White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs just responded to a letter sent today from House Republican Leader John Boehner and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor regarding the proposed bipartisan health care summit:
The President is adamant that we seize this historic moment to pass meaningful health insurance reform legislation. He began this process by inviting Republican and Democratic leaders to the White House on March 5 of last year, and he’s continued to work with both parties in crafting the best possible bill. He’s been very clear about his support for the House and Senate bills because of what they achieve for the American people: putting a stop to insurance company abuses, extending coverage to millions of hardworking Americans, getting control of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reducing the deficit.
The President looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process, and as recently as the State of the Union Address. He’s open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny. What he will not do, however, is walk away from reform and the millions of American families and small business counting on it. The recent news that a major insurer plans to raise premiums for some customers by as much as 39 percent is a stark reminder of the consequences of doing nothing.
Read HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' letter to Anthem Blue Cross calling on them to publicly justify their extreme premium hikes at the same time their parent company sees soaring profits.
While most of Washington spent the weekend digging out of the snow, federal agencies were taking the next steps in making their work more transparent for the American people. Since early December, agencies have worked to create their own webpages to serve as the gateway for each agency’s implementation of the Open Government Directive. These pages all went live this weekend, complete with the latest news and updates, downloadable information unique to that agency, and information about how each agency is moving to implement the President’s call for a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.
Importantly, each of these sites will be the focal point for the agency's open government plans that, after public feedback and suggestion, will make our work across the Administration more accessible to the American people. That's why each Open Government Webpage incorporates a mechanism to seek your ideas and insights. Most agencies are leveraging a new, no-cost public engagement app from the General Services Administration that allows them to pay less attention to designing tools and more attention to running, moderating, and analyzing public input. It will help to make the agency open government pages more effective at turning public suggestions into government actions.
Here at the White House, we're keeping tabs on the agencies’ efforts. A dashboard – launched this weekend – tracks agency progress toward the goals of the Open Government Directive. This dashboard will continue to evolve with your feedback.
Since day one, the President has committed his Administration to break down long-standing barriers between the people and their government. The steps that the agencies are taking are designed to change the culture of government from a closed, opaque structure to one that is more accessible and accountable to citizens.
Check out the agency sites and see their work for yourself.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
While most of Washington spent the weekend digging out of the snow, federal agencies were taking the next steps in making their work more transparent for the American people. Since early December, agencies have worked to create their own webpages to serve as the gateway for each agency’s implementation of the Open Government Directive. These pages all went live this weekend, complete with the latest news and updates, downloadable information unique to that agency, and information about how each agency is moving to implement the President’s call for a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.
Importantly, each of these sites will be the focal point for the agency's open government plans that, after public feedback and suggestion, will make our work across the Administration more accessible to the American people. That's why each Open Government Webpage incorporates a mechanism to seek your ideas and insights. Most agencies are leveraging a new, no-cost public engagement app from the General Services Administration that allows them to pay less attention to designing tools and more attention to running, moderating, and analyzing public input. It will help to make the agency open government pages more effective at turning public suggestions into government actions.
Here at the White House, we're keeping tabs on the agencies’ efforts. A dashboard – launched this weekend – tracks agency progress toward the goals of the Open Government Directive. This dashboard will continue to evolve with your feedback.
Since day one, the President has committed his Administration to break down long-standing barriers between the people and their government. The steps that the agencies are taking are designed to change the culture of government from a closed, opaque structure to one that is more accessible and accountable to citizens.
Check out the agency sites and see their work for yourself.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
Along with a massive snowstorm, Friday brought a blizzard of new info on the job market. From the perspective of our work at the White House, two points stand out, one about where we are and the other about where we’ve been.
First, while there are encouraging signs regarding jobs, they are early signs and must be viewed with care. The job market is clearly doing better than it was but the level of unemployment is miles north of where it needs to be. Unemployment fell significantly last month, which is good, but a) it’s a one month data point and not yet a new trend, and b) it fell from 10% to 9.7%, and that's still an unacceptably high rate of joblessness.
Second, today's data release has new, revised information on just how bad this recession has been in the job market. Here a chart is worth a lot of words.
