President Obama’s “Regulatory Review” executive order, issued this week, has no effect on the regulatory environment that I can discern. It essentially encourages agencies to continue doing the thinking and analysis they are doing so poorly under existing law and executive decree. I called it “a cosmetic, symbolic effort” in the Washington Examiner and—you’ll get the backstory here—also speculated that it’s an effort to change the subject. “Regulatory review” has briefly turned the press away from the government’s huge, ongoing spending spree, and the pall of uncertainty that President Obama has cast over the economy with projects like his re-design of the American health care system.
But don’t take that as an endorsement of the Republican program. Yesterday, House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Sam Johnson (R‑TX) issued a statement endorsing the E‑Verify program, which deputizes large and small businesses into a federal government document-checking program. You’d think that clearing out regulatory underbrush and getting people to work would be part of the Republican program, but Johnson said, “I will work with my colleagues and key stakeholders to design a verification system that prevents illegal employment while safeguarding the jobs, identities and privacy of U.S. citizens.” Can’t be done.
If you want to get a taste of the complexity, privacy consequence, and cost of E‑Verify as it struggles through its nascent stages, take a look at this truly excellent summary of a recent GAO report. The system now prohibits the employment of around 26 people for every thousand potential new hires, down from 80—and that’s the good news!
There’s much bad news. (The always-understated Government Accountability Office says “significant challenges.”) Identity fraud and employer noncompliance are (predictably) growing, so U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services is negotiating to get access to driver’s license data from state Departments of Motor Vehicles. Along with state bureaucrats, federal bureaucrats are (predictably) weaving together the national identity infrastructure that the American states and people rejected with the REAL ID Act.
And then there are costs. The last thing we need is more government overspending, right? So USCIS and the Social Security Administration are hiding it. Says the ever-accomodating GAO:
USCIS’s cost estimates do not reliably depict current E‑Verify cost and resource needs or cost and resource needs for mandatory implementation. While SSA’s cost estimates substantially depict current E‑Verify costs and resource needs, SSA has not fully assessed the extent to which its workload costs may change in the future.
This is the intrusive, costly program that the House Republican majority is falling in line behind, a clear sign that business-as-usual is business-as-usual for both parties. It’s a record-setting rejection of the Tea Party zeitgeist that put them in power. Where does it say in the Constitution that every employment decision in the country can be run past the federal government for approval?
