Report Card for the Obama Administration

CEI Grades the Performance of Cabinet and Agency Heads

by CEI Staff January 20, 2010

Washington, D.C., January 20, 2010—One year ago today, Barack Obama took the oath of office as President of the United States. Since then, he and his appointees have had the opportunity to begin implementing their policy agenda, with notable results throughout the federal government’s departments and agencies. The analysts of the Competitive Enterprise Institute have assessed the administration’s first-year performance and assigned grades accordingly.

D-
White House (overall) ― Barack Obama, President



Grader: Fred L. Smith, Jr., President

Americans rallied behind President Obama’s message of hope and change, giving this administration a wonderful opportunity to reframe the debate about an array of issues in America—entitlements, environmental policy, health care, and the roles of the federal and state governments. Americans, not wedded to either the Democrats or the Republicans, were ready for a reappraisal, a rebalancing of the powers of the people and the politicians. He blew it. Despite being elected by moderates and independents, this administration adopted the most statist agenda and created the most bloated bureaucracy in America’s history. By championing further politicization of an already overly politicized America, there have been rapid drops in Obama’s credibility and popularity.

Americans are dropping out of his Long March toward Socialism. Obama could have adopted a “Nixon in China” policy, working with Republicans, Independents, and Democrats to rebalance private and political frontiers, encouraging greater private involvement in education, allowing private property a role in the environmental field, taking on the non-sustainable entitlement programs already threatening the survival of Europe, reducing the regulatory and tax burdens on entrepreneurial creativity, and moving away from the neo-conservative “nation building” crusade of his predecessor. Unfortunately, he has not. He could have been—and, if he reshapes his course quickly enough, might still become—a great president. But, in this first year of his presidency, he has disappointed. The performance of the White House to date merits only a D-.


F
Department of Justice – Eric Holder, Attorney General



Grader: Hans Bader, Senior Attorney

The Justice Department is deeply politicized, putting partisanship before its legal responsibilities and the Constitution. It has failed to enforce federal voting rights laws like UOCAVA that protect the right of military service members to vote, resulting in many of them receiving absentee ballots to late to vote in close congressional races, like the special election for New York’s 20th congressional district. The obvious result of this is to put critics of the administration, who are disproportionately backed by military voters, at a disadvantage in every election. It dropped a voter-intimidation case after career justice department had already won the case and obtained a default judgment, shielding from punishment an Obama poll watcher and Philadelphia democratic official who used a nightstick and racial epithets to intimidate voters, and who belonged to the anti-Semitic, racist New Black Panther Party. It then thumbed its nose at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, by refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the Commission in its investigation of the administration’s actions. It overturned a legal opinion by David Baron, a liberal Justice Department attorney hired under the Obama administration, when he had the temerity to point out the inconvenient truth that giving D.C. a congressman, as Obama advocates, would violate the Constitution.

The Justice Department has expanded the use of Miranda Warnings in Afghanistan —even though they are not constitutionally required and impede investigators. Yet it argues in court briefs that detainees subjected to torture have no redress under the U.S. Constitution. It is eroding civil liberties by re-prosecuting in federal court teenagers acquitted of a hate crime in state court, even though testimony in the state case supported the jury’s not-guilty verdict by pointing to a different culprit. It failed to take steps to cut off funds to ACORN, a political ally of the President, despite ACORN’s being caught on video promoting mortgage fraud and other criminal activity, and the existence for years of federal statutes debarring contractors who engage in fraud.


D
Department of Treasury – Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary



Grader: Wayne Crews, Vice President for Policy

In a libertarian world of civil rather than political society, the Treasury Department would pay the modest bills of a constitutionally limited government. It’s true that Congress holds the purse strings; but during an economic and financial crisis rooted in already-gargantuan government that – despite the news reports – has regulated money, credit and interest rates many decades, a sane Treasury’s vision for leadership and recovery would rule out seducing Congress with yet more elaborate and larger purses (with elastic seams besides). This Treasury Department has compounded the “NASCAR” bailouts, helps inflate a silly “green energy” bubble, and stands at the podium cheerleading the idea of regulating the private-sector salaries among other priestly interventions in one formerly free endeavor after another. But creating ficticious economies through political means is nothing new; we’re experiencing the fruits of this key governmental function now. I want to give Treasury an “F” for standing by as the 2009 deficit topped an incomprehensible $1.6 trillion last year amid this self-serving orgy, a political spending phenomenon unrelated to the requirements of economic recovery.

However, Treasury gets only a “D” because it inherited from President Bush what was already the largest government on Planet Earth ($3 trillion) a behemoth it had few complaints about financing. We can argue it ‘till the whiskey’s gone, but there’s no question that under President Obama, Treasury has been instrumental in extending and “customizing” a Stimulus to Nowhere already making a beeline for the cliff’s edge, and things could have been otherwise. Federal interventions are so extensive that civil, voluntary society as opposed to administered society may never quite recover in this particular geographical area of the world during any of our lifetimes.

Since it insists upon doing more than keeping the books, to get an “A,” the U.S. Treasury Department must take a leadership role in removing obstacles to corporate and small business innovation like tax and capital gain liberalization, and help expand economic deregulation on a massive scale. Apart from paying the government’s own light bill, Treasury’s leadership is only valuable when it prioritizes wise and honest alternatives to spending yet more stimulus money that it doesn’t have. It can take a lead role in expanding ideas like privatization, liberalizing America’s network industries like electricity and telecommunications (it will surprise few that the latter is being newly regulated rather than deregulated), simplifying taxes, explaining why a VAT is disastrous, and much more. The U.S. federal government buys us far too much misery with the $4 trillion it now spends annually; I almost wish it were more Machiavellian rather than just crazy. Freedom and liberty cost less than this, America.





CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest group that studies the intersection of regulation, risk, and markets.



Related Files:
Obama 01.20.10 Report Card final.pdf