The Foundation for Government Accountability was incorporated as a nonprofit on June 27, 2011. According to the organization’s website, the group’s goal is to “develop and promote free market public policies that achieve limited, constitutional government and a robust economy that will be an engine for job creation across the state.” The IRS lists the Foundation as a “public charity with a 50 percent deductibility limitation.”

The man behind this new right-leaning public policy advocacy group: Tarren Bragdon.

While unknown to most Floridians, Bragdon made quite a name for himself in Maine, where a newspaper called Bragdon “arguably the most influential non-elected suit” in the state capital.

At the age of 21, Bragdon became the youngest state representative ever elected to the Maine Legislature, but he moved on to influence policy in other ways after two terms.

As CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, Bragdon ran afoul of Democratic critics for running a policy group that “cloaked itself as a ‘scholarly research center’ while advancing policy embraced by the extreme right and Libertarianism, a movement currently marshaled nationally by factions of the tea party,” according to another Maine newspaper.

Steve Mistler, who profiled Bragdon for the Sun Journal, reported that the group faced “allegations that its increased involvement in this year’s gubernatorial election pushes, if not violates, the political lobbying limits allowed by its tax-exempt status”:

The center’s political activism is made more relevant after a recent report in The New Yorker magazine detailing the tea party’s billionaire benefactor, Koch Industries. The modern-day oil baron has funnelled millions into the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity group.

According to the story, AFP is at the nexus of a national web of like-minded nonprofits set up as analysis centers to produce policy papers challenging climate science and regulation of the financial industry. Billed as education positions, the analysis papers ultimately benefit the organization’s anonymous corporate donors, the story says.

The furor over AFP would seem distant from Maine politics if not for the group’s similarities to the Maine Heritage Policy Center. The connection is more than resemblance: Two months ago AFP started a Maine chapter and began partnering with the policy center to hold activist training seminars.

Bragdon has repeatedly dismissed claims that the group broke any of the rules that restrict tax-exempt organizations, as well as claims that the group was bankrolled by shadowy monied interests such as the Koch brothers. His work eventually caught the eye of individuals in Florida who want the Sunshine State to have its own version of the Heritage Policy Center.

According to Bragdon, he left his influential position in Maine because he was interested in working in a bigger state.

“This was a good opportunity for me,” he tells The Florida Independent.

Bragdon says there “were initial donors who were interested in having [him] here” in Florida, but will not name who those donors are.

“Every year we will disclose our donors,” he says. “Unless they would prefer us not to disclose their contribution, but we don’t usually have a problem with that.”

While Florida donors might not request anonymity, Maine donors did request it back when Bragdon was with Heritage Policy Center. In March, Bragdon told a Maine newspaper that his donors chose to remain anonymous because of possible “political retribution (against) individuals who may choose privately to support our work.”

The Foundation for Government Accountability logo (Pic via floridafga.org)

While there is little knowledge of who helped open the Foundation’s doors, documents show the group already has a tie to a big name in conservative circles. According to the group’s articles of incorporation, one of the group’s “initial trustees” is Robert Levy of the Cato Institute. Levy is now officially a member of the Foundation’s board of directors.

The Cato Institute was one of the large conservative groups known to contribute to the Heritage Policy Center while Bragdon worked there. According to SourceWatch, “in its 2006 annual report the Cato Institute states that it made a grant of $50,000 to the Maine Heritage Policy Center.” The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane and Charles Koch of Koch Industries.

Levy is also known as the attorney behind a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down Washington, D.C.’s 32-year-old gun ban in 2008. He is also sits on the boards of the Institute for Justice and the Federalist Society.

The Foundation has also registered with the State Policy Network. The State Policy Network has been described by Mother Jones as “a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement.”

“Its mission is simple: to back a constellation of state-level think tanks loosely modeled after Heritage that promote free-market principles and rail against unions, regulation, and tax increases,” Jones reports. “By blasting out policy recommendations and shaping lawmakers’ positions through briefings and private meetings, these think tanks cultivate cozy relationships with GOP politicians. And there’s a long tradition of revolving door relationships between SPN staffers and state governments. While they bill themselves as independent think tanks, SPN’s members frequently gather to swap ideas.”

