An Associated Press story posted at 9:31 pm last night by Brett J. Blackledge notes that the Obama adminsitration “has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.” Recipients of federal money were originally supposed to report how many jobs they had “saved or created.” Now, they’re just supposed to report how many people got paid with the money.
The “saved or created” approach was an attempt to estimate how the Recovery Act spending affected employment. Unfortunately, it was impossible for this approach to deliver what it promised, as I pointed out in testimony to Congress last May. To know how many jobs the Recovery Act spending saved or created, we need to control for other factors that affect employment. We also need to control for the employment effects of the borrowing (and future taxing) that pays for the spending.
This is what good “macroeconomic” analysis does. It is not what employers do when they put people on the payroll. Asking employers who received federal money to tell us how many jobs were created or saved is asking them to give us information that they do not have and cannot acquire.
Under the new approach, employers will report quarterly how many people they are paying with the federal money. Since the reports will be quarterly, some jobs may be counted more than once — I guess as much as four times a year. According to the AP story, some Republicans are complaining that the new approach will lead to even larger and more misleading job numbers.
The numbers will likely be higher. But they will not necessarily be misleading, as long as recovery.gov makes clear that these are simply reports on the number of people paid with the federal money, not an attempt to measure the number of jobs created.
Estimating jobs created is work for serious macroeconomists who try to control for other factors affecting the results. There’s of course plenty of room for disagreement over how to do this, as this commentary by my Mercatus Center colleagues Garrett Jones and Veronique de Rugy demonstrates.
The administration’s decision demonstrates once again the old adage that data is not knowledge.
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s Chief Information Officer, may want to turn his attention to the The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which begins its public hearings tomorrow. Here’s a screen shot of the Commission’s website as of 11:02am EST today:
I also grabbed a copy of the PDF-only Notice of Open Meeting, as the site, located at http://www.fcic.gov, is scheduled to launch in its full form later today. This is according to Ray Lehmann, Senior Editor with SNL Financial who spoke to a representative of the Commission this morning.
Launching a site for a Commission the day before it holds its first hearing is unacceptable. The “page and a PDF” placeholder above, which cannot be found using any of the major search engines, hardly makes up for this.
A good CIO should outline clear guidelines about how and when sites go live, especially in an administration that professes to have a strong commitment to making government more transparent. Either Kundra hasn’t established these protocols or the FCIC isn’t following them. Either way, Kundra needs to do his job and make sure this sort of slap-shod approach to making government information available on the web is no longer accepted.
Kundra was recently named 2009 CIO of the year by Information Week for his efforts to modernize the antiquated hulk that is the federal IT infrastructure. It would seem he still has much work to do.
In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post last week, former FTC Commissioner Thomas Leary responded to a Post article describing the FTC’s suit against Intel as a “major step for President Obama,” consistent with his campaign promise to “reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.” Leary responded indignantly to this characterization by declaring:
People seem to forget that the FTC is a bipartisan independent agency.
As a Republican FTC commissioner appointed by a Democratic president, I can vouch for the agency’s independence. During my service from 1999 to 2005 in the administrations of presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, I never received a direct or indirect policy recommendation on a pending matter from anyone in the White House or from any of the people in Congress who had actively supported me.
Leary’s leeriness about political encroachment on the FTC illustrates the depth of abiding faith in independent regulatory agencies as standing truly apart from the day-to-day politics of Washington—especially when the might of the regulatory state is being wielded against a particular company in quasi-judicial prosecutions, such as antitrust enforcement actions. But if the independence of the FTC is this important, what about the independence of the Federal Communications Commission, with its broad jurisdiction over the media and tools of free speech?
Leary would probably be appalled at the politicization of the FCC in recent years. Bush’s second FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, was infamous for his political Machiavellianism and widely despised by the communications law bar. By contrast, when it became clear that Obama’s high-tech advisor Julius Genachowski would succeed Martin as FCC Chairman shortly before Obama’s inauguration, he received a chorus of applause from a wide range of philosophical perspectives, including from our former president at PFF, Ken Ferree:
Julius Genachowski is an outstanding choice to chair the Commission. He is knowledgeable, experienced, and presumably will have the ear of the most influential people within the Administration.
While no one would compare the eminently likable Genachowski to Martin, his relationship to the Obama administration appears unprecedented in its closeness, and one must ask whether that’s a good thing for the head of a supposedly “independent” regulatory agency or integrity of that agency’s decision-making. Continue reading →
I’m delighted to report that the White House’s web site, Whitehouse.gov, has begun posting the bills Congress sends down Pennsylvania Avenue so they can get a final public review. This actually began some time ago, but a link from the home page now directs visitors (and search engines) to the bills that await the president’s signature.
This is an important step toward fulfilling President Obama’s campaign promise to post the bills he receives from Congress online for five days before he signs them.
