Government has many tools to instill public confidence. The most praiseworthy ones are transparency and accountability. When government works in the open and invites feedback, citizens can feel like they are part of the process, instead of being imposed upon by outside forces.
But what happens when government just pretends to work in the open, in order to mollify public concerns?
As it prepared to issue its new rule on water regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency faced a great deal of public concern and resistance from landowners and farmers. Given recent and aggressive EPA actions against landowners, there were fears that the rule would dramatically expand EPA jurisdiction over every ditch and gully in America capable of holding a mud puddle.
To mollify critics, the EPA invited public comments, as agencies must do in the regulatory process. Later, its administrator, Gina McCarthy, would boast that it received nearly 1 million comments on the rule — nearly 90 percent of which were in favor.
“The input helped us understand the genuine concerns and interests of a wide range of stakeholders and think through options to address them,” McCarthy recently wrote on her blog.
What McCarthy did not mention, and what was reported last week in the The New York Times, is that the EPA used government resources to coordinate with environmentalist groups in order to achieve this 90 percent support. Through an intense effort in what is known as “grassroots lobbying,” the government worked to encourage people on one side of the debate to make their voices heard, so as to skew perceptions of public opinion.
In addition to meeting behind closed doors with environmentalist leaders supportive of the rule, the agency used a social media tool called Thunderclap. It is like Kickstarter, but users donate social media shares instead of money. By getting just under 1,000 left-wing activists to sign on, the EPA was able to urge 1.8 million people in their political circles, all at once, to comment favorably on the proposed rule. This helped generate levels of support for the rule more appropriate to Saddam Hussein’s re-election results than to any serious issue discussed in a democracy.
The agency’s rigging of the result made a sham of the entire comment process. And it may have even been against federal laws that forbid government agencies from lobbying.
The principle here is quite simple. Taxpayers should not have to pay, as they did in this case, to be propagandized about what proposals they should have to live under by the very bureaucracy that supposedly determines such things based on statutory interpretation.
The EPA has been looking for ways to expand its power in the area of water regulation and nearly every other area it touches for years. Congress can stop them for now by forbidding funds to go toward enforcement of this new rule, but this will not do as a long-term solution. If the bureaucrats are not punished for this, Americans’ very ability to rule themselves is under threat by clever, government-funded propagandists. If the current federal law isn’t enough to stop this sort of thing, then Congress should pass a new one.
