Lazy weekend Clinton blogging
Her campaign website lists a 10-point government reform plan. Ten-point plans, of course, are almost always ten points long for perfectly arbitrary decimal-worship reasons, so her list is about half substantive and half not.
Clinton's 10-point plan includes:
- Banning Cabinet Officials from Lobbying a Hillary Clinton Administration
- Strengthen Whistleblower Protections
- Creating a Public Service Academy
- Ending Abuse of No-Bid Government Contracts and Post All Contracts Online
- Cutting 500,000 Government Contractors
- Restore the Office of Technology Assessment
- Publishing Budgets for Every Government Agency
- Implementing Results America Initiative to Track Government Effectiveness
- Tracking and Eliminating Corporate Welfare
- Expanding Voting Access and Safeguarding Machines
The first three items on this list sound perfectly nice, but ultimately depend on, you know, how serious she is about actually doing those things and doing them cleanly. The next four are meatier items pretty much definitionally, although "ending abuse" can easily become "being less brazenly abusive than my predecessor" if nobody's looking. I don't know a thing at all about the Results America Initiative, so I'll keep my mouth shut. But I will say that my faith in Clinton's interest in "eliminating corporate welfare" is much, much lower than in her interest in vote access and security--an issue on which she's been pretty solid.
Comments
Notice she didn't say anything about changing by law increased protections that non-political civil servants are hired, and she didn't say anything about ensuring that political appointees to political positions should have real experience in the areas of their new responsibility - and guaranteeing that they are not business/industry hacks and lobbyists apppointed to help their industry instead of controlling and regulating it under the law. (whew, long paragraph)
It will be very hard for succeeding Presidents to give up the vast expansion of party/ideological influence over how government activity is done and how 10's of thousands of appointees are chosen for political loyalty that has been brought to government by the Bush/Cheney machine. That candidates don't even mention this indicates that rollback isn't on their minds. This is how totalitarian governments come to be all too often: incremental outrages that not opposed and forced back.
I worry often about the harmful precedents the president has set. But at the same time I'm heartened by the fact that--though much remains to be done--the current Congress is doing a decent job at rolling back some of the most egregious excesses. And I had plenty of doubts that they'd want/be able to fix any of it.
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