By ALINA SELYUKH
(Credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
With just one signature, President Obama not only sent $787 billion rolling into the U.S. economy, he also moved a few steps closer to fulfilling at least 38 pledges he made on the campaign trail, scratching one completely off the to-do list.
The wide-ranging stimulus bill, which Obama signed in Denver on Tuesday, included investments in Medicaid, research and development, health IT, renewable energy, energy efficiency and education, to name a few areas. Taxes and energy and the environment were the two categories of promises most affected by the bill, with veterans, education, health care and housing trailing after them.
Most of the energy and environment promises that the bill helped to advance had to do with improving energy efficiency and helping U.S. automakers to produce hybrid vehicles. Obama's tax promises were more specific, including exact goals such as cutting income taxes by $1,000 for working families and tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit. The long congressional negotiations over the bill resulted in some compromises from what the White House would have wanted -- the tax cut for working families was reduced to $800, for example, and the EITC increased by only 5 percentage points.
Yet the sole campaign promise that Obama checked off completely with the stimulus bill also involved taxes. The adjustments made to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit expanded its scope to cover low-income families making at least $3,000.
Progress stalled on some promises, however. A provision reforming bankruptcy laws to cover health costs was dropped from the final bill, and language that would have protected federal whistleblowers was removed after the House and Senate failed to reconcile conflicting versions. Although Obama didn't promise stimulus funding for Gulf Coast states hit by Hurricane Katrina, other flood control projects did get funding beyond the $90 billion in infrastructure money divided among the states.
The administration also reversed course on two government spending promises -- to pay for job programs with cuts and to reinstate PAYGO. Another spending promise, to restore earmark spending to pre-1994 levels, is harder to evaluate.
In one case of potential missed opportunity, there was no special funding for Gulf Coast reconstruction in the bill -- something Obama promised in New Orleans last year -- even while other flood control projects were included beyond the $90 billion in infrastructure money divided among the states.
The list of all promises advanced during the stimulus wrangling follows after the jump.
Updated at 12:12 p.m. on Feb. 20.
Continue reading Stimulus Moves Obama Forward On Campaign Promises.
By JILL R. AITORO, NextGov
The White House was expected to announce as early as today that Melissa Hathaway, top cybersecurity adviser to the director of national intelligence, will oversee a 60-day review of federal cybersecurity efforts, after which she will likely be offered the position of cyber czar, a position Obama promised to create while campaigning, an intelligence official confirmed Friday.
Hathaway, who serves as the cyber coordination executive at ODNI and was senior adviser to former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, will leave ODNI for 60 days to conduct the review of overall cyber organization and strategy in the federal government, said multiple sources with inside knowledge of the appointment.
Hathaway will lead the review with the National Security Council, the president's principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy issues with senior advisers and Cabinet officials. The council also helps coordinate policies among federal agencies.
"She will review short-term problems of cybersecurity that need immediate fixing," said an intelligence official who asked not to be named. When asked whether she will be offered the highly anticipated position of cyber czar, he said "probably so."
Hathaway chairs the National Cyber Study Group, a senior-level interagency body that played a lead role in the development of President Bush's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. She also serves as director of the Joint Interagency Cyber Joint Task Force, which oversees coordination of CNCI activities and programs.
Janet Napolitano, the newly appointed secretary of the Homeland Security Department, is running a parallel review at DHS outlining the state of cybersecurity in government.
By KEVIN FRIEDL
When President Obama signed into law an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Wednesday, he was keeping one promise while breaking another.
The measure, designed to expand health insurance to some 4 million additional children, was a significant step towards his pledge to "require that all children have health care coverage. And in his remarks at the signing ceremony, the president called it a "down payment" on his broader pledge to bring universal coverage to the U.S.
But by signing the bill the same afternoon it was passed in the House, Obama fell to an 0-2 record on one of his most specific good-government promises, announced over a year and a half ago during a campaign speech in Manchester, N.H.: "When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it."
The wording of that pledge has since been amended to refer only to "non-emergency legislation," but neither the SCHIP legislation nor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act he signed into law last week meet that test. The White House eventually did post the Ledbetter legislation online, but only after it had already been signed.
In response to inquiries, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro sent a statement reading in part, "We will be implementing this policy in full soon; currently we are working through implementation procedures and some initial issues with the congressional calendar."
