waste and abuse in government

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 7, 2001 | by Sean Paige

Judge: Clinton's Roadless Plan Was Rigged

The federal judge presiding over a legal challenge to the Clinton administration's controversial "roadless initiative" recently rebuked the U.S. Forest Service for cutting corners and limiting public participation as it rushed its plan toward what he called a "predetermined" outcome. The scheme would convert 60 million acres of public lands into de facto wilderness areas, closed in perpetuity to all manner of resource development.

The critique by U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge may not scuttle the plan, which is the subject of two federal lawsuits and on hold until May 12 pending a Bush administration review of last-minute Clinton-era regulations. But it lends credence to critics who say that the plan was cooked up behind closed doors by government insiders and green-advocacy groups, even while being touted as one of the most inclusive rule-making processes ever. Lodge said that there was "strong evidence" that the plan was produced with little "meaningful dialogue" and that "the end result was predetermined." Added the judge: "Justice hurried on a proposal of this magnitude is justice denied."

Those criticisms echo the conclusions of a February 2000 report issued by the House Resources subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. The subcommittee report concluded that the roadless plan was "made improperly, in apparent violation of the due-process rights of affected parties," as well as sunshine laws such as the Administrative Procedures Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

The plan was developed in a "vacuum," according to the staff report, "with virtually all input coming from a select few in the environmentalist community." That select group included the Heritage Forest Campaign, the Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club.

Though the subcommittee found such collusion "of serious concern," it was troubled equally by "the lack of any evidence of even a token effort by the [Clinton] administration to involve other interested parties." According to the report: "This disregard for any balance in the advice being solicited is evidence of both the pretextual nature of the decision, which had clearly already been made, and of a lack of concern for any adverse consequences on the affected users of the forest lands in question."

But greens say the public was intimately involved in what they portray as an overwhelmingly popular decision. "This was a process that was very open, and that in fact had more comments from citizens than any other rule ever developed," a lawyer for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund told an Idaho newspaper.

What isn't often acknowledged, however, is how easily the public-hearing process can be manipulated by national special-interest groups with the resources and reach to orchestrate mass e-mail and letter-writing campaigns (especially when such campaigns are an organization's raison d'6tre and are underwritten by green-leaning foundations, as they were in this case).

Too often failed by the process are those most directly affected by the decisions. They tend to be relatively few in number, individualists who eschew affiliation with Washington activist groups, and usually are too busy scraping out a living off the land to attend public hearings they long ago recognized as the window dressing that they are.

Government Bookkeeping Better, But Still Below Par

The difference between a D-plus and a C-minus: that is the way House Government Reform subcommittee on Government Efficiency Chairman Steve Horn of California measures the federal government's progress toward financial accountability between fiscal 1999 and 2000.

The federal government recently failed its consolidated financial audits for the fourth consecutive year, as the General Accounting Office deemed Uncle Sam's overall financial statements too unreliable to trust. But Horn, who gives federal agencies annual grades on such things, was able at least to announce some modest improvements.

For once all major federal agencies actually submitted their audits to Congress by the March 1 deadline, and a record 18 of 24 major agencies had clean audits. On average, however, these signs of progress only earned agencies an average overall grade of C-minus, a meager improvement over 1999's D-plus.

NASA, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Energy this year received A grades from Horn -- which doesn't necessarily mean they're the most efficient and waste-free government agencies, but only that they're better than others at keeping track of their waste and inefficiency.

Failing grades were meted out to the departments of Defense and Agriculture, as well as the Agency for International Development. The Environmental Protection Agency showed notable improvement, raising its grade from a D-minus in 1999 to a B-minus in 2000. Even the Department of Housing and Urban Development seems to be making (modest) progress, trading in a failing grade in 1999 for a D-plus in 2000.