Bragdon says he chose to base the group in Naples because he “has support” in the area and wants to have the group headquartered where his donor base is. He is looking to open a satellite office in Tallahassee. ”We anticipate on testifying on a couple of issues there,” he says.

Before moving to Florida, Bragdon had already met the biggest names in the state’s conservative circles: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Gov. Rick Scott. While Bragdon was CEO of the group, the Heritage Policy Center hosted Rubio as a keynote speaker. Bragdon says he also met with the governor in Tallahassee in August.

The Ave Herald reported that when Scott visited Immokalee and Ave Maria a few weeks ago,”he was accompanied by Tarren Bragdon, who moved to Ave Maria from Maine recently to set up a new think tank.” Bragdon says he “toured” with Scott in 2009 when Scott was campaigning with the anti-health care reform operation he launched, Conservative for Patients’ Rights.

One of the Foundation’s policy pamphlets was cited in the state’s defense of its new welfare drug testing law, during a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. The Foundation report claimed that a decline in the number of applicants approved for welfare benefits was because of the new law.

“Given the significant decline in August 2011 approvals,” Bragdon wrote, “it appears to be a very significant trend and quite likely related to the drug testing requirement, as the economy did not change radically from June through August.”

A judge threw out the study last week, claiming it was “not competent expert opinion.” The Bush-appointed judge wrote that “even a cursory review of certain assumptions in the pamphlet undermines its conclusions.”

Bragdon says his group researched the state’s welfare drug testing program independently. He was surprised when the state included his pamphlet in its defense.

Right now, Bragdon says he is working to make sure the group is ready to testify in front of state policy-makers during the upcoming legislative session. “The best way to influence policy is to actually talk to these legislators,” he says.

According to court documents, the state (defendant David Wilkins, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Children & Families) submitted a report created by a “free market” public policy think tank in Naples called the Foundation for Government Accountability as part of its defense.

However, the court threw out the group’s report yesterday, claiming it was “not competent expert opinion.”

The News Service of Florida reports that Tarren Bragdon, the CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, was disappointed with the decision:

“Judge Scriven’s ruling against Florida’s drug-testing requirement for taxpayer-funded welfare cash is disappointing, and removes needed accountability from our welfare system,” Bragdon said. “Our analysis of the law shows that the requirement is saving the state millions in welfare benefits, and helps ensure taxpayer dollars are reserved only for the truly needy.”

The court’s motion reads:

Though the State offers, as evidence of the cost savings, a pamphlet from the Foundation for Government Accountability entitled, The Impact of Florida’s New Drug Test Requirement for Welfare Cash Assistance, the data contained in the pamphlet is not competent expert opinion, nor is it offered as such, nor could it be reasonably construed as such. Tarren Bragdon, The Impact of Florida’s New Drug Test Requirement for Welfare Cash Assistance, FOUNDATION FOR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY, September 2011 at 1 (Dkt. 19-8 at 1.) Even a cursory review of certain assumptions in the pamphlet undermines its conclusions. Just by way of example, the pamphlet suggests that the State will save millions in the first year; but it arrives at this number by extrapolating from the 9.6 percent of TANF applications that are denied for “drug-related” reasons, including those who tested positive and those who declined to be tested. Id. at 1. It extends these hypothetical savings for the full year that a TANF applicant who tested positive for drugs would be subject to losing benefits.

Within the footnotes, the Foundation for Government Accountability is described as “a non-profit organization that ‘believes personal liberty and private enterprise are key to Florida’s economic future,’ ‘develops and promotes free market public policies that achieve limited, constitutional government and a robust economy that will be an engine for job creation across the state.’”

The group in question is not even a year old. The formation of the foundation, a “new free market think tank in Naples, Florida,” was announced in April of this year.

Sunshine State News reported in its announcement of the group:

“Individual freedom and private enterprise are the keys to Florida’s economic future,” said Tarren Bragdon, the president and CEO of the new group, on Thursday. “The Foundation for Government Accountability will be a resource for taxpayers and policymakers who seek a Florida booming with new entrepreneurs, well-educated children, a top-rate health care system, and an affordable, open government that protects freedom.”

The FGA will be tackling health care and government transparency, as well as economic and job growth.

