On a long drive yesterday, I had an argument with a friend who works in health policy for the federal government about whether or not Obama’s administration has so far demonstrated a lack of transparency.
His perspective was that Obama had made various promises during the election which were focused on ends (health care for all, reduced health spending, Medicaid and Medicare reform, etc) without clear means of achieving them. Because the president’s specific strategies are unclear, he argued, the president is therefore not being as forthcoming as he ought to be, which points to a lack of transparency in the administration.
My counterargument can be summed up by the “Today is Day…” tab at the top of this web page. Obama has been in office for less than a month. He doesn’t have a Health and Human Services secretary yet. He’s been dealing with a divided Congress over a stimulus package that is meant to save us from the nation’s worst-ever financial crisis. Isn’t a detailed plan of attack on health care reform a little bit too much to ask at this stage.
But what I didn’t really get at the time is that my friend’s gripes with Obama’s efficiency (a) have legal grounding, and (b) are intensely personal. Apparently, the president is required by law to submit a budget to Congress that presents his economic assumptions and year-to-come projections for a laundry list of ares of government spending. And there are a lot of people, like my friend, who depend day-to-day on being on the same page as various federal agencies. When your job is to crunch the numbers on something as massive and complex as health policy, all day long, in order to provide context and suggestions for where that policy ought to go in the future, it must be a huge headache to not know what the federal government’s plan is, what their assumptions are, what they expect to see coming over the horizon.
The denouement of this argument was that I don’t think Obama’s failure to present a budget is in any way not-transparent, but only because I think transparency has to do wtih not hiding information and providing it when pressed. So far, I haven’t heard anyone publicly demanding that Obama get his budget to the Capitol. Instead, expedient and thorough planning constitutes a different kind of transparency: one that goes above and beyond the basic duties of the presidency and if maintained, would lead to the sorts of perceptions of Obama — that he is a go-getter, a true reformer, and the type of effective leader he claimed to be back in October — that would really help keep up morale among federal employees and the millions of people who depend on their hard work.
- TF100D
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