I testified earlier today before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It was a raucous hearing, that covered a lot of ground. The testimony as prepared and submitted is below, along with a summary and my truth in testimony forms.
FINAL John Wonderlich Testimony Visitor Logs
Download document in OTF format.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked a series of questions today based on the Politico story I blogged about earlier.
Carney refuses to answer whether the White House has any guidance on when it's appropriate to schedule meetings that occur outside the reach of the visitor logs records. I doubt there's any formal guidance, but instead that whoever sets up a meeting thinks about the meeting's potential disclosure in the same way you might consider who is invited, how big the meeting might be, or what the agenda should be. In other words, these decisions are probably made as a matter of course.
Rather than engaging with detail in the question, or sidestepping it altogether, Carney attacks the idea that anyone would question the administration's commitment to transparency:
The suggestion that we’re not being transparent is laughable given the unbelievable precedent this administration has set in its -- closing the door, the revolving door, and releasing these records.
The tone of this response reads to me like insecurity.
If the White House feels vulnerable on lobbying reform, then they should avoid obfuscating on real questions about how the visitor logs policies work.
Of course, the fastest way to make these questions go away is to say that the visitor logs release is incidental (not essential) to the lobbying disclosure fight, and that Obama is going to actually push for lobbying reform in Congress.
The back and forth in question is below:
Q Given the President’s commitment to transparency, is there any guidance White House officials get about when it’s appropriate to meet off campus with a lobbyist and when a lobbyist meeting should be on campus? MR. CARNEY: This administration has taken extraordinary actions to be transparent. I think this question stems from a story that, frankly, was absurd. We release hundreds of thousands of records voluntarily, a policy instituted by this President because of his desire for transparency -- something no administration had ever done before. The decisions about where -- and those records are available to every American citizen online to be reviewed, and all different types of people come to the White House complex for meetings on issues. And our level of transparency and disclosure is unprecedented because the President believes deeply in it. What I would say is that, as any of you who have walked around this complex know, been in the West Wing -- not like the TV show; very small space, very few meeting rooms. The Old Executive Office Building -- the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a third of which has been under renovation since we’ve been here -- very limited space. Jackson Place is a White House conference center -- so designated -- and therefore when we have large meetings sometimes we use that space if there are no spaces here. So that’s -- Q But would you agree that there’s effectively a transparency loophole here, if the goal is to show when lobbyists, powerful interests, are meeting with White House officials, that right now it’s routine for White House officials to meet off campus with these people and there’s no daylight on that? MR. CARNEY: It is routine for the White House officials to meet with all types of people, including lobbyists, and frequently here. The suggestion that we’re not being transparent is laughable given the unbelievable precedent this administration has set in its -- closing the door, the revolving door, and releasing these records. There are no -- the WAVES system, which is the system that produces the records, operates in certain buildings and not others. And for those decisions, how that operates and why, I refer you to the United States Secret Service. But the principle here is the unprecedented level of transparency that we have provided because we believe deeply in it. Q Would it be inappropriate for a White House official to intentionally arrange a meeting off campus to not be caught by the WAVES records? MR. CARNEY: Look, we have meetings with all sorts of people. We have them here. Those records are available. Q But would it be appropriate if you choose to go off campus because you didn’t want it to show up in the files? It’s yes or no. MR. CARNEY: The guiding principle here is transparency, and we believe that -- nobody is, that I’m aware of, is hiding where they’re meeting. The meetings that happen at Jackson Place, it’s a big meeting place and that’s where -- Q If it’s so big, why not change the policy and release those names -- MR. CARNEY: We do not control where the WAVES is. And I’m not going to -- in terms of -- Q You could release them separately. You could change the policy. MR. CARNEY: Well, Chip, look, I’m not aware what policies might be instituted in the future. But what I think is fundamentally important to remind you of is that we release information that has never been released before. I think you probably remember, you were covering the previous administration. They went to court, to the Supreme Court, to prevent the disclosure of people who were meeting with the Vice President. We voluntarily release the records that are available to us. And we never said that there was a way to get every name in every meeting. The principle is disclosure, and we have gone to extraordinary lengths to make that happen. Q Would you consider changing the policy to increase disclosure? MR. CARNEY: Again, I don’t want to predict about future policies that may be put in place. I just want to remind everybody about what we’ve done and why.
