I suspect Congress won’t hire a collection agency to get the money, but Bush’s former Medicare chief appears to owe the government the cost of his salary.
The Department of Health and Human Services should have withheld former Medicare chief Thomas A. Scully’s salary last year because Scully wrongly kept a subordinate from giving Congress higher cost estimates on the Medicare prescription drug law, the Government Accountability Office said yesterday.
In a 13-page legal opinion, Anthony H. Gamboa, the GAO’s general counsel, said that a 1998 federal law prohibits an agency from paying a federal official who prevents another employee from communicating with Congress.
In writing that law, “Congress intended to advance two goals: to preserve the First Amendment rights of federal employees and to ensure that Congress had access to programmatic information from frontline employees,” Gamboa said in the opinion, which was requested by 18 Senate Democrats.
This is too entertaining for words. Scully threatened to fire Medicare actuary Richard Foster if Foster had the temerity to tell lawmakers the truth about Bush’s Medicare scheme. In the short term, the tactics worked — the administration lied to Congress about the costs of Bush’s plan and Congress passed the bill.
In the broader term, however, several laws were broken.
Nonpartisan congressional analysts said Bush administration officials appear to have violated federal law by barring Medicare’s chief actuary from sharing cost estimates with lawmakers debating prescription-drug legislation.
“Congress’s right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable,” said the Congressional Research Service legal analysis, which cites both statutes and related Supreme Court decisions dating back almost a century. “Political gamesmanship must yield to the clear public interest of providing elected representatives in the Congress with accurate and truthful information upon which to effectively fashion the laws for the nation,” it said.
And as a sign of just how secretive the administration is, officials still haven’t come clean.
The administration has adamantly refused to release Foster’s estimates, even since the law’s enactment in December. House Democrats have sued for the documents in federal court. The Associated Press, which sought the same materials under the Freedom of Information Act, received 13 pages that had previously been made public.
The administration withheld another 150 pages that HHS acknowledged are responsive to the AP’s request.
I know this isn’t nearly as exciting as, say, whether John Kerry was just past the Cambodian border in Christmas of 1969, but the Medicare scandal should hang like a weight around Bush’s neck. His administration intentionally misled Congress, forced officials who knew the truth into silence, and continues to hide pertinent information from lawmakers and the public — all the while, breaking several federal laws.
After nearly four years of scandals and corruption, this mess captures Bush’s entire approach to governing quite nicely. Best of all, there is no defense for the administration’s behavior; that they committed these acts is not under dispute. No one has even tried to present a compelling explanation to justify the administration’s criminal acts; instead they just pretend the acts never took place.
No accountability, no rule of law, no oversight. Welcome to Republican politics of the 21st century.