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Congress is losing ground on the budget; it's time it claws that power back
Jun 30 2020
Hedtler-Gaudette is a policy analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that investigates misconduct and conflicts of interest by federal officials. Dayton is a policy advocate at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit working "to prevent our democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government."
<p>Back in April, President Trump said he would halt federal funding of the World Health Organization, on the grounds it was too slow to sound the alarm about the global spread of the coronavirus. The next month, he announced the United States was withdrawing from the WHO altogether. </p><p>Like so many of the president's norm-shattering proclamations, that raised the question: Can he do those things?</p><p>The answer, as it happens, is complicated — and it shines a bright light on the vulnerabilities in the congressional appropriations process and the wobbly balance of legislative and executive power. As Congress begins to exercise the power of the purse again, by starting this month to produce spending measures for the coming year, it would do well to learn from the troubling weaknesses the WHO issue raises.</p><p>Congress provided the president with discretion when it appropriated this year's funding for "international organizations," as has been typical. It neglected to specify an amount for the WHO, created after World War II to combat diseases of global import, or even mention the organization by name. </p><p>Instead, the law instructed the administration "to meet annual obligations of membership in international multilateral organizations, pursuant to treaties ... conventions, or specific acts of Congress," and provided a bucket of funds for doing so. Absent more specificity, the administration may be technically entitled to redirect funds originally destined for the WHO.</p><p>After more than seven decades as a dues-paying member, the United States is changing course by executive decree, but it's far from clear Congress intended to grant the executive such sweeping authority.</p><p>Lawmakers commonly appropriate without including line-item details, with the understanding that policymaking benefits from some reasonable flexibility. Undergirding this practice is trust. In exchange for granting some discretion, Congress expects the presidents will not run loose and suspend the flow of money clearly meant for a program or organization — or pursue policies clearly at odds with the nation's commitments as decided upon by Congress.</p><p>Whether the president has the technical authority misses the bigger point: The administration's actions risk further eroding trust between the two branches. The president is chipping away at the presumption of good faith. And, just as troubling, lawmakers are steadily losing control over their most critical constitutional prerogative.</p><p>In this respect, the WHO issue is one of many. Last year, for example, the White House's Office of Management and Budget informed federal agencies they need not reply to inquiries from Congress' Government Accountability Office about potential violations of appropriations law.</p><p>No statute specifically mandates agency cooperation with the GAO in this regard; the law only obligates agencies to report violations themselves. But traditionally, cooperation prevails. Alarmed, the GAO wrote to tell Congress the novel OMB guidance was an abrupt departure from long-standing norms.</p><p>As the president sidelines bedrock congressional authority, it falls on Congress to reassert its power to spend money. Otherwise, Congress' power and interbranch trust will continue to erode.</p><p>First, Congress should start with requiring spending transparency within the executive branch. While Trump announced termination of WHO funding, Capitol Hill has little visibility into whether and when funds would actually be withheld or redirected. </p><p>Congress should require publicly available and regular apportionment reports, and mandate compliance with requests for information from oversight bodies like the GAO. Congress should have little tolerance for being left in the dark when exercising its most basic constitutional duties.</p><p>Second, it's time to add some teeth to its lawmaking by authorizing disciplinary measures for officials who violate appropriations law. The Congressional Power of the Purse Act, a bill proposed this spring by the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Democrat John Yarmouth of Kentucky, would make progress on both fronts.</p><p>Perhaps most importantly, members of Congress should speak up in defense of their branch of government — and forcefully. </p><p>This pushback must include public statements but also assertive action to claw back the legislative branch's rightful position in our system of separated and balanced powers. Trump's letter to the WHO suggests the power of the purse lay squarely with the executive — Congress, meanwhile, entirely absent from the picture. </p><p>A president's usurpation of congressional authority is not novel, to be sure; every one of them has sought to accrete more spending power for himself. Still, recent episodes risk further muddying the constitutional waters, communicating to the public (and the world) that our government's spending authority resides with the executive. The Framers certainly disagreed, unequivocally vesting Congress with the sole constitutional power of the purse.</p><p>Reasonable people can disagree on policy, such as whether the United States should be the 194th member of WHO or keep current on its dues to belong. That's not the issue. This is about the president's unilateral decision and Congress' power to determine government spending priorities.</p><p>While the issue right now may be Trump's decision to leave the WHO, next year may bring a new administration. Congress should want to reassert its power of the purse regardless of who is in the White House. Congressional Democrats have excoriated this administration for assuming Congress' spending authority; should Joe Biden move into the Oval Office, we can expect congressional Republicans would rightfully do the same.</p><p>Congress' real struggle, then, is less about any one president and more over its own role as envisaged by the Constitution. The latter is certainly more enduring and more important, so Congress should stand up now and reclaim its authority.</p>
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A growing and diversifying economy has 706,000 people living in the city, more than Vermont or Wyoming.
