You’ll no doubt be pleased to know that congressional Republicans, without telling anyone, quietly inserted a provision in an intelligence bill to make conflict-of-interest problems harder to detect.
Tucked within the House’s 497-page version of the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act” is a provision to repeal the requirement that senior-level officials report their personal financial assets valued at more than $2.5 million. It also would end the practice of disclosing the dates of stock transactions.
The proposal to limit financial disclosures initially covered only top-level intelligence officials. It was recently expanded to include all executive branch officials, according to a draft version of the bill.
“Something like this shouldn’t be done secretly,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee. “It should be done thoughtfully and after some hearings.”
I guess Waxman hasn’t gotten the memo — responsible and deliberate governing, in full public view is so…passé. This is Bush’s America, where secret fiats drive policy agendas.
The result of this secret provision, which no one was told about before it got in the bill, is pretty straightforward: all of Bush’s wealthy appointees, who often have financial interests with corporations with which they do government business, will no longer have to disclose those financial ties.
The new disclosure policies would make it harder to detect when officials have personal financial stakes in matters before them, watchdog groups say. The current rules require officials to list the value of their assets in categories, beginning at “none or less than $1,000” and ending at “more than $50 million.”
[Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a government watchdog group] said that after her group complained about the special financial disclosure rules for intelligence and national security officials, congressional negotiators “amazingly went even further to limit reporting for all government agency officials.”
Before Election Day, they knew no limits and had no shame. Now it’s worse.