Amid the flurry of legislative activity these past few weeks, the House quietly passed an important bill that will make advisory committees more balanced, fair, and accountable to the American people by closing some major loopholes in the law.
As we recently pointed out, President Obama took an important step toward restoring balance to federal advisory committees by issuing a memorandum directing agencies not to appoint any new registered lobbyists to their advisory committees.
The legislation that was just passed by the House—the Federal Advisory Committee Act Amendments of 2010 (H.R. 1320), introduced by Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO) and co-sponsored by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-NY)—includes several measures to further improve the accountability and transparency of federal advisory committees, including:
- banning political litmus tests for potential appointees to ensure that people are appointed to committees for their expertise rather than their partisan affiliation;
- prohibiting the appointment of any individuals with conflicts of interests to advisory committees unless “the need for the individual’s services outweighs the potential conflict”;
- clarifying that any non-government employee who regularly attends committee meetings is considered a member of the committee, regardless of whether or not the person has a right to vote on the committee’s decisions;
- requiring the public disclosure of any potential conflicts of interests that committee members have, transcripts or records of meetings, information about current members, committee charters, and other important information;
- requiring the director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to come up with regulations defining “conflict of interest”; and
- requiring the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) to come up with stronger regulations for implementing FACA.
Federal advisory committees have been called the “fifth arm of government” for the influential role they play in advising federal agencies, Congress, and the president on a wide array of policy issues. By one recent count, there are over 65,000 members serving on more than 900 advisory committees across the federal government.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) was originally passed in 1972 in response to criticisms that federal advisory committees were too secretive about their activities and were unduly biased toward special interests that were able to dominate the proceedings. FACA included several measures to correct these problems, such as requiring the committees to open their meetings to the public and draw up charters with specific provisions for how they will ensure that their membership represents a broad range of interests.
However, many committees can get around the rules of FACA, as the law was extremely vague in defining that broad range of viewpoints, and members with clear biases have been misrepresented and appointed as objective experts.
Props to Representatives Clay, Towns, and others for their hard work in getting this good government reform bill passed with broad support from both sides of the aisle. We urge the Senate to act quickly in advancing this important legislation.
POGO has been watchdogging federal advisory committees for years, and we’ll soon be issuing our own findings on problems with the registration of advisory committee members, along with additional recommendations for making the committees more transparent and accountable.
-- Rick D'Amato and Michael Smallberg
Image by Flickr use mattieb, used under Creative Commons License.
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