Washington Behind Closed Doors

Also posted at The People's Pension

Will the deficit commission find ways to keep the public out as it contemplates Social Security and Medicare cuts? It’s happened before. The pieces may already be in place for it to happen again.

“Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors,” sang the late, great recording artist Charlie Rich. Evidently, that’s the one thing Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, agree on when it comes to the president’s deficit commission.

The commission, which began meeting on Tuesday, has been barraged with letters demanding that it conduct all of its meetings – including those held by subgroups of the 18 commissioners – out in the open. One came from Michigan Rep. John Conyers and 15 other Democratic House members, another from House Republican minority leader John Boehner of Ohio. The third was signed by 77 social service organizations ranging from the NAACP to Vietnam Veterans of America.

What are they so worried about? Boehner’s letter asks, pointedly, why President Obama has “explicitly referenced the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in setting up other commissions, and yet “omitted” it in his executive order creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform? (A 1972 law, FACA requires that all federal commission meetings be announced in the Federal Register 15 days in advance and be open to the public and that all meeting minutes be available for public inspection.) Conyers goes further, asking that “the Commission open all of its meetings for internet streaming and CSPAN coverage.”

These are fair concerns, because the co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have talked openly about the need to inflict pain on benefits recipients to achieve some definition of fiscal balance, including, potentially slashing Social Security and Medicare. For Republicans like Boehner, of course, the big concern is that the co-chairs also talk of tax hikes to foot the bill.

Commissions dealing with hot-potato issues have figured out ways to get around FACA’s requirements, however. Case in point: the establishment, in the early days of the Bush administration, of the Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The name was a term of art, since its declared goal was to cut the old-age program and partially replace it with private investment accounts. Chaired by former Sen. Pat Moynihan and Time-Warner executive Richard Parsons, the Bush commission was stacked with Republicans and Democrats pledged to introduce “choice” into Social Security.

Like the Bowles-Simpson commission today, they understood that their goals would be far easier to achieve in a smoke-filled room than in public meetings. Because that’s how the last major changes to Social Security, the 1983 Amendments, were achieved. The 1983 Amendments included higher payroll taxes and reduced benefits in the form of a higher retirement age: changes that continue to reduce the value of workers’ Social Security benefits.

Defenders of Social Security knew this too, and the Bush commission was massively bird-dogged by progressive groups. So the commissioners retreated behind closed doors.

Wanting to keep their more sensitive discussions private, the members hit upon the gambit of dividing themselves into “subcommittees,” under the rationale that these didn’t have to meet publicly because they didn’t form a quorum of the whole. At the August 22 meeting, for example, the morning session was closed as the panel divided into two groups: one to look at financial estimates on private accounts that the Clinton administration had developed, the other to look at ways to administer such a program, according to Parsons.

“The public has a right to know what information is being presented to the commission and how its proposals to privatize Social security are being developed,” Reps. Bob Matsui and Henry Waxman complained in a letter to the panel. Parsons told the New York Times that, in effect, the public had no such right. Its legal counsel had told the commission that “these were information-gathering and comprehension-enhancing meetings. There was no deliberation. There was no decision-making.”

But critics saw the closed-door meetings as part of a developing pattern of secretiveness within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney was already embroiled with Congress for refusing to turn over to the GAO documents relating to his energy policy panel and the White House rejected a request from a Senate committee for access to documents concerning its roll-back of some environmental regulations (Leigh Strope, “Commission to Have Closed Meetings,” Associated Press, August 18, 2001).

Flash forward to 2010: The Bowles-Simpson commission’s meetings, the New York Times reports, will include “three smaller groups” meeting weekly that will consider the sensitive topics of “ taxes, spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and all other spending.” Will these be open to the public, or, as under Bush, will legal niceties be used to keep them under wraps?

Concerned parties are also worried about the fundamental purpose of the commission – a concern that again echoes the experience of the Bush commission.

The executive order establishing the Bush commission made clear that the panel’s role wasn’t just to develop a plan to phase out Social Security, but to devise ways to massage public opinion in the direction of accepting the cuts. One of its duties was to publish “an interim report” describing “the challenges facing the Social Security system and the criteria by which the Commission will evaluate reform proposals”: effectively, a propaganda piece highlighting scary numbers geared to undermine confidence in Social Security.

Similarly, Bowles and Simpson see their goal as in part to school the people on the need to accept austerity. “The American people know something is very, very wrong,” Simpson said on Tuesday, but that his panel will still have to “educate the American public” about the emergency the country presumably faces. Indeed, given the long odds that Congress and the White House will adopt the commission’s recommendations in the next year, this propaganda role may be the one area in which it can make a difference in the long haul.

That’s not getting by the NAACP and its co-signers, who demand that “the Commission hold hearings not simply to educate the public, as you have stated as a goal, but also to listen and learn from the public directly affected by changes you may propose.” Conyers calls for the commission “rigorously analyze how cuts to programs and tax increases would affect different constituencies.”

Very little in the commissioners’ rhetoric to this point indicates that they are thinking much about the human cost of the changes they might recommend. But how is anyone to know if, like the Bush commission nine years ago, they succeed in keeping their most sensitive deliberations out of public view?