The chart plots the course of payroll employment over the last four recessions, including this one. In each case, we index jobs at the start of the recession to 100%, and the x-axis shows the number of months from when the recession began.
By setting it up this way, you get a lot of useful, comparative information across different downturns. For example, you see how much longer it took to regain the lost jobs in the 1990 and 2001 recession compared to the 1981 version.
But the main point is how severe this recession has been on job loss. There are two lines in the graph for the current recession because last week's data provided a revision based on more complete data. We knew it was bad, but it turned out to be even worse. We thought we were losing an unprecedented 690,000 jobs per month in the first quarter of last year. It turned out to be 750,000. In the four months between December 2008 and March 2009, we lost more jobs than during the last two recessions combined.
That's where we were. Where we are, as noted, is better but not good enough. Last month, we lost 20,000 jobs and that's not an outlier—it's another data point in an improving trend moving towards net job gains, which we expect to be seeing in a few months. But the job market won't be in recovery until those small negatives turn into big positives.
Here's what comes out of all this: our policies, most notably the Recovery Act, have helped move us from a situation where we were losing a nightmarish 750,000 jobs per month to one in which we've pulled back from the economic abyss and are moving a lot closer to adding jobs, on net, on a regular basis. But we can't kick back and wait for that moment. There's too much pain out there, too many families struggling with a job market that’s simply not providing the opportunities they need to get back on their feet.
So we have to hasten the arrival of more robust job growth with a set of initiatives targeted at the factors holding back job creation. The House passed a targeted jobs bill in December that included some of these priorities, including upgrading transportation and infrastructure, and aid to states to keep teachers, cops, and firefighters on the job. The Senate’s actively working on proposals with some of those same components.
Last week the President announced an initiative to help credit flow more freely to small businesses that want to expand their operations and payrolls but can’t access the capital. Both the President and Congress have been working on a new hiring tax credit targeted at the business owner who is considering adding workers but needs a nudge (and you can see employers dipping their toes in the labor pool—temp work has increased in each of the past four months).
Another idea in the mix right now is investment in infrastructure to help offset the continuing job losses in construction, a sector that took another big hit last month. And another is help to state and local governments facing tight budget squeezes and the resultant layoffs in folks like teachers, down 10,500 last month at the local level.
GDP is growing and growing pretty solidly. The employment data show employers cutting a lot less but not yet adding a lot more. Unemployment moved in the right direction last month, and we need to build on that positive movement.
But as the figure above shows so clearly, we've got a huge hole to fill. That hole wasn't dug overnight, and it's going to take some time and some smart, targeted policies, to fill it up. Now there's a shovel-ready project worth taking on.
Jared Bernstein is Chief Economist to Vice President Biden, and Executive Director of the Middle Class Task Force
Along with a massive snowstorm, Friday brought a blizzard of new info on the job market. From the perspective of our work at the White House, two points stand out, one about where we are and the other about where we’ve been.
First, while there are encouraging signs regarding jobs, they are early signs and must be viewed with care. The job market is clearly doing better than it was but the level of unemployment is miles north of where it needs to be. Unemployment fell significantly last month, which is good, but a) it’s a one month data point and not yet a new trend, and b) it fell from 10% to 9.7%, and that's still an unacceptably high rate of joblessness.
Second, today's data release has new, revised information on just how bad this recession has been in the job market. Here a chart is worth a lot of words.
The chart plots the course of payroll employment over the last four recessions, including this one. In each case, we index jobs at the start of the recession to 100%, and the x-axis shows the number of months from when the recession began.
By setting it up this way, you get a lot of useful, comparative information across different downturns. For example, you see how much longer it took to regain the lost jobs in the 1990 and 2001 recession compared to the 1981 version.
But the main point is how severe this recession has been on job loss. There are two lines in the graph for the current recession because last week's data provided a revision based on more complete data. We knew it was bad, but it turned out to be even worse. We thought we were losing an unprecedented 690,000 jobs per month in the first quarter of last year. It turned out to be 750,000. In the four months between December 2008 and March 2009, we lost more jobs than during the last two recessions combined.