In today's Politico, Chris Frates reports on how some lobbyists now apparently feel like they're being shuttled there instead of the White House complex itself in order to avoid their meetings showing up on the visitor logs.
They're probably right.
Without laws requiring real-time, online disclosure of lobbying activity, we're going to be left with piecemeal policies, and transparency rhetoric that reaches beyond reality.
And meetings with lobbyists will sometimes be scheduled to avoid disclosure.
Now, not all meetings are scheduled at these rooms in order to be hidden, of course. I've probably been to 10 meetings in the conference center in question (and I'm a lobbyist), and these of meetings are often meetings where the administration is trying to maximize disclosure.
But, of course, the White House plans some meetings in order to gain (or avoid) the public eye. Everything the White House does is done with public exposure as a primary consideration. As the article notes, the decision to have a phone call or have an email exchange is often done with an eye to FOIA laws -- emails create a record trail, and phone calls do not. As long as we don't ban phone calls, administration officials will continue to gravitate toward them for more sensitive, or frank communications. Given that context, I'd be shocked if administration officials weren't planning meetings' locations based on whether the meetings will be disclosed.
The problem, though, is that the White House has sold the visitor logs' release as an accountability mechanism.
Whenever the administration talks about taking on special interests, and taking on lobbying, they're giving one side of the story. Their comments should be annotated with the reality of Washington influence.
The visitor logs do provide an unprecedented view into the work and influence of the White House (as Paul Blumenthal's research shows), but it's also a system that's easily (and quite often) evaded. It wasn't designed as an accountability mechanism, but for managing White House security. And releasing the records wasn't designed to affirmatively take on lobbyists, but as a response to a CREW lawsuit.
Somehow, in time since the logs were first released, this has become a hallmark transparency achievement of the administration. It's certainly a transformative development, but Obama has started to hang his hat on it. He shouldn't. The visitor logs are a security system retooled as a disclosure system, and aren't a replacement for real lobbying laws.
As we get a clearer picture of what the visitor logs do, and what they don't do, we should focus harder on what we need to ask for: real-time, online disclosure of lobbying. And we should take the visitor logs for what they are, not what we're told they might be.
More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington’s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration's health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president's promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it—pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily—is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington.
In the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his intention to include all stakeholders as he sought to reform the nation's health care system, but also supported key Democratic health reform policies. Among these were several that targeted the pharmaceutical industry: Allowing re-importation of drugs from first world countries with lower drug prices and providing Medicare with negotiating authority over prescription drug prices in the recently enacted Part D program. These weren't just promises, Obama had already voted for both of them as a senator in 2007. (Roll Call Vote 132 and Roll Call Vote 150.)
Set to carry out this agenda were two Capitol Hill veterans, schooled in the monied Washington culture, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina. Emanuel was a former fundraiser, Clinton administration official, investment banker and member of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Messina was the former campaign manager and chief of staff to the powerful Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Both were known for their unparalleled legislative abilities.
Because of Obama's decision to develop a plan operating through the legislative process, members of Congress also played key roles. Early on, the pharmaceutical companies were told to deal directly with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Baucus would be the vehicle for the deal worked out behind the scenes by the White House and PhRMA.
Central to this effort was PhRMA president, CEO and top lobbyist Billy Tauzin, a longtime Democratic member of Congress who switched party affiliations after Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. By switching parties Tauzin was able to maintain his influence and even rose to be Chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. Tauzin became the poster child of Washington’s mercenary culture. He crafted a bill to provide prescription drug access to Medicare recipients, one that provided major concessions to the pharmaceutical industry. Medicare would not be able to negotiate for lower prescription drug costs and reimportation of drugs from first world countries would not be allowed. A few months after the bill passed, Tauzin announced that he was retiring from Congress and would be taking a job helming PhRMA for a salary of $2 million.