First vote by Congress for D.C. statehood lays the ground for next year
Jun 26 2020
The House has voted for the first time to rectify one of the most counterintuitive quirks of American democracy:
People living in the national capital have less of a voice in the national government than all the rest of the nation — consigned to the same second-class status, taxation without representation, which sparked the Revolution that created the country.
Legislation to change that, by making the District of Columbia the 51st state, was approved 232-180 on Friday, the only passage of such a statehood measure by either chamber in the history of Congress.
But the almost purely party-line tally in the Democratic House will be the proposal's symbolically resonant high-water mark, at least for the year. That's because the Republican Senate had made plain it has zero interest in the measure, even before President Trump made explicit this week that he would veto it.
<p>As a result, once they became confident of passage by the House, many proponents started focusing their attention on the coming election — working to raise money and organize not only for former Vice President Joe Biden, who has endorsed the bill, but also for his fellow Democrats in close Senate contests.</p><p>A Biden presidency combined with a still-blue House and newly Democratic Senate, especially one willing to drop the 60-vote filibuster test for legislation, could propel the measure into law next year.</p><p>"The ample resources of D.C. residents — both human and material — should be devoted to races most likely to elect or reelect women and men who believe residents of the District deserve the right to full participation in American democracy," columnist Colbert I. King wrote this week in the Washington Post.</p><p>Partisan politics have neutralized the drive for statehood for decades, but Democrats believe they may be able to capitalize over time on the antagonism the president and administration officials have shown the city during the coronavirus pandemic and the protests over police brutality and racial injustice.</p><p>The legislation would create "Washington, Douglass Commonwealth" (an homage to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass), guaranteeing the new state would be treated the same as the existing 50 with respect to federal aid and spending formulas — and its people could elect two senators and one representative.</p><p>Now home to more than 706,000, the city is more populous than Wyoming or Vermont. Rapid growth and gentrification, spurred mainly by the arrival of high-tech and other industries that thrive off federal contracts, has diversified the population and made it more prosperous than ever. District residents now pay more federal income tax per capita than the residents of any state, and D.C. provides more tax revenue to the federal government than 22 other states.</p><p>The population nonetheless remains almost three-fifths Black and Latino, a bigger majority than any state, a demographic fact that has made statehood part of the agenda of many civil rights groups.</p><p>The D.C. electorate is such a deep blue — the last seven GOP presidential nominees have averaged 8 percent of the vote — that it would be guaranteed to elect a pair of Democratic senators and make a fully-enfranchised House member out of the non-voting Democratic delegate.</p><p>"We stand out as the only democracy in the world that denies democracy to the people of its national capital, and it's long past time to change that," Eleanor Holmes Norton, who's had that job for three decades, said in concluding the debate for her bill, which got the designation HR 51.</p><p>Partisan lopsidedness has assured solid Republican opposition to statehood. But GOP members also say the new state would have an unfair sway over the federal government, that D.C. officials are not prepared for the extra responsibilities of statehood and that the measure would deny Congress its constitutional power over the nation's capital.</p><p>To address that, the bill would shrink the seat of the federal government to the two square miles that take in the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court and bulk of the city's federal buildings.</p><p>Statehood was supported by 86 percent of D.C. residents in a 2016 referendum. Three years earlier the city started signaling its displeasure with the status quo — which includes Congress having the power to veto local ordinances — by making "Taxation Without Representation" the logo on its license plates.</p><p>The campaign gained new urgency this spring because of how the city was affected by the coronavirus pandemic and the civil unrest.</p><p>Although the District had one of the highest infection rates early on, and the economic consequences of its sustained shutdown were severe, it received $750 million less than the smallest state under the pandemic recovery package enacted in March.</p><p>And then last month, without the city's consent or collaboration, Trump deployed federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops across the city to repress protests after George Floyd's death in police custody.</p><p>"Statehood fixes it all," Mayor Muriel Bowser declared when the House announced debate on the bill.</p><p>The measure does not make clear who would pay the costs of becoming a state, however. The federal government, for example, might no longer feel obligated to provide more than $1 billion annually to fund Medicaid and much of the city's criminal justice system.</p><p>The last House vote on statehood was 27 years ago, when the municipal government was in a fiscal and ethical shambles. The bill got just 153 votes.</p>
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Glenn Nye
Meet the reformer: Glenn Nye, working to reduce the D.C. dysfunction he lived through
Jun 19 2020
Not all former members of Congress become big-money lobbyists; some even devote new careers to fixing the system they were once part of. Glenn Nye, for example, lasted just one term as the centrist Democratic congressman for the Atlantic coastal communities of Virginia. He lost in the GOP wave of 2010 and advised several technology companies and investment firms before signing on three years ago to run the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, a think tank working to break Washington's gridlock by incubating consensus-focused leaders for the executive and legislative branches. "I learned from the inside how our political system incentivizes dramatic partisanship," he says, and is now "sincerely hoping to be able to leave a better functioning political system than we found." His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
Incentivizing civility and compromise to fix a deadlocked system.
