Ed just posted on the State Department covering up misconduct. We’re going to need a bigger boat.
Actually, there are two potential scandals here. One is HHS tossing around what was supposed to be sensitive information to a huge swath of employees in-house. The other scandal is who actually leaked it, assuming anyone did. It might not have come from HHS at all but rather from some old-fashioned Beltway congressional/lobbyist incest. As with most of the other Obama scandals, this story is less about O himself than about the foreseeable abuses that result as the federal whale grows. You can have bigger government or you can have more accountable government. The guy who signed ObamaCare into law has made his choice.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told The Washington Post late last week that his office reviewed the e-mail records of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and found that 436 of them had early access to the Medicare decision as much as two weeks before it was made public…
“In the statistical agencies, where the handling of sensitive information is their bread and butter, they’re very serious about confidentiality,” said Keith Hall, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who has spent more than two decades in government. “But in other parts of the government that handle policy issues, there’s a whole different level of treatment.”
Hall said employees in other parts of the government, including the Medicare office, are not subject to the same types of potential consequences as employees at statistical agencies, who can land in prison for up to five years and face a fine of a quarter of a million dollars for disclosing information early.
Giving hundreds of government employees advance notice of a policy decision “is way too many,” said Hall, now a senior fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “I’ve done my share of working on policy issues and policy decisions, and you just don’t spread that stuff around like that.”
