Barack Obama promised a more active, more open government. He’s delivered on half of that. Two House committee hearings last week focused on the Obama administration’s lack of transparency. Cliff Stearns’ Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and Darrell Issa’s Government Reform Committee both assailed the administration for operating behind closed doors. The hearings only scratched the surface of the problem.
Stearns quoted President Obama’s promise to have health care “negotiations televised on C-SPAN” so that “people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who is — who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”
But the March 5, 2009, White House meeting on health care reform wasn’t on C-Span, so we don’t know what top drug industry lobbyist Billy Tauzin and Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler were asking for. Neither did we get to see what Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer asked for on April 20. Or what AstraZeneca Chairman David Brennan asked for on May 8. The White House, in fact, did not disclose the content of any of Tauzin’s dozen meetings, nor the meetings with other drug industry CEOs.
We do know the White House did its best to accommodate the industry’s requests: Tauzin’s lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, endorsed the bill, and — as agreed in a meeting with top Senate Democrats (also not on C-Span) — spent generously on campaign ads supporting embattled Democrats who voted for the subsidy-laden bill.
When Stearns asked the White House for information on the meetings with the drug industry and the other powerful lobbies who backed the bill (such as the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association), White House Counsel Bob Bauer threw up a stone wall.
Bauer wrote that such transparency would reveal “documents reflecting internal deliberations and communications” and “would implicate long-standing Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”
These were the same excuses the Bush administration gave in rejecting transparency requests on its energy task force hearings — the ones about which then-Sen. Obama complained, “The oil companies were allowed to craft energy policy with Dick Cheney in secret. … The industry got everything it wanted.”
The Obama administration has its own energy policy transparency problems, too. In April, Hillary Clinton’s State Department concluded that TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline from China posed no serious environmental impact and met a serious need. TransCanada’s lobbyist on the issue, Paul Elliott, was deputy national director of Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.
Elliott’s lobbying disclosure forms show he lobbied State on the matter. But when environmentalist groups tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get more specifics, State flatly said no, on flimsy grounds. FOIA expert Mark Caramanica at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told Reuters the rejection was wrongheaded. In parts of State’s rejection letter, he said, “The State Department is making assumptions that aren’t there.”
So much for Obama’s much-trumpeted policy to “adopt a presumption in favor” of fulfilling FOIA requests.
Opacity is standard in this administration. For example, Obama’s housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, required lobbyists participating in meetings to sign nondisclosure forms, as first reported by Politico’s Chris Frates.
Back during the transition, the Obama team posted the names of its advisers on Change.gov, implying this was a complete list. But wireless company Clearwire told me that its vice president for policy, Gerard Salemme, was on leave of absence to help the transition team on telecom policy. Change.gov did not list Salemme’s name, and maybe for good reason: The policy toward which Salemme steered the transition team — delay in the transition to digital television — benefitted Clearwire by making the competition wait longer to get into the 4G wireless network.
Obama also promised that the $800 billion stimulus bill, loaded with handouts to private business, would be a model of transparency. It got off on the wrong foot when Obama signed the bill before the text was publicly available.
Then there was the bloated $18 million contract to software company Smartronix for building the transparency database. Nonprofit reporting outfit ProPublica begged the General Services Administration to disclose the details of this contract and related documents. When the GSA finally released the documents, they were “so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless,” ProPublica reported.
In July 2010, the Government Accountability Office found Recovery.gov failed to meet its transparency mandate. On the website, only 25 percent of the funding projects examined by the GAO had descriptions that met the bill’s transparency criteria.
Openness and transparency were central to Obama’s campaign. But they are hard to find in his administration.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
