President Proposes Results, Sunset Commissions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Anna Oman, (202) 234-8494

Statement of Robert Shull, Director of Regulatory Policy & Adam Hughes, Budget Policy Analyst

The White House submitted a legislative proposal to Congress today that would imperil the balance between the executive and legislative branches by concentrating power in the White House free of democratic accountability and would expose long-standing public protections to powerful special interests and industry insiders.

The proposal, the “Government Reorganization and Program Performance Improvement Act of 2005,” forces agencies to plead for their lives every ten years before a “sunset commission” and face automatic elimination unless Congress acts to reauthorize them. The White House would also be able to empanel “results commissions” that would propose plans for restructuring government programs, plans that would then be fast-tracked through Congress with very limited time for debate and no option for amendments.

This proposal is a bald power grab. There is no need for the White House’s proposal, because Congress already has the power to reorganize government programs when it determines the need to do so. Congress creates the agencies by statute in the first instance, and it revisits their effectiveness and continued existence each year through the budget process. The White House’s proposal would usurp power from Congress by entrusting unelected commissions with important decisions about the structure and function of all government services. Such decisions are too important to be ripped from the representatives who have been democratically elected to make them. Decisions this crucial — about the priorities of the government on issues such as health care, retirement security, environmental protection, and even homeland security and defense — deserve the full debate and consideration of elected bodies. The proposal gives the White House the power to ram its proposals through Congress and imposes such severe limitations on debate that it would effectively muzzle our elected representatives from speaking on these vital issues.

The White House claims its proposal will simply streamline government and increase the effectiveness of agencies and programs. In reality, this proposal would decrease their effectiveness by distracting them from their mission of protecting the public. Agencies would be required to comply with requests from sunset and results commissions for data and any other information the unelected commissions demand — even information the agencies would have to create or obtain from scratch. The result is agency staff would be forced to divert time, energy, and resources that should be devoted to their congressionally-mandated missions of protecting the public interest. Imposing yet more analytical requirements will induce paralysis by analysis.

Although the White House has exempted programs that protect public health, safety, civil rights, and the environment from the sunset commission sections of the proposal, it has left them vulnerable to the results commission section. Thus, even though they would not face automatic expiration every ten years, they still would be at the mercy of a commission with the power to possibly restructure them into irrelevance.

The proposal for the commissions does not stop at bypassing Congress — it also seeks to exclude public stakeholders from commenting on the priorities of the government. Both the results and the sunset commissions would be exempt from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, thus freeing them from balance and openness usually required of official government advisory panels. This would create the ultimate opportunity to put foxes in the henhouse as industry lobbyists and other special interests would have the opportunity to pack the panels and fast-track their wish-lists as legislative proposals. There are provisions for stakeholder participation and public comment periods, but they are merely optional.