Politics

Under Obama, More Appointments Go Unfilled

Thursday, 28 February 2013 08:23

Written by Propublica

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by Theodoric Meyer--ProPublica

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services haven’t had a Senate-confirmed administrator since 2006. The Federal Labor Relations Authority has had only a single member since January and can’t issue decisions. And the Election Assistance Commission hasn’t had any commissioners at all since 2011.

All presidential administrations have vacancies. But an analysis of appointments data by ProPublica shows that President Obama hasn’t kept up with his predecessors in filling them. A greater share of presidentially appointed positions that require Senate confirmation were sitting vacant at the end of Obama’s first term than at the end of Bill Clinton’s or George W. Bush’s first terms.

At least 68 of the positions remain vacant, including 43 that have been vacant for more than a year.

The vacancies have been spread across dozens of different departments and agencies, with some hit harder than others. At the Department of the Interior, for instance, six of its 18 appointed positions were vacant at the end of Obama’s first term. The department had three vacancies midway through Clinton’s presidency and only one midway through Bush’s.

The lack of appointed leaders can create problems. Too many vacancies can put agencies “in stand-down, waiting for policymakers to show up,” said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied appointments.

Acting heads of agencies “don’t make any big decisions,” said Cal Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College who has studied appointments since the 1970s. “Your authority is not going to be recognized in the same way a Senate-confirmed appointee is going to be recognized.”

Overall, more than 13 percent of presidentially appointed positions hadn’t been filled at the end of Obama’s first term, compared with around 10 percent for Bush and 11 percent for Clinton. While the uptick compared with the Bush administration may sound small, it translates into dozens more vacant positions.

The data comes from the Plum Book, a directory of federal appointees released every four years. (We started looking at the data after it was flagged by the New York Times’ Derek Willis.) The data doesn’t include the vast majority of judicial appointments, for which vacancies have also risen under Obama.

The White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

So who’s to blame for the unfilled positions?

“I think President Obama bears some responsibility and the Senate bears some responsibility,” said Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research shows that Obama filled fewer positions in departments and executive agencies in his first year in the White House than any of the last four presidents.

Obama has been slower to make appointments, she said, and the Senate slower to confirm them.

Republicans have increasingly created roadblocks for nominees.

For instance, Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s nominees to the Election Assistance Commission — an agency charged with aiding voting that House Republicans voted to get rid of in 2011.

And Chuck Hagel this month became the only the third cabinet nominee to face a filibuster. (It was Democrats, however, who first toughened up the confirmation process, under Republican presidents in the 1970s and 1980s. And it was Democrats whofilibustered the first two cabinet nominees.)

At the same time, the number of positions the president must appoint has swelled. Obama signed a bill in August that removed the Senate confirmation requirement from some 166 positions, but the president still must fill over 1,000 appointed positions — a task that can prove overwhelming.

Clay Johnson, a Republican who headed the Presidential Personnel Office director under George W. Bush, said there simply are not enough White House staff to select and vet nominees, especially in the early days of an administration. Senate clashes over appointments, in his view, are less of a problem.

“There is little dispute that the current nominations process has grown too cumbersome and complicated, in some cases discouraging qualified individuals from seeking leadership positions,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said on the House floor when the bill passed.

Despite the recent efforts to reform appointments, the growing fierceness of Senate confirmation battles has fueled worries that it might get harder to find qualified nominees willing to endure them.

Consider William Boarman, whom Obama tapped to lead the Government Printing Office in 2010.

Boarman, a former printer, had headed the printing, publishing and media workers section of the Communications Workers of America union when he was nominated. He had advised the White House on choosing the next public printer — as the head of the GPO is known — before they offered him the nomination. He cleared the Senate Rules and Administration Committee unanimously in July 2010.

“I thought it was going to a cakewalk,” he said of the confirmation process.

But Boarman’s nomination failed to come up for a vote. (Roll Call reported that a senator had placed a hold on it.) Obama circumvented the delay by giving Boarman a recess appointment while the Senate was away in December, allowing him to take the post while the administration nominated him a second time.

As public printer, Boarman took steps to modernize the agency and cut its costs. He slashed bonuses — “which were being paid pretty liberally when I got there,” he said — offered buyouts to workers and introduced the GPO’s first e-books.

Boarman’s recess appointment lasted only until the end of Congress’s current session, however.

Obama had nominated Boarman again in January 2011, but his nomination continued to languish in the Senate. As Roll Call first reported, Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, both Republicans, were holding up Boarman’s nomination because they were unhappy that a nominee to the National Labor Relations Board had not been confirmed by the Senate.

Boarman’s nomination never came up for a vote. He turned on C-SPAN on Dec. 17, the last day Boarman could be confirmed, and found out he was out of a job.

The GPO is now run by the acting public printer, Davita Vance-Cooks, whom Boarman has hired after he arrived. But he said he doesn’t think an acting head can lead as effectively as a Senate-confirmed one.