“As government grows in size and complexity, and as people lose faith in their elected officials, it’s important that organizations exist to influence government on behalf of the taxpayers, and move the state toward common-sense reforms and a growing economy,” said Bragdon. “The Foundation for Government Accountability will give the public peace of mind that their financial security and personal freedom will be at the forefront of all policy debates.”

Bragdon certainly has the background to launch a think tank at the state level. His impressive background includes a long tenure with the Maine Heritage Policy Center as director of health reform initiatives and, eventually, CEO. From 1996 until 2000, he served in the Maine House of Representatives. Bragdon was 21 — by less than two weeks — when he was first elected, making him the youngest legislator in the state’s history (take that James G. Blaine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Hannibal Hamlin — yes, all the politicians I know from Maine are from the 19th century). Bragdon also was a special assistant to Maine Senate President Richard Bennett after his stint in the House and oversaw Gov. Paul LePage’s budget workgroup after the 2010 elections.

Maine Heritage Policy Center, Bragdon’s former employer, describes its mission as formulating and promoting “conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise; limited, constitutional government; individual freedom; and traditional American values–all for the purpose of providing public policy solutions that benefit the people of Maine.”

According to SourceWatch, the group has received big donations from conservative groups in the past. For example, “in its 2006 annual report the Cato Institute states that it made a grant of $50,000 to the Maine Heritage Policy Center,” SourceWatch reports. The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane and Charles Koch. Koch is one of the conservative and influential billionaire Koch brothers.

Bragdon has an interesting history in Maine. At the age 21, Bragdon become the state’s youngest state representative ever elected. According to the Portland Press Herald, after years in the legislature, Bragdon “worked for five years as the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s part-time director of health reform initiatives, before taking over as CEO in January of 2008.”

The Portland Press Herald reported that ”according to the organization’s tax filings, Bragdon earned $136,208 in salary and other compensation in 2009.”

The Press Herald also reported that Bragdon was later the “co-chair of Gov. Paul LePage’s transition team … [and] played a major role in writing LePage’s proposed budget for the next two years.”

Besides contributing research for Florida’s defense of its drug testing law, Bragdon has also written in support of the state turning down millions of dollars from the health care reform law during his short time here.

Scott’s bill would slash the corporate income tax rate for the highest-earning companies in the country. Corporate taxes already comprise a smaller portion of federal tax revenue than they have since records began in 1950.

Scott’s bill would change language in current Internal Revenue Code, replacing the rate of 35 percent that appears in a tax code subsection on “corporations in general” with one of 23 percent. Currently, the rate of 35 percent applies to the top corporate tax bracket. Businesses making less than $10 million a year would be unaffected by the legislation, but businesses making more than that would reap huge benefits.

Scott prides himself on being a friend of business (PDF). Indeed, the largest single contributor to his successful 2010 campaign was Club for Growth. Club for Growth is a tax-exempt conservative organization dedicated to “limited government and economic freedom.” Like many such organizations, it has ties to the Koch brothers: Howard Rich, a developer on the Club for Growth’s board, also serves on the Board of Directors of the Cato Institute alongside David Koch.

Although some of its corporate partners would benefit hugely from the cuts, Koch Industries itself may have little to gain directly, because, it has been reported, it pays no corporate income tax. When an Obama official mentioned this last August, the only response from Koch Industries was loudly-professed outrage that the administration seemingly knew confidential information about its tax status.

Sestak’s insistence on the issue is part of a growing trend among Democratic candidates, who appear to have finally gained some traction by going on the attack against the plans of some Republicans to privatize or otherwise alter the popular entitlement program. He’s among the most recent Democratic candidates to sign a pledge on the issue at SocialSecurityProtectors.com, a campaign launched by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

PCCC co-founder Stephanie Taylor says the campaign is a part of a broader mission of “saving the Democratic Party from itself. Progressive are working with bold candidates and members of Congress to show party leadership how to go on offense, run progressively, and win — especially on issues like Social Security, where the public is so clearly on our side.”

And while Toomey and other Senate candidates like Nevada’s Sharron Angle, who famously told Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to “man up” about the issue last week, appear unfazed by the Democrats’ new counterattack, a number of House GOP candidates I spoke to about deficit reduction do seem to be taking it to heart:

“I don’t think it’s realistic to believe that Congress is going to make those cuts to Social Security,” said [Steve] Chabot of Ohio. “It’s not going to happen, so to act like it’s going to happen is just going to scare seniors, which is what Democrats do in every election.”

