Cass Sunstein, the president's regulatory czar, gave a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday. Focusing on the Obama Administration's alleged "accountability" and "transparency", Sunstein grossly exaggerated his boss' commitment to open government.
One of the White House's top regulators on Wednesday stressed the Obama administration takes public comments submitted on its transparency websites "extremely seriously."..."We've started to democratize data, we've used openness to promote accountability," Sunstein said, adding disclosure is a "low-cost, high-impact, regulatory tool.""What transparency does is allow the public to see and to comment on what are the easy cases, what are the hard cases, and how to think about the latter," he added.
The government doesn't take these websites seriously and never has. Their most celebrated attempt at transparency, Recovery.gov, was supposed to track stimulus money. Instead it wildly overestimated the number of jobs that had been created and claimed new jobs in imaginary zip codes. The White House website is used more as a bulletin board to make the case for health care reform than a transparency tool. Obama has also made a practice of holding closed door meetings with everyone from union bosses to drug lobbyists to Bill Ayers, according to the White House visitor logs.
Sunstein himself isn't transparent at all. He's an unaccountable czar of the president's and almost never makes public statements. The website for his department, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has scant information on it. In the speech, Sunstein gave no indication as to what he does. In fact, he barely mentioned regulatory reform at all, even though that's his job.
Sunstein has previously written that the First Amendment is outdated and needs to be rewritten to serve the public interest. He has suggested that animals should have legal rights and said we should celebrate Tax Day. He didn't address any of these controversies in his Brookings speech.
