Sunlight Foundation writer says new Farm Bill fails the transparency test

Rick Cohen

The recently signed Farm Bill shows a weakness in transparency, opines Rick Cohen of the Sunlight Foundation., a nonprofit dedicated to openness in government.

"The Farm Bill manages to keep the recipients of the crop insurance program secret," Cohen writes. "It even ditched a provision sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) that would have simply required members of Congress and of the president’s Cabinet who are receiving crop-insurance benefits to reveal themselves to the public," he writes. "The Senate, controlled by members of the resident’s political party, never let an amendment offered by Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) that would have required disclosure of all beneficiaries of the crop insurance subsidy even come to a vote."

President Obama claimed last year that his administration was the most transparent in history, but "that hasn't been quite our take on the transparency of the Obama administration on campaign finance, lobbying, closed door conferences with philanthropists, the Social Innovation Fund, insider trading by members of Congress, bilateral aid, prosecuting whistleblowers, and, of course, the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency," Cohen writes. "In some cases, legislation that reached the president’s desk for signature, such as the STOCK Act, had been so gutted in Congress as to make the disclosure requirements weak, if not worthless. But the president has the ability to veto bills that violate his commitment to transparency and to use his bully pulpit to call out legislators for ducking into the shadows."

"With the Farm Bill’s next-to-nonexistent transparency requirements on crop insurance, the operative issue may be the connection of the campaign donors to politicians—including President Obama," Cohen writes. "Sunlight notes that in the 2012 election cycle, agricultural services industry interests contributed $42 million in federal and state campaigns. Included in the donors’ lists are various crop insurance trade associations that probably feel a lot more comfortable with keeping the identities of crop insurance recipients hidden from the public."

"In his State of the Union address, the president promised a new muscularity in the use of executive orders, a willingness to issue them when Congress proves unable to act," Cohen writes. "In the case of transparency, President Obama ought to be issuing a flood of executive orders, because his signing off on transparency-weak legislation coming from Congress, such as the Farm Bill, will serve to make his administration unbelievably less transparent than he promised in his 2008 campaign and 2009 inauguration." (Read more)