis that discusses the failure of bank bailouts.
- In a new piece at National Interest (Online), Doug Bandow offers a new strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il.
- Nat Hentoff reports on Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the Washington Times.
- Make no mistake: “Of course it was torture,” says Gene Healy in this week’s Examiner column.
- In Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Benjamin Friedman discusses the record of Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Obama.
A Flagging Obama Transparency Effort
President Obama made some very firm commitments about transparency as a campaigner. Among other things, he promised to post bills online for five days before he signs them. This promise has been fulfilled just once – and in that case, only arguably.
The Obama campaign Web site promised “Sunlight Before Signing:”
Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.”
To a roar of approval, President Obama pledged on the campaign trail: “[W]hen there is a bill that ends up on my desk as a president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing.”
Here’s a look at the White House’s uneven efforts to fulfill that promise:
Of the eleven bills President Obama has signed, only six have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. None have been posted for a full five days after presentment from Congress.
So Much for the Promise of Financial Transparency
President Barack Obama promised transparency and accountability for how the federal government spends the trillions — or is it quadrillions (I’ve lost count)? — in bail-out money, stimulus outlays, and expanded government programs. Alas, his administration doesn’t seem interested in living up to his promises.
The watchdog for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the government’s financial rescue plan, said today that the Treasury Department has not been cooperating with oversight efforts up to this point.
“We do not seem to be a priority for the Treasury Department,” the Congressional Oversight Panel’s Elizabeth Warren told a Senate Finance Committee hearing today.
“We have sent letters. We have requested that there be someone named so that we can get technical information. And so far, we have not been a first priority,” Warren said. “We use what you give us, and we will exercise the leverage given to us by Congress. In part, that’s why I’m here today. I’m here to talk to you about what’s happened so far, what we have discovered so far, the inquiries that we have in mid-stream and for which we continue to await responses.”
Warren, visibly frustrated with a lack of cooperation from the administration, emphasized, “This problem starts with Treasury.”
Obviously, this isn’t the first time that a presidential commitment has gone aglimmering. But given the extraordinary opportunity for pervasive waste, fraud, and abuse in the tsunami of new federal spending, few presidential commitments have been as important.
Canned Transparency
President Obama took a step toward making his administration more participatory and interactive Thursday. He answered questions that had been submitted to him in a program the White House calls “Open for Questions.”
Everyday Americans submitted questions, including video questions, and rated the questions of others to help determine which the president would answer. The questions he answered, of course, were the ones he and his staff chose.
President Obama promised to make his administration the most open and transparent in history, and taking questions from the public kind of looks like that. But it also kind of looks like a gimmicky, canned publicity stunt, rather than true openness in government.
Real transparency would include fulfilling his campaign promise to post bills online for five days before signing them. The president has now signed 10 bills into law and not subjected any of them to that five-day public review.
Let’s Be Fiscally Responsible, Starting Tomorrow
In his famous book, Confessions, the 5th-century theologian Augustine wrote that he used to pray before his conversion, “Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet.”
That quote came to mind as I read the news a moment ago that President Obama plans to sign the $410 billion catch-all appropriations bill even though it contains 8,500 “earmarks” that will cost taxpayers nearly $8 billion.
Recall that as a candidate, Obama said he and Democratic leaders in Congress would change the “business as usual” practice of stuffing spending bills with pet projects. Those earmarks, submitted by individual members to fund obscure projects in their own districts and states, typically become law without any debate or transparency.
Saying he would sign the “imperfect bill,” President Obama offered guidelines to curb earmarks … in the future. “The future demands that we operate in a different way than we have in the past,” he said. “So let there be no doubt: this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability.”
Lord, make us fiscally responsible, but not just yet.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