Tauzin’s job change became fodder for a campaign ad that then presidential candidate Barack Obama ran in the spring of 2008 simply titled “Billy.” It featured the candidate, sleeves rolled up, talking to a salon of gasping Americans about the ways of Washington. “The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee, who pushed the law through, went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year.” The screen fades to black to inform the viewer that, “Barack Obama is the only candidate who refuses Washington lobbyist money,” while the candidate continues his lecture, “Imagine that. That's an example of the same old game playing in Washington. You know, I don't want to learn how to play the game better, I want to put an end to the game playing.”
Aiding PhRMA in their outreach to Congress would be a squadron of lobbyists to push their health care reform priorities. Over the course of 2009, the drug industry trade group spent over $28 million on in house and hired lobbyists. Aside from PhRMA's massive in-house lobbying operation, the trade group hired 48 outside lobbying firms. The total number of lobbyists working for PhRMA in 2009 reached 165. Some 137 of those 165 lobbyists representing PhRMA were former employees of either the legislative or executive branches. Of these dozens were former congressional staffers including two former chiefs of staff to Max Baucus.
According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, drug makers contributed huge sums to congressional campaign committees during the same period—from January to the end of October (4th quarter numbers are still being totaled), industry political action committees, employees and their family members flooded lawmakers with over $8 million. Those contributions tilted heavily to Democrats over Republicans by a 57 to 42 percent margin—the first time in any election cycle going back to 1990, the first year that the Center for Responsive Politics began tracking industry giving, that Democrats were so favored. Given their majorities on Capitol Hill, and the new President’s intention to reform America’s health care system, the new tilt was perhaps not surprising.
| Key Meetings Between White House, Max Baucus and Pharmaceutical Companies [click here for a visual timeline] | ||
|---|---|---|
| March 5, 2009 | Billy Tauzin, President & CEO of PhRMA and Jeff Kindler, CEO & Chairman of Pfizer, chairman-elect of the Board of PhRMA | White House |
| April 20, 2009 | Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen | Sen. Max Baucus |
| April 20, 2009 | Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen | White House |
| May 7, 2009 | David Brennan, CEO of AstraZeneca, Chairman of Board of Directors of PhRMA | Sen. Max Baucus |
| May 8, 2009 | David Brennan, CEO of AstraZeneca, Chairman of Board of Directors of PhRMA | White House |
| May 19, 2009 | Billy Tauzin, President & CEO of PhRMA and James Hall, PhRMA lobbyist | White House |
| June 2, 2009 | Billy Tauzin, President & CEO of PhRMA; James Hall, PhRMA lobbyist; Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen; Jeff Kindler, CEO & Chairman of Pfizer, chairman-elect of the Board of PhRMA; Miles White, CEO of Abbott Laboratories | White House |
| June 2, 2009 | Billy Tauzin, President & CEO of PhRMA; Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen; Jeff Kindler, CEO & Chairman of Pfizer, chairman-elect of the Board of PhRMA; Miles White, CEO of Abbott Laboratories | Sen. Max Baucus |
| July 7, 2009 | Billy Tauzin, President & CEO of PhRMA; Kevin Sharer, CEO of Amgen; Jeff Kindler, CEO & Chairman of Pfizer, chairman-elect of the Board of PhRMA; Miles White, CEO of Abbott Laboratories (David Brennan, CEO of AstraZeneca, Chairman of Board of Directors of PhRMA is also listed in visitor logs for an appointment date) | White House (Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina; Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Max Baucus' chief of staff Jon Selib are scheduled to meet at the same time; Independent reports place Emanuel in the meeting) |
On April 15, Jim Messina and Jon Selib, chief of staff to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, convened a meeting at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) with leaders of organized labor and health care groups, including PhRMA. At the meeting, the groups decided to form two nonprofit entities to promote reform efforts, Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care, that would be almost entirely funded by PhRMA. The two groups spent $24 million on their advertising campaigns; the contract to produce and place ads went to White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod’s former firm, AKPD, which owed Axelrod $2 million.
In the next month, CEO’s from pharmaceutical companies would meet with Baucus and administration officials at least four times. These talks preceded a major public event at the White House, one critical to its strategy to promote health care reform. On May 11, PhRMA and other trade industry groups pledged cost cutting measures to the White House that would save, they claimed, upwards of $2 trillion over the next decade. President Obama announced the deal in the State Dining Room, flanked by leaders of the various trade groups; the administration followed up with a media blitz in the press and on the White House Web site.