Meanwhile, other GOP House candidates who advocate overhauling the program were careful to insert many caveats into their plans:

“We do need to look at entitlements, realizing of course that there are a lot of people who rely on our current system,” said the campaign manager for Tom Reed, who is favored to win the open House seat in New York’s 29th District. “So a promise made must be a promise kept, but for future generations we need to look at what levels they’ll be at down the road.”

“I’m in favor of personal [savings] accounts,” said Benishek, “but [I want to] guarantee that they don’t lose any money.”

Steve Griffin, who is leading the House race in Arkansas’ Second District, proposes reforming entitlement spending on his campaign website but also opposes privatizing social security or raising the age at which one qualifies for benefits. (He did not respond to repeated requests for more details about his plan.)

That’s a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of plan for Social Security, says Tad DeHaven, budget analyst at the Cato Institute, but it illustrates the political difficulties faced by Republican candidates who want to see real reform but also must run for re-election.

SpeechNow.org’s founders — which include David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth, and Edward Crane, president of the libertarian Cato Institute — assure the Center that the group does indeed plan to register, despite the fact that it has yet to raise any money or establish a bank account. Meanwhile, the number of political groups that have wasted no time in leaping into the breach that SpeechNow.org helped open in campaign finance law continues to grow:

The following is a list of groups that have notified the FEC so far:

• American Crossroads (Washington, D.C.)
• American Dental Association PAC Independent Expenditures Committee (Washington, D.C.)
• Americans for New Leadership (Las Vegas, Nev.)
• America’s Families First Action Fund (Washington, D.C.)
• Arizonans Working Together (Scottsdale, Ariz.)
• Californians for Fiscally Conservative Leadership (Coarsegold, Calif.)
• Citizens for Strength and Security PAC (Washington, D.C.)
• Club for Growth Action (Washington, D.C.)
• Commonsense Ten (Washington, D.C.)
• Communications Workers of America Working Voices (Washington, D.C.)
• Concerned Taxpayers of America (Washington, D.C.)
• Conservatives for Truth (Jackson, Tenn,)
• First Amendment Alliance (Alexandria, Va.)
• Florida Is Not For Sale (Coral Gables, Fla.)
• Headquarters Committee of West Hollywood/Beverly Hills & Stonewall Democratic Clubs & Stonewall Young Democrats, Ltd. (Burbank, Calif.)
• League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund (Washington, D.C.)
• Louisiana Truth PAC (New Orleans, La.)
• Majority Action PAC (Washington, D.C.)
• New Prosperity Foundation (Chicago, Ill.)
• People’s Majority (Alexandria, Va.)
• Protecting Choice In California 2010, a project of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California (Sacramento, Calif.)
• Sierra Club Independent Action (San Francisco, Calif.)
• Texas Tea Party Patriots PAC (The Woodlands, Texas)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi holds a press conference at the Capitol to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Social Security Act. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

This summer, Social Security – the government program that provides a steady check for seniors – turned 75. In Washington, lawmakers celebrated its platinum anniversary not with champagne, but with a heated argument over whether to reform the costly entitlement program by slashing benefits or raising the retirement age. Indeed, with the national debt over $13 trillion and the government running at a $1 trillion a year loss, the Obama administration created a deficit commission — the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — to find ways to return the country to the black. In anticipation of its report, and in anticipation of possible changes to the program, lawmakers have started discussing how to reform Social Security.

[Economy1] After running a surplus for years and building up a sizable trust fund, Social Security now runs in the red. Though the program is far from bankrupt, more money is pouring out than going in. Economists project that the trust fund will be emptied by 2037. From there, opinions diverge on how far into debt the program will fall if nothing is done.

“Social Security is not in immediate trouble. There’s been a lot of exaggeration of that problem,” says Alice Rivlin, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the deficit commission. “It is not on a solid basis for the long run, however. The sooner we act, the less we have to do.”

The problem is, there’s no consensus on what form that action should take. And many of the most commonly discussed tactics for stemming the flow of red ink would disproportionately impact lower-income Americans, the segment of the population that depends on Social Security the most.

One idea that comes up frequently is raising the retirement age. House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), for instance, proposes lifting it to 70; some economists have suggested lifting it to as high as 75.

