I’ve been reluctant to go into too much detail in criticizing Bush’s latest federal budget, in large part because it’s too ridiculous to take seriously. It became irrelevant a few minutes after White House officials dropped off a copy at the Senate Budget Committee’s office.
The document is helpful, however, in highlighting the president’s misguided priorities. Whether Congress ignores the budget proposal or not, it’s important to know, for example, that Bush wants to balance the budget by extending tax cuts for billionaires, while slashing funding for children’s health care, education, housing for low-income seniors, and community and regional development grants.
This is not to say, however, that the president has suddenly become thrifty. No, there are some domestic programs for which Bush wants to increase spending. Take, for example, a series of anti-drug ads that don’t work.
President Bush has proposed a significant jump in funding for an anti-drug advertising campaign that government-funded research shows is at best useless and at worst has increased drug use among some teens.
The administration has asked for a 31 percent increase in funding for the advertising campaign that a nearly five-year study concluded had increased the likelihood that all teens would smoke marijuana. The White House proposal would increase the program’s budget to $130 million over the next year.
Several times in his first term, Bush articulated his philosophy for domestic social spending, particularly as it relates to helping Americans get off drugs: “Out of the halls of Congress, we ought not to be stuck on process. We ought to be focused on results. We ought to ask the question, does it work? And if it works, we ought to welcome anything that works to save American lives.”
Apparently, the emphasis on efficacy is no longer operative.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy asked the Government Accountability Office to scrutinize whether the ad campaign was worthwhile. The GAO conducted a thorough, five-year investigation and came up with a fairly clear answer — which the White House didn’t want anyone to know about.
The bad study results weren’t news to the White House, which sat on the research for a year and a half while continuing to fund the ad campaign on the basis that the study was still ongoing, Slate magazine reported in September. In October, National Journal reported that John Carnevale, former director of budget and planning for the drug czar’s office, admitted that the office “did not like the report’s conclusions and chose to sit on it.”
The GAO-reviewed study found that “greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana.” In some categories, such as 14- to 16-year-olds, and among all white teens, more exposure to the ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use.
In 2003, the Office of Management and Budget evaluated the program and determined it showed virtually no results. The 6 percent score on the program’s effectiveness forced the program to come up with an improvement plan. OMB’s Web site still notes that the plan is “pending the receipt of the GAO report assessing the Media Campaign evaluation,” which was received more than two years ago.
Since 1998, the federal government has spent more than $1.4 billion on the ad campaign. Now that administration officials know that the campaign isn’t effective, they want to spend more. Apparently, when Bush insisted, “We ought to ask the question, ‘Does it work?'” he was just kidding.
Of course, we could stop throwing money at an ineffective policy, but that would be cutting and running. The only way to fail is to quit. This is all about showing our resolve, and rejecting a defeatist attitude. If we stop funding useless ads, all the money we’ve already wasted will have been spent in vain.
And who wants that?