The next day, Healthy Economy Now's PhRMA funded ad campaign ran their first advertisement in support of the health care reform process calling for the government to finally “fix” the nation's health care cost problems. While many elements of the $2 trillion cost cutting pledge fell apart, the drug industry remained committed to the process in the hopes that they could ultimately win out and defeat the provisions they most feared in closed-door meetings with the White House.
The first occurred on June 2. White House visitor logs show PhRMA’s top executives, including Tauzin, and industry CEOs met with Sarah Fenn from the White House Office of Health Care Reform. On the same day, the publicly available schedule of Senator Max Baucus shows Tauzin and the same industry CEOs met the Senate Finance Committee chairman. What ultimately resulted from these coordinated meetings would be revealed by Baucus on June 20.
In a press release featuring a statement by Tauzin, Baucus revealed that the pharmaceutical industry had accepted $80 billion in cost cutting measures to be included in the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill. According to news reports, Baucus initially proposed $100 billion in cost cutting measures, but the executives and lobbyists meeting on June 2 were able to win the lower figure.
The terms of the initial cost-cutting deal included $30 billion go directly towards closing the “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. The “donut hole” is a term for the gap in coverage that occurs within the Medicare prescription drug coverage. For those purchasing prescription drugs through the Medicare program coverage cuts off at $2,700 spent and does not pick back up again until $6,154 is spent by the participant. The amount proposed in the deal, 50 percent coverage for drugs within the coverage gap, however, would not completely close the “donut hole.”
In Baucus' press release, Tauzin is quoted as saying, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and, working together, we can make this hope for a better tomorrow a reality today.” This “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity also extended to the pharmaceutical industry's ability to blunt the long-term Democratic agenda of lowering prescription drug prices through Medicare negotiations, re-importation and quicker release of generics onto the market. After making such a grand statement of support through cost cutting proposals it was time for the pharmaceutical industry to finally force the White House and Democrats to take certain chips off the table.
Baucus proceeded with a plan to convene a bipartisan group in an effort to craft the bill desired by the White House. These participants included Democrats Kent Conrad and Jeff Bingaman and Republicans Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe. Baucus' decision and the need to solidify deals with groups like the pharmaceutical industry – which were reliant on Baucus producing a bill – slowed down the legislative process making it impossible for Congress to meet the White House's announced August recess deadline for passing health care reform.
Soon after, PhRMA’s big guns and industry lobbyists paid the White House another visit on July 7 and this time met with Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina (Baucus' chief of staff Jon Selib is also listed in White House visitor logs for this meeting). In August, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim reported on an internal memo that was drafted at that meeting that outlined the policies that would not be allowed into any final version of health care reform. These included Medicare prescription drug negotiations, drug re-importation, and the lowering of prices for drugs available through Medicare Part D and Part B. The deal would be $80 billion in cost cutting and absolutely no more.
While the $80 billion deal was cut with Baucus' committee, other congressional committees continued to mark-up their own versions of health care reform without the knowledge that the White House was relying on Baucus to produce the final product. In the House of Representatives, the House Energy & Commerce Committee leveled a direct threat to the $80 billion deal. Energy & Commerce Chair Henry Waxman sought to include all of the provisions that PhRMA had gotten the White House and Baucus to cut out of the reform bill. These included drug reimportation, Medicare negotiating power and speedier release of generics to the market. According to previous analysis of the measures proposed by the committee, these measures would have totaled hundreds of billions in cost cuts, far exceeding the $80 billion cap agreed to by the White House, Baucus and PhRMA.
The cost cutting measures passed in the Energy & Commerce bill spooked the board of PhRMA, which included all of the CEOs involved in the deal-cutting meetings with the White House and Baucus. The board pressured Tauzin to go public with the deal to ensure that the White House would recognize it and not renege. On August 4, the Los Angeles Times, in an exclusive report, featured quotes from Tauzin claiming that a deal between the White House and PhRMA existed and that, as Tauzin put it, “The White House blessed it.” Tom Hamburger wrote in the article, “For his part, Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe.”
