Obama and his bunker buddies

Most transparent administration in history closes more meetings than ever

BY ANDREW MALCOLM

08:16 AM ET

When Barack Obama first seized the White House back in 2009, his website promised "the most transparent administration in history."

In 2013, the Democrat announced: "This is the most transparent administration in history." And if you like your doctor.....

Now comes the Congressional Research Service to document that, well, that's just another Obama promise/claim.

The CRS just published a detailed look at what are called Federal Advisory Committees. Yes, yes, it sounds arcane. That's how the Washington bureaucracy gets away with so much stuff. Make it sound as boring as humanly possible, like a Joe Biden speech on Scranton. And the people will leave you alone, tune out.

But don't you dare. For one thing, you're shelling out a third of a billion dollars for these things. And you don't even know what they do. That's $915,000 every single day.

Congress -- yes, those folks again -- created the Federal Advisory Committee Act in 1972. Like many Washington ideas, it sounds like a swell one going in. Allow the feds to tap into the experience and knowledge of experts outside government. Consolidate all those unregulated advisory committees and boards that were, well, allegedly advising the federal government. They'd have to report who was on them, what they got paid, what if anything they did. All that.

The cool thing is anybody can create a FAC -- Congress, a president and any of his agencies. According to the Research Service's new report, during the 2014 fiscal year, of the 989 existing Federal Advisory Committees with 68,179 appointed members 825 of those committees held 7,173 meetings that cost $334 million.

It's quite an honor to be on these things. Prestigious line on a resume. You get expenses paid to meetings and government folks appear to listen. Health and Human Services has the most advisory committees, 264. Agriculture is second with 166. Homeland Security is down near the bottom with just 27 because it knows pretty much everything already.

The number of committees has been pretty steady during the last fiscal decade at around 980. However, there was a real spurt in 2011 up to 1,029 committees. That was when Obama was organizing his reelection campaign. But that's probably coincidence.

Here's what we've been leading up to: In the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years only 23% of the committee meetings were open to the public, as they're supposed to be without compelling reason. To put it another way, 77% of all the advisory committee meetings were closed to the people paying for them. Thanks. Now get out.

Coincidentally, those increased secret meetings occurred after Obama's reelection when voters lost all leverage on this guy.

As our astute colleague Chuck Ross over at the Daily Caller points out, "Overall, the ratio of open meetings was higher during the George W. Bush years than during the Obama years."

But wait! That would mean the current administration can't possibly be the most transparent administration in history. And that, in turn, means that Barack Obama has been wrong every time he made that claim. We need a Federal Advisory Committee to explain how that could be?