The Republicans have talked big about slashing your federal government.
You know, get rid of the Commerce Department, the Education Department and the Energy Department. Blah, blah, blah.
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And what’s actually been eliminated?
“Nothing,” said one Capitol Hill reporter, echoing the views of every other Capital Hill reporter who covers the GOP “revolution.”
“They have some things in the works, but nothing actually eliminated,” said the reporter. He mentioned something called the Office of Technology Assessment as having vanished but wasn’t even sure what it did.
Well, I suggested he call the following number: 202-254-7020. Here’s what he heard:
“You have reached the Administrative Conference of the United States. The Administrative Conference did not receive funding for fiscal year 1996. Effective Oct. 31, 1995, the Administrative Conference will terminate its operation.”
Bingo. An agency dead and gone!!
I asked a bunch of reporters and none had heard of it. They thus had no reason to know, as does a small group, including conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that ditching the conference was dumb.
“The Republicans had to get a scalp and took the littlest kid on the block and cut off his head,” said Alan Morrison, an attorney with Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen whose own liberal politics underscore the breadth of support behind the agency.
At minimum, there’s irony in the efficiency-minded GOP doing away with the conference.
It was formed in 1968 as a civic-minded, quasithink tank to benefit federal agencies. It had a small, 19-member paid staff and a presidentially appointed chairperson.
This year’s budget was a pittance, a laughable $1.8 million. Since 1968, its budgets combined have amounted to about $30 million, or $2.2 billion less than we’re spending on research next year alone for a needless fighter plane, the F-22.
The heart of the operation was the volunteer work of more than 100 government and private attorneys, like Morrison; C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George Bush; and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Richard Wiley (Scalia was the group’s head in the early 1970s, before he was a judge).
It studied ideas for making agencies work better, seeking to cut down on lawsuits inspired by agencies’ actions and resolving disputes in less-costly ways. It proposed non-binding changes that often were accepted.
Here’s some of its handiwork:
– It put a halt to ludicrous “races to the courthouse,” whereby parties would literally line up in the dark on the day some new regulation was to be issued, get a copy and then file a lawsuit in a court they thought would be most sympathetic. It convinced agencies to opt for a lottery system in resolving disputes over who filed first and where, thus saving an estimated $2.6 million in litigation costs in the 26 such disputes.
– It introduced what’s known as negotiated rulemaking to several agencies, seeking to develop new regulations through a process of consensus that would avoid litigation. Five agencies, including the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, claim they saved a total of $12 million last year by avoiding litigation.
– It inspired a pilot program in mediation at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for disputes arising from FDIC takeover of failed banks. The FDIC claims that’s saved $9 million in legal fees in the program’s initial 18 months of operation.
– And then there was its involvement in the Goliath of administrative adjudication processes, the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals process.
There are 500,000 hearings a year before Social Security administrative law judges, mostly doctors and government claims officers.
These disputes can go all the way to the Supreme Court and have been exhausting. The conference, however, correctly urged elimination of one especially needless stage and, says Social Security, has saved the government $85 million a year.
All of the above seems completely in sync with what the GOP budget-cutters and the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” proponents, led by Vice President Al Gore, crave. What happened?
Clearly, there was no shortage of ignorance about the agency and downright misinformation.
In 1992 a dinky flap inspired by certain proposals that could affect administrative law judges resulted in chagrined law judges claiming that the agency was a bastion of right-wing, Reagan-era kooks.
Briefly, they had the ear of Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), then the chairman of the appropriations panel that covered the agency.
He briefly “zeroed out” its funding for the next year but, after being pressed to hold a hearing, learned what it actually did and became a strong supporter, says agency research director Jeff Lubbers.
But by this year, the Republicans were in charge and Reps. Jim Lightfoot (R-Iowa) and Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) were key opponents of the agency in the House and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) was key in the Senate.
With rumors of its death, defenders surfaced.
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In a letter, Scalia praised its successful quest for efficiency in a world in which “bureaucratic inertia and closemindedness often prevail.” Fellow Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer called it a “unique organization that is important and beneficial to the average American, at rather low cost.”
A bipartisan Senate cabal of Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), among others, pleaded with a joint Senate-House appropriations committee that it keep the agency alive.
But it was Shelby who apparently caved in to Lightfoot’s view that this was some bunch of egghead professor-types who didn’t do much and, anyway, had already achieved their mission. He could not be reached for comment.
What makes the agency’s demise especially odd is that Congress had only recently saddled it, or planned to, with new duties.
For starters, there was the first part of the GOP “Contract with America” that passed, one that made the Congress accountable to the same labor laws we all are.
The agency was asked to study the new law’s impact on the Congressional Budget Office, General Accounting Office and Library of Congress.
Then there’s this: Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s own pending regulatory reform bill requests the administrative conference do three separate studies: on how various revamped administrative procedures would play out; how risk assessment provisions in the act would fare; and how another provision, for the government to pay claimants’ attorneys’ fees in certain Social Security cases, would actually work.
“It looks as if the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” said Lubbers, 47, who joined the conference as a staff lawyer in 1975. “The appropriators were trying to save money but the substantive committees, like Judiciary, were giving us new responsibilities.”
Attorney Morrison more than concurs. “This is know-nothingism of the worst sort,” he said. “The amount of money being saved is trivial. The benefit was substantial. It was an agency that leveraged an enormous amount of free public labor to work on matters of concern to government. All that free labor is now dissipated.”
Oh, a final thing: The message on that answering machine said the voice mail system would go poof Oct. 31. I checked it out Friday and found it’s still working.
If the Republicans are serious about downsizing government, they’d better learn how to turn off phones.
Cokie watch
Jack O’Dwyer’s Newsletter, a bible of the public relations biz, quotes Public Relations Society of America chief Ray Gaulke as indicating that ABC’s Cokie Roberts pulled out of a long-advertised appearance at the group’s annual convention in Seattle “when she was told, in a phone conversation with him (Gaulke), that someone would probably ask what fee she was receiving for speaking to” the group.