The White House's Jim Messina later confirmed Tauzin's claim, stating, “The president encouraged this approach … He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”
Democratic lawmakers were furious. Rep. Raul Grijalva, chairman of the Progressive Caucus, asked, “Are industry groups going to be the ones at the table who get the first big piece of the pie and we just fight over the crust?”
On September 7, Baucus' bill made a private circulation on the Hill; pharmaceutical industry cost-cutting did not exceed $80 billion. Five days later, the New York Times reported that PhRMA planned to spend up to $150 million in an advertising blitz in support of Baucus' bill. The Times noted that the ad spending “…would be a follow-up to the deal that drug makers struck in June with Mr. Baucus and the White House.” On September 16, Baucus released the full text of his legislation to the public.
The White House, PhRMA and Baucus still had to fight a few battles to keep the deal intact. The key amendment targeting the PhRMA deal in committee mark-up came from Sen. Bill Nelson from Florida, which has one of the largest Medicare participant populations in the nation. The pull of constituent needs clearly put Bill Nelson into a position to push for further cost cutting in Medicare prescription drug pricing. His target: closing the “donut hole” completely.
Nelson claimed that his amendment would generate $106 billion in revenue, or from PhRMA's perspective increase their cost-cutting to $186 billion. That would be unacceptable to PhRMA, to Baucus, to the White House and to the pharmaceutical industry who had made the deal. Other Senate Democrats, Tom Carper and Robert Menendez voted with Republicans and Baucus on the committee to defeat the amendment. It is little surprise the Carper's Delaware is home to AstraZeneca and Menendez' New Jersey is home to Merck and Bristol-Myers-Squibb, all of which lobbied for the $80 billion cap.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced the final bill, with the cap in place, on November 19. Debate began on Dec. 3, and with it come one more attempt by members to change the terms of the deal. Senator Byron Dorgan introduced an amendment that would allow for drug re-importation, but as the date for voting drew near, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) released a letter objecting to the proposal that echoed pharmaceutical industry talking points: “…as currently written, the resulting structure would be logistically challenging to implement and resource intensive. In addition, there are significant safety concerns.” Dorgan's amendment was defeated with numerous Democrats previously in support of reimportation switching to "no" votes.
On Christmas Eve, the bill passed the Senate with the PhRMA deal fully intact.
New Year's Eve passed with no further action on health care reform. Public opinion regarding the health care reform bill had been slipping throughout 2009. It reached a fulcrum in the special election to replace the deceased senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts on January 19, 2010. Newly minted senator Scott Brown campaigned that he would be the senator to provide Republicans with the votes to filibuster the final health care reform bill. Democrats ran for cover. Despite having the largest majorities of any party since the 1970s, Democrats put the brakes on their agenda, particularly health care reform.
In the end, the pharmaceutical industry's support for health care reform would be left up in the air. After spending $100 million in advertising in support of legislation that Tauzin and key executives hoped would be a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry, the legislative process had flat-lined. In February, the board of PhRMA, split over the deal cut by Tauzin, pushed Tauzin to resign his post.
In an interview with Diane Sawyer, President Obama owed up to failures in the process of passing health care reform, “[T]he health care debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns not just among my opponents, but also amongst supporters that we just don't know what's going on … And it's an ugly process and it looks like there are a bunch of back room deals.”
President Obama's weekly address explained on his administration's efforts to combat influence peddling, and the steps it is considering taking in response to the Citizens United decision. It will be interesting to see to what extent these themes are reflected in the State of the Union speech this Wednesday, and how they translate into policy. The Sunlight Foundation will, of course, remain focused on the transparency implications.
Some highlights from the weekly address are after the jump.
First, the President described his lobbying reform efforts over the past year:
On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.
He then talked about the effects of the Citizens United decision.This [Citizens United] ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.
And finally, he indicated that responding to Citizens United is a priority for the administration.When this ruling came down, I instructed my administration to get to work immediately with Members of Congress willing to fight for the American people to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision. We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done.