That's where we were. Where we are, as noted, is better but not good enough. Last month, we lost 20,000 jobs and that's not an outlier—it's another data point in an improving trend moving towards net job gains, which we expect to be seeing in a few months. But the job market won't be in recovery until those small negatives turn into big positives.
Here's what comes out of all this: our policies, most notably the Recovery Act, have helped move us from a situation where we were losing a nightmarish 750,000 jobs per month to one in which we've pulled back from the economic abyss and are moving a lot closer to adding jobs, on net, on a regular basis. But we can't kick back and wait for that moment. There's too much pain out there, too many families struggling with a job market that’s simply not providing the opportunities they need to get back on their feet.
So we have to hasten the arrival of more robust job growth with a set of initiatives targeted at the factors holding back job creation. The House passed a targeted jobs bill in December that included some of these priorities, including upgrading transportation and infrastructure, and aid to states to keep teachers, cops, and firefighters on the job. The Senate’s actively working on proposals with some of those same components.
Last week the President announced an initiative to help credit flow more freely to small businesses that want to expand their operations and payrolls but can’t access the capital. Both the President and Congress have been working on a new hiring tax credit targeted at the business owner who is considering adding workers but needs a nudge (and you can see employers dipping their toes in the labor pool—temp work has increased in each of the past four months).
Another idea in the mix right now is investment in infrastructure to help offset the continuing job losses in construction, a sector that took another big hit last month. And another is help to state and local governments facing tight budget squeezes and the resultant layoffs in folks like teachers, down 10,500 last month at the local level.
GDP is growing and growing pretty solidly. The employment data show employers cutting a lot less but not yet adding a lot more. Unemployment moved in the right direction last month, and we need to build on that positive movement.
But as the figure above shows so clearly, we've got a huge hole to fill. That hole wasn't dug overnight, and it's going to take some time and some smart, targeted policies, to fill it up. Now there's a shovel-ready project worth taking on.
Jared Bernstein is Chief Economist to Vice President Biden, and Executive Director of the Middle Class Task Force
Reiterating once again his commitment to small business as the engine of our economy, the President urges Congress to move forward immediately on steps to help them expand and create jobs. These proposals include using $30 billion in TARP funds to create a new Small Business Lending Fund to provide capital to community banks to increase lending to small businesses, offering a new tax credit for over one million small businesses that hire new workers or raise wages, and providing targeted support for the most innovative small businesses with the potential to export new goods and products.
Today the President got to meet the Park View Little League Team, 2009 Champions.
President Barack Obama shakes hands with members of the Park View Little League baseball team of Chula Vista, California in the East Room of the White House, to congratulate them on winning the 2009 Little League World Series
In accordance with the Open Government Directive, two working groups have been established to help develop specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration set forth in the President’s Memorandum of January 21, 2009.
First, Federal Agencies have designated a high-level senior official to be accountable for the quality of Federal spending information. In an ongoing commitment to transparency, participation, and collaboration, these senior leaders will work together to ensure that Federal spending information meets adequate controls to ensure quality data is are available to the public. The senior leaders will also participate in the agency’s Senior Management Council.
Second, the White House created a Working Group on January 6 to focus on transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration within the Federal Government. With senior-level representation from program and management offices throughout the Government, this group will serve several critical functions. These functions include (1) the development and sharing of best practices and innovative ideas to promote transparency, encourage participation, and foster collaboration and (2) coordinating efforts to implement existing mandates for Federal spending transparency.
With representation from across government, the work of these two groups will support Federal Agencies as they encourage transparency, cultivate public participation, and create opportunity for innovative collaborations.
Vivek Kundra is Chief Information Officer
Aneesh Chopra is Chief Technology Officer
As the President has recently noted, the Administration has had an extraordinary first year for transparency and open government. We still have work to do, but we have already had some significant accomplishments. That was the conclusion of the respected independent groups that gave us an A for transparency in a recent report card -- and that view was also expressed by other experts in this area who I recently joined on a panel hosted by OMB Watch on government transparency. You can watch a recording of the full panel discussion, and we have excerpted some of the comments below.
Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, said:
There is no question that the President has set an extraordinarily high bar with respect to transparency in government. And while I think there have been certainly some shortcomings in execution… I think he has begun to make a significant change in the culture of what openness means and move the default of where government information is from being in the hands of government into citizens’ hands… The Administration has clearly endorsed that sort of fundamental cultural shift in information and transparency. It’s a sea change, frankly, not just from the previous Administration… Forget the previous administration; this is a sea change in my decades of experience of Washington…
The important thing that's happening in the administration is not the individual things that they are making available, as important as they are, but the fact that they are beginning to hardwire this default of openness into government.
Transparency is not an issue; it’s a value. And I think that's what the administration has embraced and what’s absolutely key to their successes.
Meredith Fuchs, General Counsel of the National Security Archive, focused on the Administration’s work on three specific openness issues:
[F]or me, these three issues--presidential records, classification, and FOIA--can be summed as showing a pretty good start. A lot of work necessary in a few of these areas but really a tremendous change.
She also noted regarding our historic White House visitor records release (100,000 records and counting) that it is "tremendously brave to expose yourself to that kind of attack, that kind of inquiry."
Sarah Cohen, Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, while candid about the work that remains to be done, stated:
The idea that we’re here at all talking about transparency says a lot. We wouldn't have been here at all a year and a half ago. Nobody would have had it on an agenda, and nobody would have cared about it. And that makes a big difference… the point about releasing the White House visitor logs is a very important one, that that was a huge step, and one that I think most people around the country looked at and said "that’s really important."
And even Mark Tapscott, the editor of the Washington Examiner's editorial page—which has been pretty tough on the Administration at times—offered some kind words:
Having served in an administration… as a political appointee, I have some appreciation for the political imperative that the transparency issue has to exist within. The political imperative is very simply this: plausible deniability. "Protect the boss." "Save your tail." And that means, too often, we have an incentive to not be transparent. And an incentive that’s institutional and not merely personal. That’s one of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to achieve change.
It's also one of the reasons why many of the things that the Obama people have started to do are rather remarkable. It is remarkable, given that imperative, that they would assume responsibility for doing these things.
Our release of the White House visitor logs that the panelists applauded is only one example of the many steps the President has taken so far to increase government transparency. The Administration’s other concrete commitments to openness include issuing the Open Government Directive, putting up more government information than ever before on data.gov and recovery.gov, reforming the government’s FOIA processes, providing on-line access to White House staff financial reports and salaries, issuing an executive order to fight unnecessary secrecy and speed declassification, reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records, and webcasting White House meetings and conferences. The release also compliments our new lobbying rules, which in addition to closing the revolving door for lobbyists who work in government have also emphasized expanding disclosure of lobbyist contacts with the government. And the President capped the year off by calling in the State of the Union for bold transparency initiatives (pdf) as part of his reform agenda for 2010 and the years ahead.
Norm Eisen is Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform
Yesterday, just hours after the Senate voted 96-0 to confirm Martha Johnson as the Administrator of the GSA after a pointless 9-month delay, we learned that Sen. Richard Shelby from Alabama has placed a blanket hold on all nominees, including national security nominees, to use as leverage for some projects in his state. He's holding up 70 nominees, among them top intelligence officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. According to the National Journal, he’s holding them up until two defense contracts that would benefit interests in his state can be fast-tracked.
Let's be clear: Sen. Shelby is preventing qualified nominees who will help protect the American people from being confirmed. He’s not alone, though. This is just the latest example of this kind opposition for opposition’s sake that the President talked about earlier this week.. This strategy of obstruction is preventing qualified people from doing their jobs on behalf of the American people and it’s preventing real work from getting done in Washington. Every minute spent needlessly blocking noncontroversial nominees, many of whom go on to be confirmed by 70 or more votes or by voice vote (nine of the President’s nominees so far), is a minute not spent on the issues that matter to American families.
As I noted yesterday, this is true of the legislative process, too. The Senate cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and '60s combined, making it nearly impossible to come to agreement on key legislation.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director