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October 3, 2005

Giving Accountability the Old GAO Try

by kim @ 4:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Over at the DCDL blog, Keith notes that the notoriously liberal (not) Washington Post gave one of the most Bush-friendly headlines to a recent GAO finding.

I’d like to address a slightly different issue, but one related to this article: what happens when the GAO says that the Bush administration acted illegally when it paid Armstrong Williams to praise its programs? How serious is it? Could somebody go to jail?

To answer this question I looked at a similar case from May 2004: (Pravda on the Potomac)

The General Accounting Office concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services illegally spent federal money on what amounted to covert propaganda by producing videos about the Medicare changes that were made to look like news reports. Portions of the videos, which have been aired by 40 television stations around the country, do not make it clear that the announcers were paid by HHS and were not real reporters.

Sounds pretty serious. You’d figure that the axe is going to fall pretty fast and hard when somebody illegally uses public money for the purposes of covert propaganda. Not.

The fallout of this decision was that the White House snapped into action and released this:

Last month, the Comptroller General circulated a memorandum to Executive Branch departments and agencies purporting to provide guidance from the General Accountability Office (“GAO”) as to how appropriated funds may be used for video news releases (“VNRs”) consistent with legal restrictions on the use of such funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” B-304272, Feb. 17, 2005. That guidance conflicts with the views of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”), as noted in the attached memorandum from OLC to the general counsels of the Executive Branch. Heads of Executive departments and agencies are reminded that it is OLC (subject to the authority of the Attorney General and the President), and not the GAO, that provides the controlling interpretations of law for the Executive Branch.

I’ll paraphrase: it’s our country, and we’ll do what we want with it.

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