Last week, the White House released another set of visitor logs online and in a format that can be parsed and analyzed. The 25,000 individual records from September 16 through September 30, 2009 can provide valuable insight into how the White House is developing its policies and ultimately, gives us a rare look into who they are consulting as they develop their agenda.
This is yet another positive step by the Obama administration. By providing this data to the public, they once again show that they share Sunlight Foundation’s view that government information needs to be made public, and that in this day and age, that means it must be released online and in a researchable format.
That is where we come in. The minds over at Sunlight Labs under the direction of Clay Johnson, have taken the White House visitor logs and created a new mashup that will allow you to mine this data for information on the individual visitors. The new page links to data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics in order to show whether visitors have given campaign contributions. It links to Wikipedia pages and Google searches so that you can look deeper into the biographical information on visitors and get a fuller picture of the visitor’s perspectives on their specific issue area. And it links to their profile on LittleSis.org so you can see their relationships with politicians and other influentials.
The White House has promised that they will release this data on a monthly basis, with October’s data to be released sometime this month. One point of concern: The White House announced that they are withholding some records for reasons of national security, political sensitivity, privacy or other concerns. While we understand these concerns, it is unclear how many visitors fall into those categories, which could be used by either this administration or future administrations to scrub the data of meetings that they would like to hide.
Today the White House released its log of White House visitors for the period of September 16-30, 2009. (Here's today's announcement and the data.) More than 2,000 records specifically requested from the time period prior to September 16 have been released as well. Records for October 2009 -- the first full month to which the visitor log publication policy applies -- will be released in 30 days.
It's worth noting that the White House is working to release visitor information for the Vice President's Residence in an identical format to the White House Complex; when the visitor record system at the residence is updated, the White House "visitor information for the White House Complex and the Residence will be released in a common format." Hooray for common standards.
The White House deserves significant praise for releasing this information, although, as we noted earlier, getting to this point was a bit bumpy.
White House Ethics Counsel Norm Eisen raises the issue that it's difficult to disambiguate visitors who share the same name. This is a common problem with this kind of data, often making it difficult to compare datasets. (Or, as they note, figure out whether the William Ayers visiting the White House is the former weatherman, or someone with a less stormy past.) How can this problem be mitigated? Perhaps having people indicate their state of residence, or age, or if they are a registered lobbyist under the LDA.
The White House is also likely withholding some records for reasons of national security, political sensitivity, privacy, or other concerns, as they said they would in their policy statement. It would be helpful to know how many people fall under that category. While I'm at it, it would also be nice to have all the records prior to September 16th released.
Still, this is a tremendous change in policy from where we were a year ago. And it is a welcome companion to their announcement earlier this week regarding changing (de)classification procedures.
by Jessica Pearce
By the end of November, nearly 2,100 records of visitors to the White House recorded between January 20, 2009 and September 15, 2009 were publicly released by the Administration in a searchable online database. Although this is only a fraction of the total visitors during that time -- up to 100,000 people visit the White House each month -- in the future, we will see a much fuller picture.
Since September, the Obama administration's policy has been to release records only if (1) specifically requested and (2) deemed by the Administration as “reasonable, narrow and specific” enough to release. Since then, more than 400 requests have been submitted to the White House, resulting in releases of two batches of visitor logs: nearly 500 in October and more than 1,600 in November.
President Obama has promised to release the full logs, albeit delayed 90-120 days to “allow the White House to continue to conduct business.” In addition, certain visitors' names will not be released because of national security, political sensitivity, privacy, or other concerns.
Initially, the Administration had refused to release the logs when requested by MSNBC and Citizen for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), asserting (like the Bush administration) that the records were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. CREW sued for access to the records in July, dropping the suit once the government agreed to turn over the records under a new "voluntary" disclosure program, which took effect on Sept. 15.
While the disclosure policy is not retroactive -- records prior to September 15 are available only upon request -- all records after that date will be released three months after the visit. We can expect a much clearer view of visitors to the White House starting around the end of December.
Hopefully, the Administration will minimize the number of instances where it fails to disclose names, perhaps by reviewing the redactions every six months and releasing additional names. It should also reconsider and publish all visitor logs from earlier this year. Doing so could make available tens of thousands of records.
