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| Lobbyists Terminating Their Federal Registrations at Accelerated Rate |
| 2009-11-02 |
| Lobbyists this year began terminating their formal registrations with the federal government at significantly higher levels than usual, a joint study by OMB Watch and the Center for Responsive Politics has found. The OMB Watch-CRP study found 1,418 "deregistrations" of federally registered lobbyists during the second quarter of 2009, a marked increase for any reporting period during all of 2008 and 2009. This occurred shortly after President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13490, which created new restrictions on former lobbyists appointed to the executive branch. Guidance was then issued in March, which marks the start of the 2nd quarter reporting, that enacted a gift ban and further restricted the kind of communications lobbyists could have about stimulus and TARP funds. Via a recent blog post, the White House also announced, “it is our aspiration that federally registered lobbyists not be appointed to agency advisory boards and commissions,” a practice that is common today. Although lobbyists terminate their registrations for a variety of reasons, a few hundred lobbyists, at most, typically fall from the ranks of active lobbyists each quarter. OMB Watch's Lee Mason, the organization's Director of Nonprofit Speech Rights, commented on the timing of the acceleration of terminations and the president's policies on lobbyists. “While we can’t draw a direct link between the president’s executive order and the increased pace of terminations during the second quarter of 2009, we can say that they came at a most controversial time,” Mason said. A diplomatic way of putting it. The study also indicates that since the beginning of 2008, the number of lobbyists filing termination reports has generally outpaced the number of newly active lobbyists – a trend that considerably accelerated during this year's second quarter. All told, there have been 18,315 lobbyist termination reports filed since January 2008. Meanwhile, only 15,310 lobbyists became active again after previously filing termination reports. This leaves a total of 3,005 lobbyists who have effectively “de-registered,” of which more than half (1,691) have come since April 2009. Another troubling issue highlighted by the organizations is that the thousands of lobbyists who appear to have left their line of work may not have actually done so. At the federal level, many people working in the lobbying industry are not registered lobbyists, instead adopting titles such as "senior advisor" or other executive monikers, thereby avoiding federal disclosure requirements under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. It's all smoke and mirrors. Nothing's really changed. Additionally, the terminology the lobbying community uses does not align with the categories of the U.S. Senate's or the Clerk of the House's lobbying disclosure databases. For example, on the disclosure form, there is no such term as “deregistration" – a phrase lobbyists and many in the media frequently use. Given this limitation, the most accurate way currently to determine the number of unique active lobbyists terminating their registrations requires tracking lobbyists' names listed on line 23 of the Lobbying Disclosure Act's form (LD2, which tracks lobbying activity on behalf of a client) and standardizing the data per unique individual lobbyist. Congressional disclosure offices must therefore research the activity of each lobbyist prior to sending notification of missing reports. With no unique identifier per individual lobbyist and with no “deregistration” field, verifying and enforcing compliance with the rules is made much more difficult. In a bid for greater government transparency and more useful and accurate lobbying disclosures, OMB Watch and CRP recommend the federal government make the following improvements in order to reach the intended goals of the Lobbying Disclosure Act: · Assign a unique identification number to each federally registered lobbyist · Add a field for "deregistering" as a lobbyist · Amend the LDA to codify these changes "Each of these corrective actions would allow the government, the media, and the public to more easily track lobbying activity and shine a light on the efforts of those who seek to influence government," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. |
| Posted by:Alaska Paul |
| #1 De-regulation is NOT in season. |
| Posted by: Angusoting Stalin9280 2009-11-02 18:03 |