Tag: oversight

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government transparency too much government

Last of the Big Spenders

California, spending, budget

The state government of California spends a lot of money. But how much and on what?

That information has, apparently, been a state secret. 

Until now.

For years, a watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com has been working to discover and disclose government spending in the United States. Its efforts were enabled by 2006 legislation sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to establish a website, USASpending.gov, that details federal expenditures. Until his death in 2020, Coburn was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.

The group reports that in 2021, it filed some 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on some $12 trillion of government spending. So they’ve been busy.

California is now the fiftieth state whose spending is being made public in detail.

The state had long resisted requests for info about its spending. State controller Betty Yee said that it was impossible to comply with such requests because California has no central database of government payments. Compiling the data would be too darn hard.

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com performed the chore instead, filing requests for public records with each of 469 state-government entities.

According to founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”

Various budgetary items will doubtless prove controversial — now that they are publicly known.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Our Experience with Experience

exit, term limits, experience, Congress, oversight, Senators Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Bob Corker

It seems exceedingly plausible that the longer one serves as a legislator, the better legislator one would become.

Yet voters back home have noticed something: the longer in office, the less representative their so-called representative tends to become.

No wonder that in those states where Americans have been permitted to vote on congressional terms limits, that vote has been a resounding, “Let’s limit ’em!”

In a Washington Post op-ed, Greg Weiner, associate professor of political science at Assumption College, praised Senators Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) as “voices for congressional power” and “defenders of congressional prerogative.” He worries their departure weakens Congress as an institution, further eroding a critical check on the president and the executive branch.

“The problem pertains far less to opposition to this president,” Weiner points out, “than to the long-range erosion of congressional resistance to the presidency as an institution.”

This caught my attention because we desperately need Congress to function as a co-equal branch of government and because opponents of state legislative limits* often assert a similar argument: term-limited legislatures are less able to check the power of the governor and executive branch agencies.

“Congress has been in decline for generations,” Weiner acknowledges. What else has been happening over this time? Politicians have been loitering in Congress longer and longer, term after term after term. 

Hmmm. The correlation is between a weakened Congress and more experience, not less.

Let’s further note that Flake is only in his first Senate term and Corker his second.

After nearly four decades in office, is, say, doddering Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), providing better oversight?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The 15 states that have them — Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota — contain 37 percent of us.

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