Obama's Plan to Limit Influence of Lobbyists on Stimulus Spending
As funds from the $787 billion stimulus bill are funneled into states' coffers, President Barack Obama met with state legislators today to drive home the message that he's been stumping to the public, Congress, governors, and mayors: that they, as well as he, have to make sure the funds are spent responsibly. He also made several new announcements, including measures his administration would take to limit the influence of lobbyists in stimulus spending.
"I can't stand here and promise you that not one single dollar will slip through the cracks," Obama told legislators at the White House meeting. "What I can promise you is that we will do everything in our power to prevent that from happening." At a key congressional hearing on stimulus oversight yesterday, legislators and head stimulus watchdog Earl Devaney acknowledged that the estimate for fraud in large government contracts is around 7 percent—an equivalent of $55 billion in the stimulus package. (Devaney's job, he said, was to minimize that amount.)
While Obama emphasized that all levels of government will be responsible for being accountable, he also unveiled a couple of new measures to make that easier. One was a promise to limit lobbyists' influence in the choice of funding projects. If any member of his administration meets with a lobbyist about a stimulus project, he said, information about that meeting will be posted online. Requests from lobbyists to talk to any member of his administration about projects, meanwhile, will have to come in writing. "Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists," Obama said.
Obama also issued guidelines to the various federal agencies receiving funding today that will outline what constitutes "acceptable use of taxpayer money."
His comments come as many watchdogs have pivoted from questioning the spending overall to wondering whether the funds, as promised, will be able to be spent both quickly and responsibly. And with critics poised to jump on any waste or fraud in the spending, the issue, for Obama, is becoming a major political test.
Reader Comments
Charley Daniels' Idea
I heard long ago from an interview with Charley Daniels the country / western singer musician that he had an opinion on the first things to do to straighten out Washington, D.C. He said we should make it illegal for anyone to get paid to lobby. If they had to do it for things they believed in then, out of their own money, they could approach their congressmen and representitives and this sounded like a great idea to me. It took forever for ideas from people like Henry David Thoreau to become part of our laws. He wrote about problems we still have. When I originally read this I didn't realise that he wrote Walden's Pond in in the early 18 hundreds. Lobbyists running Washington, D.C. are limited now. Obama said during his campaign that his administration wouldn't be run by lobbyists. That, I am afraid, is going to be his biggest test and challenge for living up to his campaign promises. When it comes to the middle class Americans we don't have a lobbyist. Maybe we should figure out how to hire at least one to represent us. We need Job Recreation and Creation NOW and we aren't going to make it much longer without it. People think we are rewarding AIG for failing. It was AIG that insured the banks that failed and went broke spending money to keep them afloat. If the banks that were spending so much don't have F.D.I.C. insurance, that they got through AIG, then we won't have banks much longer. It will all be one large monopoly run by the government. Some people don't listen, so it doesn't matter, what will be - will be.
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