The idea sounds good: People are living longer, so it makes sense they will be working longer as well, right? But raising the retirement age will not necessarily keep people in the workforce longer, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research. For lower-income Americans, it would often just consign them to a retirement of lower benefit checks.

Already, around two-thirds of non-disabled workers elect to begin receiving smaller checks at 62 rather than full payments at 65. The hardship of raising the retirement age falls disproportionately on low-income workers who work in physically demanding professions, jobs they may not be able to continue through their seventh decade. According to Baker, 45 percent of workers over the age of 58 hold physically demanding jobs. Among those who lack a high-school diploma, that percentage skyrockets to around 75 percent. “If the hope is that people will work longer, that’s a very difficult thing for low and moderate income Americans to do,” Baker says.

Moreover, though the average lifespan has increased since Social Security’s creation, those extra years aren’t enjoyed equally by all Americans. Overall, Americans are living about 7 years longer. But the poorest 20 percent of Americans are living just two years longer – coinciding with that increase in retirement age. Baker notes that minority Americans fare even worse. “Even at 65, there’s a gap of about two years in lifespan. Also, on average, they have much lower wealth at retirement, so they’re much more dependent on Social Security.”

Center and right-leaning policy experts say another way to limit Social Security expenditures is to change the baseline for the benefits calculator from a wage index to a price index. Since the price of goods tends to grow more slowly than wages do, this shift would reduce the amount the program would have to pay out in the future. Supporters of this proposal say that because the benefits will still increase along with price inflation, seniors won’t suffer a shortfall in real-dollar terms.

This logic works in theory. But in practice, it would seriously impact lower-income Americans. Why? Seniors spend differently than average-aged workers: They buy more healthcare goods and services. And healthcare costs are skyrocketing well above the average inflation rate, so lowering benefits would make it more difficult for retirees to cover their costs. The more economically strapped the American, the more it would hurt.

Other plans would have less impact on those least able to shoulder the burden. One idea would be to reduce benefits for wealthy retirees. The idea is that “Bill Gates doesn’t need social security,” says Brookings’ Rivlin.

The problem is deciding where to set the bar: Too low, and you ensnare middle-class families, too high, and you only earn the ire of the superrich without contributing much to the bottom line. Some experts, including Rivlin, think the political cost probably wouldn’t be worth the impact on the bottom line. Polls show that even wealthy Americans want their Social Security, and are willing to pay for it. The government might net a little more money, but it would lose the public support and buy-in of wealthy (and thereby influential) citizens.

“U.S. benefits relative to earnings are low by comparison with those in other wealthy nations,” says Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think there’s a strong case for cutting benefits on the merits of the idea. In my view, the bulk of the fix should come from the revenue side.”

Many economists on the left share that sentiment. “It makes sense to fix social security by increasing revenues and making sure a good chunk of those revenues come from the high end of the income distribution,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Raising the payroll cap is one popular idea. Currently, the first $106,800 an American makes is subject to the Social Security tax; above that, the earner pays nothing. “If you eliminate the cap, you’re probably getting very close to eliminating the entire Social Security deficit for the next 75 years,” says Christian Weller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The more common proposal is to raise the cap so 90 percent of earnings are subject to the tax, which would eliminate about a third of the deficit.”

Another idea under consideration is raising the payroll tax rate by a fraction of a percentage point. Although the flat rate of this tax is inherently regressive, some left-leaning experts say it’s preferable to a cut in benefits, especially when the prospect is discussed in conjunction with other modifications like a minimum benefit, as described in a recent report by the Urban Institute.

Not everyone thinks adding to the payroll tax rate is the way to go, though. “It seems to me that raising the payroll tax is the least desirable way to try to move the program towards solvency,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. “It’s a tax on work and makes it more expensive for employers.”

Marshall supports ideas more commonly embraced by the right to make up the shortfall, including an increase in the retirement age and a downward adjustment on the formula used to calculate benefits.

Some Republican politicians are still pushing for privatization, pointing to the rise of the stock market over the long term. Mike Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, asserts that even if a retiree cashed out at the trough of the market in 2009, he or she would have still experienced a growth in wealth. Given the wariness with which many Americans bruised by a drop in their 401(k) and home values now view the stock market, though, privatization may be a tough sell at least until the current bear market fades from our collective memory. “A lot of Republicans seem to view private investment as some kind of panacea, which I don’t think is correct,” says PPI’s Marshall. “That wouldn’t solve the underlying structural problems.”

