Washington’s New Regulatory Behemoth
The New York Times has an excellent story this morning on the “scramble” by myriad Washington bureaucrats to write regulations regarding the health care and financial overhauls. Among the issues raised in the piece:
Broad Discretion to Unelected Officials: “The laws were so broad and complex that executive-branch regulators have wide leeway in determining what the rules should say and how they should be carried out.”
Wasteful Spending: “In Bethesda, [Maryland,] health care officials are leasing more than 70,000 square feet of space on three floors of an office building for about 230 employees to work on rule-making and other duties. The government agreed to pay $51.41 per usable square foot of space, compared with an average of $27 in Bethesda, because it wanted to get the operation running in July, officials said.”
Lack of Transparency: “With the rules spread across agencies, no one is certain how many employees are working on them, but the number is certainly in the hundreds or higher.”
In the period from March to September, bureaucrats released 4,103 pages of regulations implementing the health care law – and many of these were done without any opportunity for public comment. While candidate Obama repeatedly promised to televise the health care negotiations on C-SPAN, President Obama’s Administration has created a new unaccountable bureaucracy where the American people can’t even find out how many people are working to create these massive new regulations. (Has anyone seen a list of key staff running the Office of Consumer Insurance Information and Oversight, the new bureaucracy occupying three sprawling floors of an office building in Bethesda? It’s certainly not for Republicans’ lack of asking…)
Overall, the regulatory leviathan being established by this Administration – rules released without public comment, a massive new bureaucracy up oversight, the new federal head of health insurance regulation not subject to Senate confirmation – does not meet the White House’s promise for “an unmatched level of transparency, participation, and accountability across the entire Administration.” It also illustrates the significant structural flaws inherent in Democrats’ government takeover of health care.