“When you’re a political appointee,” Boarman said, “you feel that you’re empowered” to make the kind of changes that Boarman made when he arrived. “I don’t think you can do that as an acting,” he added.

Boarman, who left his well-paid union position to serve as public printer and is now retired, said he worried that the arduous confirmation process would make it hard to find good candidates: “If this continues to happen — and I have no reason to believe that it won’t — people aren’t going to serve.”

ProPublica’s Cora Currier contributed reporting to this story.

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IRS Should Bar Dark Money Groups From Funding Political Ads, Lawsuit Says

Thursday, 21 February 2013 00:00

Written by Propublica

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by Kim Barker--ProPublica

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.

As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don't have to identify their donors, have increasingly becomemajor players in politics since the Supreme Court'sCitizens United ruling in early 2010.

Gill, an emergency room doctor who has advocated for health-care reform, including a single-payer plan, was the Democratic candidate for the 13th district in Illinois last year. After a tight race, Gill ended up losing to the Republican candidate by 1,002 votes — a loss the lawsuit blames "largely, if not exclusively," on spending by the American Action Network, a social welfare nonprofit.

It's impossible to say for certain why Gill lost. He had lost three earlier races for a congressional seat.

But the American Action Network, launched in 2010 by former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, played a role. It reported spending almost $1.5 million on three TV commercials and Internet ads opposing Gill, mainly in the weeks right before the election. That was more than any other outside group spent on the race, and more than Gill's principal campaign committee spent on the entire election, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Though Gill had never held public office, the American Action Network ads described him as "a mad scientist" who supported sending jobs to China, channeling money to the failed green-energy company Solyndra, and making a mess out of health care and Medicare.

Gill said he ran into people every day who said they weren't voting for him because of claims he would destroy Medicare.

"I think that certainly the money put forward — they saw that they could have an impact here," Gill said of the American Action Network. "They wanted to put their money where it could make a difference between victory and defeat."

Dan Conston, spokesman for the American Action Network, described CREW as a "left-wing front group" in an email. He said Gill was a "failed candidate with an extreme ideology, looking to blame anyone but himself for losing his fourth-straight congressional election."

Nonprofits like the American Action Network have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into political ads in the last two election cycles. Like super PACs, these groups can accept unlimited donations. But super PACs must identify their donors, allowing voters to see who is behind their messages.

The Gill lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, alleges the IRS failed to properly regulate the American Action Network, citing seemingly contradictory definitions the agency has applied to such groups for years.

The statute governing social welfare nonprofits says they should be operated "exclusively" for promoting social welfare. But the IRSpaved the way for political spending by these groups by interpreting "exclusively" as meaning the groups had to only be "primarily" engaged in promoting the public good. Some groups have taken this to mean they can spend up to 49 percent of their money on election ads.

The lawsuit claims the IRS' interpretation of the law "is arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law," and asks for an injunction prohibiting the agency from using it.

Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director, blamed the IRS for sitting on its hands as social welfare nonprofits have been formed specifically to run negative ads paid for by anonymous donors.

"Now the IRS can explain its deplorable inaction in federal court," she said.

The IRS didn't respond to requests for comment Tuesday. It typically doesn't comment on issues related to individual taxpayers.

The American Action Network has been one of the more controversial dark money groups active in politics. Conston said the American Action Network's primary focus was on non-electoral activities and called the dispute over the group's election spending a "tired long-since settled argument."

In filings to the IRS, the group said it spent $25.7 million in its 2010 tax year. In separate filings to the Federal Election Commission, it reported spending about $19.4 million over the same period on political ads, or about 76 percent of the total expenditures reported to the IRS.

If the group stays on its current schedule, American Action Network won't file its taxes covering the 2012 election until May 2014.

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Can Vote-By-Mail Fix Those Long Lines At The Polls?

Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00

Written by Propublica

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama returned to a point he’d made on election night: The need to do somethingabout long voting lines. Obama announced his plan for a commission to “improve the voting experience in America.”

But often missing from discussions about how to make voting easier is the rapid expansion of absentee balloting. Letting people vote from home means fewer people queuing up at overburdened polling places. So why hasn’t vote-by-mail been heralded as the solution?

When it comes to absentee and mail-in voting, researchers and voting rights advocates aren’t sure the convenience is worth the potential for hundreds of thousands of rejected ballots.

Although Oregon and Washington are the only two states to conduct elections entirely by mail, absentee voting has expanded rapidly nationwide. Since 1980, the number of voters using absentee ballots has more than tripled. Roughly one in five votes is now absentee.

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia allow voters to request an absentee ballot for any reason, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from the six states that did so in 1988, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Rare cases of voting fraud are more likely to be through absentee ballots, The New York Times reported last fall, citing comment from some election officials. Compared to in-person voting, an absentee ballot also is more likely to be rejected.

