The Sunlight Foundation scorched a flimsy report issued by the Congressional Research Service Dec. 1 purporting that the Obama Administration’s restrictive lobbying edicts have changed the culture of advocacy in Washington.
“It reaches an unsupported conclusion about the effect of the administration’s lobbying disclosure rules, and also contains several factual and analytical errors,” wrote policy counsel Daniel Schuman, a former CRS attorney.
White House lawyer Norm Eisen used the report to crow about how brilliant and effective the administration’s war on lobbyists has been on the White House blog.
We’re pleased that CRS recognized a fact that is apparent every day to those of us who work in government: the President’s historic restrictions on lobbying are having a significant impact in making sure that the government serves the public interest and not special interests.
The most glaring problem?
The big story is CRS’s conclusion that the “[c]reation of restrictions on federally registered lobbyists’ access to executive branch departments and agencies has already changed the relationship between lobbyists and covered executive officials.” However, the report does not explain the sense in which the term “relationship” is used, or whether these rules have changed the effectiveness of lobbying efforts …
Frankly, I don’t read the particular CRS passage that everyone has highligted as a gleaming endorsement as suggested in most media reports like this Politico story.
Perhaps I’m wrong, as no one has really disputed the general thrust of this story, but the language used is incredibly innocuous and not particularly positive. The report does not conclude that the administration’s regulations have decreased corruption or increased confidence in government. It concludes that the restrictions have “… already changed the relationship between lobbyists and covered executive branch officials.” [emphasis added].
I agree. The rules self-evidently change the relationship by booting off qualified lobbyists from agency boards (while leaving CEOs, union heads, lawyers, P.R. types and other professional advocates), ban lobbyists from talking to administration officials on stimulus projects and limit lobbyists from working in the White House.
This isn’t “hope and change” for the better, though, and I’m not sure why this milquetoast statement is considered an endorsement of the lobbying restrictions. In the same paragraph, CRS states “CRS takes no position on any of the options identified in this report.” If it’s an endorsement of the policy, it’s a pretty flimsy one as there’s no metric mentioned for determining exactly how the relationship has “reformed” lobbying.
The rules have been panned across the spectrum, as Politico notes:
[Melanie] Sloan, who was originally hired by Eisen, a founder of her group [Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington], called some of the administration’s lobbying changes “dumb” and made a similar point as Wenhold — that by still allowing executives who are not registered lobbyists to lobby administration officials, “all you’ve done is make other people de facto lobbyists.”
As a caveat, CCP doesn’t necessarily agree with the Sunlight Foundation’s policy recommendations for mandated lobbying disclosure for virtually every activity, but the analysis is interesting.
CCP’s last post on Norm’s lobbying edicts is here.
