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White House to defend request for slush fund

Posted:  3/3/2008 TAKE ACTION to stop Bush plan for White House slush fund! Summary of budget request for Executive Office of President, from appendix to FY09 Budget Submission Background: A look back: Bush and cronies used 2007 for more destructive regulatory deform

President Bush is asking Congress for a White House slush fund, which may be one of the requests up for review when Office of Management & Budget director Jim Nussle appears before Congress later this week.

Nussle will testify on the requested budget for OMB before the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on March 6.

OMB’s requested budget

Among the features of OMB’s requested budget that Nussle may be expected to defend are the following:

• A 5.6% increase in spending for the Executive Office of the President, including $7 million for OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) — run by the controversial recess-appointed Susan Dudley — which wields power to delay and weaken public protections for the environment, safety, public health, consumers, privacy, and much more.
• The elimination of accountability limits on OMB, such as
  • deleting the prohibition on altering the transcript of other agencies’ testimony before congressional appropriations committees, and
  • deleting the limits on OMB second-guessing of Army Corps of Engineers water resource projects.
• A request for a White House slush fund through a proposal for 10% transfer authority to shift funds between the OMB account and other offices within the Executive Office of the President, which range from the Council on Environmental Quality to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  This slush fund could allow the White House to shift much more funding to OIRA -- giving Susan Dudley more power than ever to put wealthy corporate special interests ahead of the public interest.

OMB’s destructive record

OMB has a lengthy track record, particularly during the Bush administration, of weakening, delaying, and killing public protections and making it difficult for agencies to get things done to protect the public.

OMB has heavily relied on two major mechanisms of exerting power over protective policy:  regulatory process burdens and performance management.

Regulatory & science policy

OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been the headquarters of White House initiatives to weaken regulatory protections.  Created by statute to handle information resources management policy, OIRA has dedicated its resources to weakening and delaying regulations — a power it was never given by law, only executive order.

From its earliest days, OIRA’s record was a deadly one for the public, with decisions ranging from delaying warning labels on aspirin and weakening workers’ right to know about workplace hazards.

In more recent years, OIRA has labored behind the scenes to weaken public protections.  A small sample of cases would include

• working hand in glove with staff of Vice President Dick Cheney to develop a new framework for fuel economy standards that undermines the very purpose of fuel economy policies;
• weakening a regulation to require automobile dashboard alerts that trigger whenever a tire is dangerously under-inflated — something Congress demanded in the aftermath of the Ford-Firestone deaths; and
• weakening the cost-benefit analysis for a proposed rule to tighten standards on ground-level ozone emissions — the smog-forming emissions which Susan Dudley claimed erroneously, before becoming OIRA administraor, benefit health by protecting us from skin cancer.

After being forced to sneak Dudley into power through the back door, President Bush has moved to give Dudley and OIRA even more power than ever to get a stranglehold on regulatory protections and the scientific assessments that are often important to protective policies:

• a January 2007 executive order and bulletin giving Dudley the power to review not just regulations but also “guidance,” an amorphous category of information that could include almost any agency release, including risk assessments and important databases of toxicological profiles;
• a September 2007 memorandum clarifying what had been suspected for months:  that the new process burdens on “guidance” would also apply to many important risk assessments, with the result that wealthy corporate special interests could get three bites at the apple to force more reviews and delays of scientific evaluations; and
• a November 2007 draft report jointly authored with the European Commission that proposes, among other things, forcing agencies to further bias pre-regulation cost-benefit analyses by adding impacts on international trade and investment to the cost side of the cost-benefit comparison.

Performance management

With even less scrutiny and accountability given to OMB’s interference with regulation has been its use of performance measurement to “manage” government programs out of their duty to protect the public.

Like the Clinton-Gore “Reinventing Government” debacle, the Bush administration unveiled a performance management initiative it promptlyinflicted upon the public.  Called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), the initiative deploys OMB budget officers to review government programs using a one-size-fits-all questionnaire.

PART has proven to be a simplistic rubric that provides seemingly technical cover for ultimately political decisions to slash program budgets, decisions justified by claiming that the programs failed to demonstrate “results.”  Appropriators on both sides of the political aisle have registered their disapproval of PART, going so far as trying to defund it — during Republican-controlled Congresses, no less.

Agencies have been judged against criteria that are often inapposite. In some cases, agencies such as OSHA and the CPSC have been graded down for failing to base their standards on cost-benefit analyses — even though the agencies’ legal mandates prohibited them from doing so.  In fact, when Clay Johnson, OMB deputy director for management, was asked point-blank in a congressional hearing whether OMB gave low or failing PART scores to programs for failing to do what OMB demanded because they were following their legal mandates, Johnson’s answer was one simple, shocking word:  “Yes.”

Although PART has been expected to fade away like Reinventing Government before it, the White House has tried to codify it by executive order.

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