Yet few legislators proposed restrictions on absentee and mail-in voting to prevent fraud during the wave of voter ID laws introduced in the last election. Some point to partisan politics, as Republican voters traditionally have been more likely to vote absentee while Democrats tend to turn out early to vote in-person.

Proponents of mail and absentee voting say it can encourage higher voter turnout. Last November, Oregon had the sixth-highest voter turnout of eligible voters in the country, though the five states with higher turnout had a mix of mail and in-person voting. Mail-only elections also require fewer staff and resources, said professor Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

The effect of absentee voting on wait times is unclear. Nationwide, line lengths have stayed fairly steady over the last 10 years.

In Florida, more than 28 percent of the nearly 8.5 million ballots cast in the last election were from absentee voters, up nearly 6 percentage points from 2008. In anticipation of discouragingly long lines, the Obama team ran a “Vote Now!” campaign endorsing early and absentee voting. Yet many Florida voters still reported standing in line for hours.

The long wait times were likely the result of cutbacks in early voting days and an unusually lengthy ballot, said Dartmouth professor Michael C. Herron, who with another researcher studied the effect of early voting restrictions in Florida last year.

Herron found that the rise of absentee voting in Florida was the result of long lines and expressed concern about the high number of rejected absentee ballots. Overall, nearly 23,000 of Florida’s absentee votes were thrown out in the last election.

“If the solution is to shut people into a process that has a 1 percent rejection rate, that could be a lot of people,” he said.

Like long lines, ballot rejection can disproportionately affect voters of color. In Florida, African-American voters who voted absentee were nearly twice as likely to have their ballot rejected as white absentee voters, Herron found. Vote-by-mail can also make it more difficult for low-income voters, who are more likely to move, to stay on top of registration requirements, Gronke said.

Gronke said he believes states that conduct all elections via mail are able to do a better job making sure votes get counted. Voters in Oregon have also been voting by mail ballot since 1998 and have a better handle on the system, he said.

Voting rights activists aren’t trumpeting mail-in voting as the best answer. Elisabeth MacNamara, national president of the League of Women Voters, said increasing early voting is not a priority. Instead, the League has focused on expanding online registration and securing more days of in-person early voting, she said.

“Is that a true 21st century solution to modernizing our election process, given the fact that fewer and fewer people are using the mail?” MacNamara said. Of vote-by-mail, she said, “I’m not sure this is going to be a long-term solution.”

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Obama Says We Need to Fix Voting Lines. But How?

Thursday, 14 February 2013 08:33

Written by Propublica

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by Christie Thompson--ProPublica

During the State of the Union address, Michelle Obama was joined by 102-year-old Desiline Victor, who, like many in Florida and elsewhere, waited hours to vote on Election Day.

“By the way,” Obama said in his election speech. “We have to fix that.”

But how to fix it remains unclear.

Though new research on states’ performance in the November election reveals long lines kept thousands from voting, there’s still much we don’t know about what would best speed up the process.

Victor’s home state of Florida had the longest average wait time of any state at 45 minutes. Victor waited for three hours. Other Floridians reported standing in line for up to 7 hours.

Not every voter had Victor’s stamina: Professor Theodore Allen at Ohio State University estimated that long lines in Florida deterred at least 201,000 people, using a formula based on voter turnout data and poll closing time. The number only includes people discouraged by the wait at their specific polling site, and not those who stayed home due to “the general inconvenience of election day.” The real number, Allen says, is likely much higher. One study also showed that black and Hispanic voters nationwide waited longer on average than white voters.

Some legislators are already proposing changes. Last week, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner released a set of recommended election reforms that included allowing counties to expand early voting to 14 days. The proposal would reverse Governor Rick Scott’s decision to reduce early voting in the last election.

Another reason behind Florida’s long lines was the state’s incredibly long ballot, which listed the full text of eleven, wordy constitutional amendments. Detzner has proposed limiting constitutional amendments to 75 words, which could also save counties money. The 2012 election in Florida’s St. Lucie County was roughly twice as expensive as 2008, a hike the county election supervisor blamed on printing, mailing and processing longer ballots.

Researchers say simply expanding voting hours and shortening ballots isn’t enough. The U.S. needs to overhaul how they decide to allocate resources on Election Day. Many counties determine how many voting machines and poll workers to have in a district based solely on the number of expected voters. Others don’t even do that, says Lawrence Norden, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

But the amount of time it can take to fill out a ballot can vary enormously by county or locale, because both ballots and machines can be different.

Yet the actual time it takes to cast a ballot is almost never considered. “How long the job takes should be taken into account when you provision the resources to do that job,” Allen says. “If you just do it on head count alone, you’re kind of being dumb.”

