Obama falling short of bill-signing pledge

The White House in recent weeks took a step toward fulfilling one of President Obama’s transparency pledges from the campaign by posting a link on its main Web site for Americans to comment on bills he’s about to sign into law.

That still didn’t help Mr. Obama keep his pledge when he signed two giant spending bills in the past five days.

Both the omnibus and the defense appropriations bills had been posted for just two days when the president signed them — despite totaling more than $1 trillion in combined discretionary spending and including billions of dollars in earmarks inserted by lawmakers for favored projects.

As he nears the end of his first year in office, Mr. Obama repeatedly has fallen short on his pledge to have all bills Congress sends to him posted and open for comments for at least five days before he decides to sign them.

A Washington Times analysis of data from the Library of Congress found that on 32 of the 117 bills he signed through Tuesday, Mr. Obama didn’t wait the full five days after the bill reached his desk to pick up his pen.

In June, realizing they were falling short, White House officials altered their pledge. Spokesman Nick Shapiro told the New York Times that the administration would post a link to the Library of Congress Web site and start the five-day clock “once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk.”

Yet even under those amended terms, the administration is still coming up short. A Cato Institute analysis finds that on 43 of the 117 bills Mr. Obama has signed, the White House didn’t even bother to post a link to the bill or allow comments. The administration disputes Cato’s numbers.

Mr. Shapiro said at least some of the bills Cato lists were posted for comment but were dropped from the Web site when it was upgraded earlier this year.

Mr. Shapiro declined to comment for this article on how the White House views its performance in meeting the pledge, declined to provide numbers on how often since June it thinks it has met the modified pledge and declined to talk about how many comments it has received or how much influence the comments have on Mr. Obama.

“In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House posts the bill online. This gives the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law,” Mr. Shapiro said.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at Cato, a libertarian think tank, said that by his calculations, only once in 117 bills has the White House posted legislation for at least five days once Congress passed it — already a lower benchmark than after the bill is actually presented to the White House. That bill, to delay the digital television transition, was passed on Feb. 4 and posted the next day; it was passed on to Mr. Obama on Feb. 9, and he signed it two days later.

“It’s not a very good average,” Mr. Harper said. “A promise is a promise is a promise.”

Mr. Obama made the transparency vow first as a candidate: “When there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing,” he told an audience in Seattle in September 2008.

Then, when he was president-elect, Mr. Obama’s Change.gov Web site pledged: “As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days.”

However, a review of every bill Mr. Obama has signed into law thus far shows that he has taken fewer than five days on 32 occasions, including on some of the most contentious pieces of legislation, many of which were not slated to take effect for months. Among those big bills on which the pledge wasn’t fulfilled: the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights, and the two catchall “omnibus” spending bills for fiscal years 2009 and 2010.

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