August 30 , 2010

Mr. Bush’s Broken Government . . . continued

This week’s edition begins the details of the analysis by the Center for Public Integrity (the Center) of the Bush Administration as it drew to a close. The Center compiled a list identified as “Forty ways in which the federal government failed to perform under the Administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2008.” Refer to last week’s edition for that list.

We begin with one example of conduct that was not actually spelled out as a single item on the list.

Signing Statements Thwart Congressional Intent: Bills passed by Congress (the House and the Senate) become law or are vetoed by the President. A third option is “changing the meaning of the legislation via a ‘signing statement’ attached while signing the bill into law.” An alarming 78% of Bush’s signing statements raised constitutional objections according to the Congressional Research Service. The Center quoted an American Bar Association task force warning that presidents should “simply veto legislation they deem unconstitutional.” An investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office regarding 2006 appropriations legislation in “six of 19 sample provisions addressed by Bush in his signing statements were ultimately not executed as written by Congress.”

Many items on the “forty-ways” list fall under the recurring theme category prevalent throughout the Bush Administration – lack of funding for oversight.

Failure of Whistleblower Protection: The Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Governance Act was passed in 2002 primarily in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Employees acting as whistleblowers of publicly traded companies were protected from retaliation by the Act. The Center’s analysis determined that of 1,273 complaints filed between 2002 and September 2008, 841 claims were dismissed with only 17 whistleblowers receiving favorable rulings from the Labor Department. The Labor Department based its decisions on the premise that the dismissed claims involved employees of subsidiaries, not the main companies, and that Sarbanes-Oxley did not cover employees of subsidiary companies. The Senators (Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley) who drafted the Sarbanes-Oxley statute adamantly disputed the Labor Department’s interpretation. Federal whistleblower employees were not protected by the statute at the time.

EPA Deprives Public of Information on Toxics: Collusion between the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Environmental Protection Agency allowed the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting requirements to be relaxed, ostensibly to “reduce the burden on industry to gather and report data on roughly 650 chemicals,” – this after chemical council data showed a 75% reduction in toxic emissions reportings. The Toxic Right-to-Know Prevention Act was introduced in the 110 th Congress (2007-2008), but got “stuck” in committee and was referenced in a Government Accountability Office transition report to the Obama Administration. The report stated that “the EPA should ensure information is ‘effectively collected and communicated to the public.’”

Science Policy Politicized: From almost day one of the Bush Administration, members of the scientific community criticized the handling of key scientific posts and the Adminisration’s almost disdain for science. The post of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, National Institutes of Health director and surgeon general went unfilled for months – 20 months for the FDA position. According to the Center, accusations of “politically-tinged appointments to science advisory boards in 2001” reached such a level as to prompt an investigation by the House Government Reform Committee. That Committee’s assessment concluded that the Bush Administration “was unique in having ‘repeatedly suppressed, distorted or obstructed science to suit political and ideological goals.’” The Union of Concerned Scientists followed with its statement denouncing the Bush tactics, reportedly signed by “thousands of scientists, including 49 Nobel laureates and 63 recipients of the National Medal of Honor. By April of 2008, the Union of Concerned Scientists disclosed its survey that showed “1,586 EPA scientists reported that 60 percent had experienced political interference in their work during the past five years . . .”

Medicare Fraud Out of Control: Fraud through various schemes – fraudulent billing services or medical equipment not provided – accounts for as much as $60 billion annually in Medicare (probably even more). Medicare and the U. S. Secretary of Health and Human Services place the blame on Congress for its failure to fund the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Fund. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requested that Congress provide $579 million which did not happen. The agency claims that even without such funding, already “existing fraud review process and pilot programs have saved billions of dollars.”

Next week, more from that “forty-ways” list. The reader’s comments or questions are always welcome. E-mail me at doris@dorisbeaver.com.

Doris Beaver