Right-leaning experts tend to paint a bleaker view of the Social Security situation in general. Cato’s Tanner explains that the difference is that they include in their calculation of upcoming obligations the cost to be borne by the Treasury when the program cashes in its trust fund bonds. Obviously, that money will have to come from somewhere, but progressive economists like CAP’s Weller, counter that it’s disingenuous for the right to say those bonds pose an economic risk when the Social Security surplus is one factor that was used to justify Bush-era tax cuts in the first place.

Experts of all stripes like to point out that Social Security reform should be a snap compared to changing more complex programs like Medicare. In a strictly economic sense, that’s true. But the discussion around Social Security often threatens to collapse under the metaphorical weight lawmakers have conferred on the program. “It’ll probably be more politically determined than substantively determined,” PPI’s Marshall concedes. “Right now neither side wants to come out of its assigned place.”

But undeterred by all that is a coalition of liberal and conservative defense wonks from the Project on Defense Alternatives, the Center for American Progress, the Cato Institute, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Defense Information and more. Calling themselves the Sustainable Defense Task Force — thereby taking up the “sustainability” call for budget austerity from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his undersecretary for policy (and likely successor), Michele Flournoy — they identify up to $960 billion in spending cuts over ten years. That’s in a new report they’re releasing this morning.

The cuts don’t come from war spending, but from the Pentagon’s “base budget”: everything that the department buys or maintains on a regular basis, as opposed to a contingency basis for wartime emergency. Cuts are supposed to come across the board, from nuclear forces, missile defense and space programs (nearly $200 billion saved over ten years); big service priorities like the Joint Strike Fighter, the KC-X refueling tanker, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the Osprey helicopter (nearly $90 billion saved over ten years); getting rid of two Air Force tactical fighter wings and cutting the Navy to 230 ships (nearly $167 billion saved over ten years); reforming DOD’s increasingly expensive health care system (nearly $50 billion saved over ten years); and many, many other canceled, delayed or reformed programs. You can read the full (PDF) report here.

It would be an understatement to say that the cuts identified by the task force run against the ever-upward trajectory of the defense budget. But they also run up against certain priorities of the current Pentagon leadership, even as that leadership goes further than most in sharing the task force’s goals. The Joint Strike Fighter and KC-X are priorities. So is maintaining an expanded ground force. But the task force urges the Pentagon to roll back the growth in the Army and Marine Corps as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end. And while several post-Cold War Pentagon leaders have argued for reducing the U.S.’s garrisoning footprint in Europe and Asia, another task force priority, the diplomatic equities at stake have proven to be a powerful inertial force. And then there’s the fact that the House is thumbing its nose at Gates’s efforts just to get rid of an engine that the services say they don’t want in the Joint Strike Fighter.

But it’s one thing to propose specific costs to specific programs. It’s another to offer a set of criteria to identify wasteful spending going forward. That gets into the issues of national strategy that Flournoy discussed in her speech yesterday to the Center for a New American Security. And the task force is happy to oblige, urging policymakers to eschew:

Department of Defense programs that are based on unreliable or unproven technologies,

Missions that exhibit a poor cost-benefit payoff and capabilities that fail the test of cost-effectiveness or that possess a very limited utility,

Assets and capabilities that mismatch or substantially over-match current and emerging military challenges, and

Opportunities for providing needed capabilities and assets at lower cost via management reforms.

No one is going to be excited by a proposal that involves “finger printing the entire U.S. working population,” said Calabrese at a Cato Institute Capitol Hill briefing today. The proposed regulations are “costly, they’re ineffective, they’re bureaucratic. They’ll start with immigrants, but they’re a tool for social control.”

What Calabrese is referring to is a proposal for a national biometric ID card, laid out by Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a Washington Post op-ed in mid-March as part of the comprehensive immigration reform bill they’re drafting. The two senators essentially plan on requiring “all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card,” they wrote.

But according to Calabrese and Harper, the nationally uniform ID would create a long list of problems — and it wouldn’t help solve the problem of illegal immigration.