Currently, four bills are listed there, arranged in order by the dates they were posted. The final language isn’t posted at the link, and it takes a little sophistication to find the final version at the linked-to page on the Thomas system, but this is substantial progress.
Kudos to the White House for moving toward full implementation of President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise!
The White House announces its open government plans today, live at 11:00 am Eastern, on Whitehouse.gov.
But what about the president’s promise to run his own White House more transparently? In a post on Cato@Liberty this morning, I look into a new development on the Sunlight Before Signing promise, which he has violated more than 100 times since taking office.
At some point earlier this year, the White House began posting links on Whitehouse.gov to bills that were heading its direction, a half-measure the White House told the New York Times it would take.
I failed to notice the existence of these pages, but I think it is forgivable error. There is no uniform structure to them, and there is no link I can discover on Whitehouse.gov that would bring anyone to them.
Based on my spot-checking, they haven’t been crawled by any search engine, so the only way a person could find them is by searching on Whitehouse.gov for phrases on the yet unseen pages or by searching the House or Senate bill numbers of bills that you know to look for because they have already passed into law.
This doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the Sunlight Before Signing pledge. It doesn’t give the public an opportunity to review final bills and comment before the president signs them. I doubt if a single one of the people who cheered when President Obama made his Sunlight Before Signing pledge has visited one of these pages and commented to the president as he told them they would be able to do.
There are further curiosities: The pages themselves are undated, but their “posted” dates, which appear in search results, are sometimes well beyond the date on which they became law. A Whitehouse.gov search for H.R. 2131, which became Public Law 111-70 on October 9th, shows that it was posted for comment on October 23rd.
Is the White House posting bills for review after they’ve become law, trying to make it look like they’re providing some measure of sunlight?
Move over, health care reform, climate change, and the economy. Judging by White House visits by various government agency heads, the Obama administration instead appears preoccupied with the re-regulation of communications, media, and the Internet. The Administration has just released logs of all visitors to the White House and Executive Office Buildings from Obama’s inauguration through August—including a staggering 47 visits by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski. By contrast, no other major agency head logged more than five visits. Chairman Genachowski obviously has an audience with those at the highest levels of power, including the President himself, but this raises questions about just how “independent” this particular regulator and his agency really are.
Unprecedented Transparency by White House
The Administration deserves credit for releasing these visitor logs, which offer unprecedented transparency into the White House’s workings. Unfortunately, the logs lack visitors’ affiliation and title, making it difficult to discern subtle patterns. Furthermore, each entry indicates only one “visitee” and the total number of people involved. Full disclosure requires identifying all meeting participants. Nonetheless, President Obama’s gesture is a great first step toward improved government accountability.
This openness allows us to ask questions we couldn’t pose for previous administrations—such as why the FCC head seems to have unparalleled access to the White House. Lacking data from previous administrations, it’s difficult to make direct comparisons with previous FCC Chairmen, but the sheer number of visits by Chairman Genachowski leaves no doubt about his uniquely close involvement with the White House. Continue reading →
Here’s something that may appeal to transparency enthusiasts, as well as to environmental skeptics…
WASHINGTON, November 9, 2009 – BroadbandCensus.com has been investigating broadband stimulus projects and focusing on the preferred projects from the states. We still lack letters to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration – or notices that states are demanding confidentiality for their letters – from 13 states and territories.
The first person to send any letters from the following states will get a complimentary seat at the November 10 Broadband Breakfast Club at Clyde’s of Gallery Place at 707 7th Street NW, Washington, DC. The breakfast runs from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the topic is “Setting the Table for the National Broadband Plan: The Environment.” Information about the event, and registration, is available at http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.
As someone who follows the federal regulatory process, I was amazed to see this in a recent American Spectator post about White House technology advisor Susan Crawford’s return to the University of Michigan Law School:
But White House sources say that she ran afoul of senior White House economics adviser Larry Summers, who claimed he and other senior Obama officials were unaware of how radical the draft Net Neutrality regulations were when they were initially internally circulated to Obama administration officials several weeks ago … In the end, the proposed regulations were slightly moderated from the original language FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, a Crawford ally, circulated.
Unlike regulatory agencies that are considered part of the executive branch, the Federal Communications Commission is an “independent” regulatory agency — which means the president cannot fire its five commissioners. Before executive branch agencies can propose a regulation, it must be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). No administration has yet tried to bring independent agencies like the FCC under OIRA review.
Typically, congressional and private watchdogs scream bloody murder when they see the White House trying to influence independent agencies. But I haven’t heard any barking about this one.
Personally, I think independent agencies’ regulations should be subject to OIRA review. I don’t mind letting the president and his advisors have their say on regulations proposed by people he appointed. But I’d like to see it happen through the formal OIRA review process, where the public knows it’s happening and knows what the rules are.
For example: If you want to know which proposed regulations OIRA has reviewed, go here. If you want to know the standards OIRA uses to review regulations, go here. If you want to know what outside parties have met with OIRA to discuss regulations, go here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.