WH Website Incorporates Text From My Obama

Congress should note closely the White House website changes. Changes from one of them involves legislation: A promise to host for five (5) days a public comment period before the President signs a bill.

These ethics-oversight changes should be matched by similar changes in Congress and GAO.  Real change means giving the public the opportunity to comment before Congress debates the final version of the bill, before the Congress sends the bill to the President.

It remains to be seen how closely the MyObama issues match the White House agenda.

Table Cross-Indexing MyObama to White House

[Work in Progress]

• Removed: Faith, incorporated under "Additional"

Civil rights: MO WH 

Defense: MO WH

Disabilities: MO WH

Economy: MO WH

Education: MO WH

Energy & Environment: MO WH

Deleted: Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump

Deleted: Enact a Windfall Profits Tax to Provide a $1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate to American Families.

Ethics: MO WH 

Faith: MO WH [Deleted, moved]

Family: MO WH

Fiscal: MO WH

Foreign Policy

Healthcare

Homeland Security

Immigration

Iraq

Poverty

Rural Service

Seniors and Social Security

Taxes

Technology

Urban Policy

Veterans

Women Additional

President Obama's website at the White House included one thing which caught our eye:

President Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

These words match those at the MyObama. 

This text was added as a third bullet item:

End the Practice of Writing Legislation Behind Closed Doors: President Obama will restore the American people's trust in their government by making government more open and transparent. Obama will work to reform congressional rules to require all legislative sessions, including committee mark-ups and conference committees, to be conducted in public. By making these practices public, the American people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful spending and lawmakers won't be able to slip favors for lobbyists into bills at the last minute.

 

This text was added to the section, "Free the Executive Branch from Special Interest Influence" related to OGE, ethics regulations and OGE opinions [emphasis added]

• Enforce Executive Branch Ethics: The Obama-Biden administration will give the Office of Governmental Ethics strong enforcement authority with the ability to make binding regulations, and it will work with inspectors general in all the federal agencies to enforce ethics rules, minimize waste and ensure federal officials are not using their offices for personal gain. The OGE will also be the clearinghouse of all public records relevant to ethics in the Executive Branch and place this information on its website. Finally, the OGE will promulgate rules and procedures to record all oral and in-person "lobbying contacts" between registered lobbyists and political appointees and make those records available to the public in a searchable computerized database.

This is new:

Spend Taxpayer Money Wisely

• Performance Team and Chief Performance Officer: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will create a focused team within the White House that will work with agency leaders and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to improve results and outcomes for federal government programs while eliminating waste and inefficiency. This unit, a SWAT team, will be composed of top-performing and highly-trained government professionals and be headed by a new Chief Performance Officer (CPO) who will report directly to the president. The CPO will work with federal agencies to set tough performance targets and hold managers responsible for progress. The president will meet regularly with cabinet officers to review the progress their agencies are making toward meeting performance improvement targets.
• Streamline Government Procurement: Barack Obama will implement the GAO's recommendations to reduce erroneous federal payments, reduce procurement costs with purchase cards, and implement better management of surplus federal property. These initiatives will save $4.5 billion a year.
• Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
• Line-by-Line Review of Spending: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will conduct an exhaustive line-by-line review of the federal budget, work to eliminate government programs that are not performing, and demand that new initiatives be selected on the basis of their merits -- not through a political process that rewards lobbyists and campaign donors.
• Slash Earmarks: Earmarks grew from $7.8 billion in 1994 to $29 billion in 2006. Barack Obama is committed to returning earmarks to less than $7.8 billion a year, the level they were at before 1994.
• Shed Sunlight on Corporate Tax Loopholes: The tax code is riddled with corporate loopholes and preferential regulations that benefit a handful of companies at the expense of the rest of the business community as well as ordinary families. Some large companies have managed to secure tax breaks or hide their profits in overseas tax havens to avoid paying any American corporate taxes at all. Obama and Biden will require any tax bill considered by Congress to include a Corporate Tax Impact Statement that would disclose which industries or specific companies would be expected to benefit from the new tax breaks.