Perhaps the most significant issue Calabrese addressed is that the problem targeted by the proposal won’t be affected at all. The card would require all U.S. citizens and permanent residents to get a card, but illegal immigrants who already ignore current laws can still just ignore the national ID. “You’re saying, ‘Let’s pass a law to target people who are already ignoring the existing law,’” Calabrese said. Employers could still hire people who do not have a card or have a falsified card, or they could simply pay their workers under the table.

This isn’t just an immigration issue, Harper noted. “We’re talking about native-born Americans” who would be affected by this.

Harper and Calabrese addressed some of the issues with the national ID:

- Anyone could still present false documents, either by creating a manufactured identity or stealing an identity, to obtain a national ID.

- The actual ID could also be illegally reproduced.

- Biometrics are untested. There is no good standard for biometrics. Harper pointed out that, for example, some people who work in manual labor don’t have easily distinguishable fingerprints.

- The ID system could cost at least $100 billion, based on cost figures for a similar identification program, “the Real ID,” a voluntary state-issued national ID program implemented in 2005.

- The system would create privacy issues, including a possible government database of information that could be easily corrupted.

- It eliminates the choice of documents someone can use when applying for a job or for government benefits.

- A nationwide system could create long delays for correcting errors.

- It could encourage discrimination in the workforce, because employers might not want to deal with longer delays for immigrants (legal residents or naturalized citizens) who have more documents that need to be added into the system.

“These problems have never been addressed,” said Calabrese, “and the problems are going to fall on the backs of workers.” He said it would invert the relationship between citizens and the state and it would mean certain rights are conditional upon approval by the government. A national ID would be “sort of like the note you needed to get to go to the bathroom in school.” Calabrese said the Arizona immigration bill is a step in that direction.

The ACLU and more than 40 other organizations have publicly opposed the national ID proposal within Schumer and Graham’s immigration reform plan. But the entire proposal is still cloudy — the Post op-ed is the only concrete “plan” the senators have so far, and until the bill is actually introduced, no one really knows what to expect. It’s also unclear whether a national ID could face opposition from right-leaning anti-immigration groups.

An ambitious plan to update the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act that supporters hope to see signed into law in 2010 comes amid charges that this legislation was responsible for nothing less than the subprime crisis and the resulting collapse of the residential real estate market.

The plan, sponsored by Rep. Eddie Johnson (D-Tex.), would close some loopholes in the original act that let non-bank financial firms operate with relative impunity. It would levy negative ratings on a much wider array of institutions that practiced predatory or discriminatory lending, and it would require that non-bank entities like mortgage providers and insurance companies comply with all CRA tenets.

[Economy1] Why this piece of legislation is still such a lightning rod more than 30 years after its introduction is something both its supporters and detractors struggle to explain from their respective camps. “The idea that this was just some sort of carrot-stick regulation that didn’t work is a perception that goes very much in hand with a right-wing agenda,” said Jose Garcia, associate director for research and policy at advocacy group Demos. Demos is one of several progressive groups seeking to have the bill, the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009, made into law.

On the other hand, Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, asserts that political pressure drives CRA support. “It fundamentally gets to some very emotional issues. [Supporters] see this as an issue of racism and social justice,” he said. The Cato Institute held a forum in November that was broadly critical of the CRA, asserting that the financial models at its core are faulty.

Federal Reserve chairman Benjamin Bernanke called the CRA a “catalyst” in 2007, although he touched on the trouble already brewing in the subprime mortgage sector as an imperative to revisit the Act in the wake of significant changes in the banking industry since its implementation.

At its heart, the CRA was created to try and legislate out some of the institutional discrimination in the financial services industry. It was conceived in a very different era from today’s world of global banking behemoths. In the wake of the civil rights movement, most banks were still small, often single-branch operations. Many would operate selectively in low-income and minority neighborhoods, accepting the deposits of local residents but only writing home or business loans in more affluent communities.

Regulatory changes in banking plus an agenda embraced by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to boost homeownership cracked the mortgage market wide open beginning in the 1990s, and the CRA was initially credited with higher rates of homeownership among low-income and minority Americans. According to Kathleen Day, spokesperson for the Center for Responsible Lending, “The purpose of the CRA is to go into underserved areas and look for credit-worthy borrowers you overlooked because of red-lining,” she said, referring to the bank practice of categorically refusing to lend in certain neighborhoods.