The White House has made some progress towards fulfilling this promise. Whereas Ledbetter didn't appear on WhiteHouse.gov until after it was signed, the administration posted a link to the SCHIP bill on Feb. 1.
"Their actions are filling the spirit of openness they pledged," said John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, an open government group. "But they are so far failing to follow the letter of the pledge that they made."
Along with the link to the text of the legislation, the bill's page on WhiteHouse.gov included a commenting section -- but it is unclear from the site how that feedback is used, and there is no provision for seeing others' submissions or voting up and down suggestions, as there was on Obama's transition Web site. And then there is the complaint that taking feedback after a bill has already reached the president's desk means it's too late for tweaks and amendments.
"Ultimately, it seems to me that it is a meaningful thing for Obama to do, but not necessarily for immediate effects," said Wonderlich. "It's very unlikely he would veto something because of bad feedback. But it brings people into the process."
For progress updates on this and other campaign pledges, see National Journal.com's Promise Audit.
Updated at 1:05 p.m. on Feb. 5.
The "Administration" category of NationalJournal.com's Promise Audit is freshly updated, but we thought one pledge deserved a closer look.
By ALINA SELYUKH
Shoving aside two unsuccessful examples, President Obama plans to attempt his own take on a pledge made previously by both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to "thin the ranks of Washington middle managers." In a document released on the campaign trail titled "The Change We Need in Washington," Obama promised he would free up resources "both for deficit reduction and for increasing the number of frontline workers."
Experts agree the promise might be hard to measure and -- more importantly -- accomplish.
"The vast majority of federal employees are not managerial, so it's not clear, if we pursued this promise vigorously, how much in savings we'd reap or how many folks we'd get to move to the front lines," said Robert Shea, an associate director for the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget.
Obama adds complexity by committing to move middle managers to the front line. Without that clause, the promise would be "a lot easier to execute," said Paul Light, who researches federal bureaucracy as a public service professor at New York University. After all key OMB players are on board, Light expects a plan to slowly take shape, but making downward shifts will be "a real problem." The administration may reclassify someone as on the front line, but stripping away higher pay is a cumbersome process. "The most efficient way is to remove the occupant or take advantage of the occupant's retirement and recreate the position on the lower level," he said.
Reclassifying instead of eliminating jobs is what undermined Clinton's plan, Light said. The initiative to cut management layers and do away with superfluous positions, around 252,000 in all, morphed into creation of new de facto middle managers under different titles. Clinton's "Reinventing Government" program made the mistake of proposing personnel cuts across the board, Shea said. The cuts "weren't done strategically, so programs that needed more employees probably lost some," he said. "Doing anything like this across the board is a bad idea."
The Clinton plan also came under fire for applying the private sector's manager-employee and supervisory ratios, something Darryl Perkinson, national president of the Federal Managers Association, dismissed as a poor replacement for conversations with middle managers about their place and potential in government affairs.
"In my 29 years, I have worked with only a handful of people that had no business being employed in the government," he said. "I have seen people in the wrong jobs at times, but if they were properly placed they could function and be useful." Referring to Obama's promise to eliminate redundant federal programs by evaluating each and every one of them, Perkinson said the examination "will in most cases highlight the inefficiency is due to the incomplete or misdirected policy of the program, not the effort of the manager."
Bush never took up his promise to reduce the ranks of middle managers by 40,000 though attrition. But Shea said OMB "always had a challenge keeping all positions filled, and we could have used more people in certain areas, but we never made the case."
Light estimated that 14 percent of full-time civil servants in the federal government -- 200,000 to 250,000 people -- are managers of some kind. Depending on what definition of a middle manager guided Obama's promise, the administration might have to fire a number of them to actually reduce spending on salaries while increasing frontline help. That's "easy and very painful to do," Light said. "It's a terrible economy in which to dump... however many middle managers into a Washington economy or a regional economy."
While speculation about Obama's exact plans is premature before his 2010 budget is released in February, specialists agree the administration is unlikely to repeat past mistakes.
Light said the first indication of progress might be a decrease in jobs classified as managerial, which "will take a little bit of time." Shea, however, was less optimistic about obvious signs of the promise's implementation.
"We may not know when or if it is fulfilled," he said.
