Earlier this month, the GOP released talking points to its attack dogs, complete with specific data on how best to attack John Kerry’s economic plan. They felt comfortable with the fiscal analysis because they relied on Treasury Department officials to crunch the numbers.
Which is precisely the problem.
As the Wall Street Journal reported today, the Treasury’s efforts on this project are raising some troubling questions.
The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry’s tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site. A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns.
The Treasury analysis doesn’t mention Mr. Kerry by name. Rather it sketches out the potential cost of a tax plan that rolls back tax reductions for taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 — the nub of the Democratic presidential candidate’s plan. The result, the Treasury said in the analysis posted March 22, would be a tax increase of as much as $477 billion over 10 years on “hardworking individuals and married couples.” The same day, the Republican National Committee issued a press release in which it unveiled what it called its “John Kerry $pendometer,” and cited the same $477 billion figure as the cost of “raising taxes on the top income bracket.”
In fact, there’s more evidence that this Treasury project was politically motivated.
House Majority Leader Tom Delay of Texas requested the estimates, said Stuart Roi, a DeLay spokesman, because several Democratic budget proposals had provisions similar to the Kerry tax plan. Mr. DeLay then distributed the analysis widely, including to the Republican National Committee.
[…]
Lawmakers typically turn to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation for tax estimates, not the Treasury. Mr. Roi said the committee “couldn’t turn it around as fast as we needed it.”
What does that mean, “needed it“? DeLay needed the report so he could go on the attack and encourage others to do the same. In a campaign season, I expect DeLay to be showing his fangs, but the Treasury Department’s staff does not exist to serve as the RNC’s research department.
Dan Maffei, a Democratic spokesman for the House Ways and Means committee, called the Republican effort “highly suspicious.” If Republicans had “a legitimate legislative purpose, the first place you would go would be the Joint Committee on Taxation.”
These guys never learn. They’re already embroiled in controversy for improperly pressuring officials at HHS over Medicare and improperly using the CIA to smear Richard Clarke, yet now they’re forcing career Treasury staffers to create GOP talking points. It’s an abuse of the system and it undermines the government’s independence from partisanship. The Republicans know it, but they don’t care.
John “Buck” Chapoton, who headed Treasury’s tax office under Ronald Reagan, said career tax officials “are supposed to be objective. It’s important that they are thought of as not being influenced or used for political purposes.”
Eugene Steuerle, another Treasury tax official during the Reagan administration, said that using the analysis of the Kerry plan for political purposes “stepped over the line” that’s supposed to protect career officials from political influence. “This type of release tends to reduce the reputation of the department as a fair and neutral arbiter of what constitutes good tax policy,” Mr. Steuerle said. Messrs. Chapoton and Steuerle were Treasury political appointees during the Reagan years.
This ordeal seemed eerily familiar to me and then I remembered — they’ve done this before. In June, Bush’s Treasury Department issued a highly questionable report on the effects of Howard Dean’s economic proposals. As the Washington Post reported at the time:
The Bush administration yesterday released a highly selective analysis of the cost to families of rolling back scheduled tax cuts, an early sign of the White House’s plan to brand Democrats as tax raisers throughout their race for the presidential nomination…. Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont governor, was confronted with the Treasury Department figures on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday.
What’s worse, this is history repeating itself from the other Bush administration. As the WSJ article noted:
In 1992, Fred Goldberg, then the Bush Treasury’s top tax official, stirred controversy when he told reporters that Treasury calculations showed that candidate Clinton’s proposals could increase taxes for moderate-income Americans.