Allen calls that “dumb” approach “naive allocation.” According to his team’s research, counties could cut hours off of waiting time by shifting more machines to places with longer ballots. “By simply acting smarter, we could cut the waiting time to 1/4 of what it would have been,” Allen says.

Changes in voting technology can also result in voters spending more behind the curtain. After 2000’s “hanging chad” disaster, many states turned to electronic voting machines. The touch-screen machines are easier for many to use, and encourage voters to weigh in on every item up for vote. But they can also take twice as long to vote on, Allen says. And strapped city budgets are reluctant to shell out thousands of dollars per machine to make up for longer voting times.

Overall, average line waits have held fairly steady for the past ten years, says Professor Charles Stewart III of MIT. The problem is not necessarily getting worse, but it’s not getting any better, either.

“Studies show it’s the same places that keep having the same problems,” says Norden of the Brennan Center, referencing Stewart’s findings. “We tend to forget quickly after the election the problems that we had.”

And as Norden points out, “a lot of private companies have figured these things out in other contexts. There’s a reason…McDonalds never seems to have nine-hour lines.”

The most important thing, Stewart says, is conducting more research on what keeps lines long year after year. “This is a persistent problem and it’s one that we need to address,” he says, “but it’s not one [where] there is a magic bullet.”

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State Of The Union Fact Check: Obama's Big Speech Scrutinized

Wednesday, 13 February 2013 06:17

Written by Administrator

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WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama did some cherry-picking Tuesday night in defense of his record on jobs and laid out a conditional path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that may be less onerous than he made it sound.

A look at some of the claims in his State of the Union speech, a glance at the Republican counterargument and how they fit with the facts:

OBAMA: "After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over 6 million new jobs."

THE FACTS: That's in the ballpark, as far as it goes. But Obama starts his count not when he took office, but from the point in his first term when job losses were the highest. In doing so, he ignores the 5 million or so jobs that were lost on his watch, up to that point.

Private sector jobs have grown by 6.1 million since February 2010. But since he became president, the gain is a more modest 1.9 million.

And when losses in public sector employment are added to the mix, his overall jobs record is a gain of 1.2 million.

OBAMA: "We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas."

THE FACTS: Not so fast.

That's expected to happen in 12 more years.

Under a deal the Obama administration reached with automakers in 2011, vehicles will have a corporate average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, twice the 27 miles per gallon, on average, that cars and trucks get today. Automobile manufacturers won't start making changes to achieve the new fuel economy standards until model year 2017. Not all cars will double their gas mileage, since the standard is based on an average of a manufacturers' fleet.

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OBAMA: "Already the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the growth of health care costs."

THE FACTS: The jury is still out on whether Obama's health care overhaul will reduce the growth of health care costs. It's true that cost increases have eased, but many experts say that's due to the sluggish economy, not to the health care law, whose main provisions are not yet fully in effect.

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OBAMA: "Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship – a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally."

THE FACTS: The seemingly stern admonition that illegal immigrants must go to the back of the line, often heard from the president, doesn't appear to have much practical effect except in the most obvious sense. Everyone who joins a line, whether for a movie, a coffee or citizenship, starts at the back of that particular line. It's not clear he is saying anything more than that illegal immigrants won't get to cut in line for citizenship once they've obtained provisional legal status.

Like those living abroad who have applied to come to the U.S. legally, illegal immigrants who qualify for Obama's proposed path to citizenship will surely face long waits to be processed. But during that time, they are already in the U.S. and will get to stay, work and travel in the country under their new status as provisional immigrants, while those outside the U.S. simply have to wait.

Sending illegal immigrants to the "back of the line" is something of a distinction without a difference for some legal immigrants who dutifully followed all the rules before coming to the United States.

For instance, some legal immigrants who are in the U.S. on an employer-sponsored visa can't easily change jobs, or in some cases take a promotion, without jeopardizing their place in line to get a green card. In other cases, would-be legal immigrants in other countries wait for years to be able to settle in the U.S.

Obama is using "back of the line" somewhat figuratively, because there are multiple lines depending on the applicant's relationship with family already in the U.S. or with an employer. Generally, a foreign-born spouse of a U.S. citizen or someone with needed skills and a job offer will be accepted more quickly than many others.

But even as a figurative point, his assertion may cloak the fact that people who came to the U.S. illegally and win provisional status have the great advantage over applicants abroad of already being where they all want to go.

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OBAMA: "Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. ... And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. ... Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on – by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime."

THE FACTS: Dozens of studies have shown Head Start graduates are more likely to complete high school than their at-risk peers who don't participate in the program. But a study last year by the Department of Health and Human Services that found big vocabulary and social development gains for at-risk students in pre-kindergarten programs also found those effects largely faded by the time pupils reached third grade. The report didn't explain why the kids saw a drop-off in performance or predict how they would fare as they aged.

Continue Reading this article in the Huffington Post

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