White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: June 22, 2009

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that once a bill was passed by Congress, the White House would post it online for five days before he signed it.

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“When there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what’s in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government’s doing,” Mr. Obama said as a candidate, telling voters he would make government more transparent and accountable.

When he took office in January, his team added that in posting nonemergency bills, it would “allow the public to review and comment” before Mr. Obama signed them.

Five months into his administration, Mr. Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited five days. On the recent credit card legislation, which included a controversial measure to allow guns in national parks, he waited just two.

Various watchdog groups have slapped Mr. Obama’s wrist for repeatedly failing to live up to the pledge. Politifact.com, the fact-checking arm of The St. Petersburg Times, has branded it a “promise broken.”At the same time, many have questioned the value of the promise, saying it was too late in the process for anything to change in a bill.

“There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless,” said Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group dedicated to making government more transparent.

Now, in a tacit acknowledgment that the campaign pledge was easier to make than to fulfill, the White House is changing its terms. Instead of starting the five-day clock when Congress passes a bill, administration officials say they intend to start it earlier and post the bills sooner.

“In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”

Mr. Shapiro said the move would provide more transparency because the White House site drew so much traffic. It also stretches out the time in which a bill will be posted, making it easier for Mr. Obama to abide by the pledge.

Currently, after a bill passes Congress, the White House posts it by linking to the site of the Library of Congress. From now on, the White House plans to link to the site earlier, though Mr. Shapiro did not specify when.

The move marks a departure in the White House position on the pledge. Since January, when Mr. Obama broke the pledge with the first bill he signed, the administration has said it would implement it “in full soon.”

The Obama team has also said that it found unexpected technical hurdles in translating its campaign goals to governing. This is especially true regarding the posting of online comments. Ms. Miller of the Sunlight Foundation said that while the pledge was well intentioned, it was “meaningless” because it would not change anything and it had no mechanism for public comments or initiating a national conversation.

More useful, she said, would be for Congress to post bills earlier in the process, when language can still be changed. (Representative Brian N. Baird, Democrat of Washington, introduced a bill last week that says the House must post bills 72 hours before debate begins; a similar measure has not been introduced in the Senate.)

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning research organization, has tracked Mr. Obama’s bill-signing history. He said posting bills before final passage could be problematic because of last-minute changes.

One glaring example came in February, when it was discovered that the 1,071-page federal stimulus bill allowed millions of dollars in bonuses for American International Group executives.

If members of Congress know that final language will be “sitting out there” for five days, Mr. Harper said, they might be less likely to try to slip in questionable items. And if Mr. Obama keeps his pledge to wait five days, Mr. Harper said, he might set an example for Congress.