Didn’t President Obama promise a new era of government accountability and transparency? If he truly meant it he wouldn’t have outsourced the crafting of the Porkulus bill to Nancy Pelosi and company. By now you’ve heard about the millions set aside by Nancy Pelosi to save the mice but you probably haven’t heard about the RAT hiding in the Porkulus bill.
The provision, which attracted virtually no attention in the debate over the 1,073-page stimulus bill, creates something called the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board — the RAT Board, as it’s known by the few insiders who are aware of it. The board would oversee the in-house watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose job is to independently investigate allegations of wrongdoing at various federal agencies, without fear of interference by political appointees or the White House.
In the name of accountability and transparency, Congress has given the RAT Board the authority to ask “that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting an audit or investigation.” If the inspector general doesn’t want to follow the wishes of the RAT Board, he’ll have to write a report explaining his decision to the board, as well as to the head of his agency (from whom he is supposedly independent) and to Congress. In the end, a determined inspector general can probably get his way, but only after jumping through bureaucratic hoops that will inevitably make him hesitate to go forward.
How appropriate that Congress will be overseen by their own RATs, or as Ed Morrissey puts it:
The name of the RAT Board is Orwellian, as is its appearance in the administration that claimed it would have the most transparency in American history. Putting IGs under Nancy Pelosi’s thumb eliminates transparency and accountability, and calling it an Accountability and Transparency Board is a grim joke. It’s simply a mechanism to shut down potentially embarrassing (or worse) IG investigations while commanding others against political foes.
Put simply, it brings the worst aspects of the Chicago Machine to Washington DC — a result which we repeatedly warned would happen with Obama’s election.
Can you imagine the outcry by the left and the media (I know, they’re one and the same) had President Bush and a Republican Congress slipped something like this into a so-called stimulus bill?