<p><strong>Describe your very first civic engagement.</strong></p><p>My first civic acts involved public displays of support for families of military service-people deployed to the first Gulf War when I was in high school in Norfolk. I cast my first vote, cast absentee when I was in college at Georgetown, in the 1992 presidential election. </p><p><strong>What was your biggest professional triumph?</strong></p><p>Securing the enactment of a law that provided a tax break to small businesses hiring returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Working on military family issues and veteran issues tended to be an area where we could find bipartisan cooperation in Congress, despite efforts by some in both parties to polarize every issue.</p><p><strong>And your most disappointing setback?</strong></p><p>Failing to pass anti-<a data-linked-post="2636688309" href="https://thefulcrum.us/gerrymandering" target="_blank">gerrymandering</a> reform during my term in Congress has been a decade-long disappointment. I co-sponsored a bill to impose criteria on states to use independent commissions to draw congressional boundaries — but failed to convince too many colleagues to support it. My hope was revived seeing how successful efforts have taken root at the state level. Still hoping to translate that to a federal requirement some day.</p><p><strong>How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?</strong></p><p>Growing up in a military community teaches you to approach problems pragmatically, to get at the incentives that drive behavior. That is why my team focuses our political reform work on changing incentives in order to produce more cooperative and functional policy making.</p><p><strong>What's the best advice you've ever been given?</strong></p><p>My first decade after college was primarily overseas in the foreign service, which took me from the Balkans to Afghanistan to the Middle East. When my tour in Iraq within the U.S. Agency for International Development ended in 2017, I was deciding between running for office or studying public policy. "Run for office," my dad advised. "Even if you lose, you'll learn enough about politics, your community and yourself to be able to teach the course."</p><p><strong>Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.</strong></p><p>The Ben & Gerrymander: raspberry and blueberry ice cream divided by oddly twisted pretzel sticks — and with a slight smoky flavor from a special backroom production facility.</p><p><strong>What's your favorite political movie or TV show?</strong></p><p>"The Distinguished Gentleman," the 1992 comedy with Eddie Murphy as a newly elected outsider congressman. It's a great parody on the rigged nature of campaign finance and influence.</p><p><strong>What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?</strong></p><p>Add new photos of our two sons on our family photo sharing app.</p><p><strong>What is your deepest, darkest secret?</strong></p><p>I am a big fan of the Katy Perry song "Firework." (This is just between us, right?)</p>
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A new report from Issue One Action shows how the wealthy special interests have spread their influence under the Trump administration.
The D.C. swamp has gotten swampier under Trump, report finds
Jun 17 2020
Four years after Donald Trump campaigned on "draining the swamp," wealthy special interests wielding power in Washington have only become more pervasive.
Spotlight on the Swamp, a new project launched last week by the bipartisan advocacy group Issue One Action, details how lobbying activity and spending has increased during the Trump administration, the "pay to play" system has persisted and D.C.'s ethical standards have fallen. (Issue One Action is affiliated with Issue One, which is incubating — but has no editorial say in — The Fulcrum.)
With the November election 20 weeks away, and Americans grappling with the compounded crises of Covid-19 and racial injustice, efforts to make the system more equitable and representative for everyone have become even more crucial.
<p>To determine the extent to which the power of special interests have grown during Trump's presidency, Issue One Action's project posed three questions:<br></p><ol class="ee-ol"><li>Has lobbyist influence been reduced and the revolving door slowed?</li><li>Has donor access and the "pay to play" system been reduced?</li><li>Is D.C. more ethical and accountable?</li></ol>
<p>"The answer to all three is a resounding no," the report found.</p>
<p>The number of registered lobbyists and the money they've spent has increased every year since 2017. Last year, nearly 12,000 lobbyists spent $3.47 billion. More than 280 lobbyists have been hired to work in the president's administration, and Trump has named more lobbyists to Cabinet-level positions than former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did in their eight-year terms.</p>
<p>Trump also hasn't addressed the growing presence of "<a data-linked-post="2636225613" href="https://thefulcrum.us/dark-money" target="_blank">dark money</a>" in elections. Since the Supreme Court's 2010 <a data-linked-post="2636209592" href="https://thefulcrum.us/citizens-united" target="_blank">Citizens United</a> decision, undisclosed donors have spent more than $1 billion. Additionally, more than 3,100 conflicts of interest within the president's administration have been flagged over the last three years.</p>
<p>"The facts are abundantly clear. More than ever, Washington, D.C., is a place where wealthy special interests buy access and influence and have an outsized say in government policymaking," said Issue One Action Executive Director Meredith McGehee.</p>
<p>While these problems didn't start with Trump, they have escalated during his presidency, according to Issue One Action, which outlines <a href="https://www.spotlightontheswamp.org/solutions" target="_blank">two dozen solutions</a> the Trump administration or Congress could take to reduce the influence of special interests and strengthen federal accountability standards. For instance, Congress could pass legislation to extend a mandated "cooling off" period between government officials leaving office and starting lobbying jobs. Other suggestions include releasing the White House visitor logs and nominating more qualified candidates to the Federal Election Commission.</p>
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