The result of reckless lending practices is by now apparent to everyone, although concerns were swept under the rug in the go-go years of the mid 2000s. CRA supporters say brokers and non-bank mortgage outfits wrote nearly 95 percent of the bad loans, while the Act took the fall when these loans turned out to be unsustainable.

“Nine out of 10 of the people who got bad loans already had homes,” said the Center’s Day. “Six out of the 10 were refinances and three were selling one home and buying another.”

Often, Day adds, the unscrupulous vendors that preyed on subprime mortgage candidates cloaked their malfeasance in the language of the CRA’s mission, a sleight of hand that muddied the waters and assigned undue blame on the regulation when mortgages — and the huge numbers of securities backed by them — began to sour.

Even Lawrence White, a New York University who wants to see the CRA scrapped, says it’s not to blame for the financial meltdown. “The CRA has very little to do with the subprime lending debacle,” he said.

Aside from mortgage lending, the other goal of the CRA is to provide basic banking services to low-income and minority citizens. In these locations, “Pawnshops and the like literally became the banking services,” said John Taylor, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the organization spearheading the modernization of the CRA.

“In some communities there are no financial institutions,” asserted Demos’s Jose Garcia. Geographic impediments and language barriers create a two-tier system that leaves low-income Americans, minorities and immigrants without access to the banking and lending services the middle class takes for granted.

If the legislation were better-enforced — something the NCRC’s Taylor believes the modernization bill would facilitate — banks wouldn’t be able to do things like close branches in these communities without repercussions. But preventing closures would just be the beginning.

In a 12-page statement, the NCRC spelled out major features of modernization. Key among them are inclusion of non-bank financial firms under the umbrella of CRA oversight, and a greater emphasis on the neighborhoods in which institutions write loans, not just the locations where their branches or offices are located. This is partially due to the rise of online and branchless financial institutions, but Taylor says the switch will also prevent companies like subprime mortgage-peddlers from operating under the radar.

Advocates also want to see enforcement of the CRA transferred to the not-yet-created Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The CFPA, as its supporters envision it, would consolidate regulatory oversight and enforcement of banking and lending activities in a single agency, rather than the patchwork of regulators some say let ruinous business practices slip through the cracks.

The modernization effort isn’t without roadblocks, though. The current House bill has yet to progress to the Senate, although Taylor says the NCRC’s goal is to have the modernization signed into law sometime this year. The CFPA doesn’t even exist yet, and might never come to fruition. Last week, Senate Banking Committee Chair Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the lawmaker who has championed the idea, indicated he may be willing to abandon the idea of a consumer protection agency.

In the end, it’s not clear what is ahead for the CRA. Some, like the Cato Institute’s Mark Calabria, think the need has run its course. “There was a logical raison d’être for the creation of the CRA at the time but that justification is no longer there,” he said. He admits that an outright repeal of the Act is unlikely, though. NYU’s Lawrence White also wants to get rid of the CRA, although he wants to replace it with a cap-and-trade system of credits similar to the protocol used to eliminate acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide in the 1980s.

Progressive and social-justice groups say that the CRA, while not perfect, needs to be improved, not thrown out. “We’re talking about trillions of dollars of private resources that could be available to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods,” said the NCRC’s Taylor. “We believe in banks. If we don’t have them active in these neighborhoods, it’s very unlikely they’re going to prosper. We want banks to see these neighborhoods as an important part of the economic future of this country and of their business plans.”

In the end, it might come down to that. If the notoriously profit-hungry banking industry sees economic potential in lower-income areas, this would go a long way towards keeping the predatory players out of the arena.

Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich (Cal Sport Media/ZUMA Press; Flickr)

As soon as the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Dec. 24, Republicans and conservative activists started making a promise to voters. Give them a victory in the 2010 midterm elections, and they’ll repeal the bill.

“Every Republican in 2010 and 2012 will run on an absolute pledge to repeal this bill,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who remains a key strategic thinker for the party, on the Dec. 27 episode of “Meet the Press.”

“This has an unusual ability to be repealed, and the public is on that side,” said Max Pappas, the vice president of public policy at FreedomWorks, in a Dec. 28 interview with Avi Zenilman. “The Republicans are going to have to prove that they are worthy of their votes.”

[GOP1]The “repeal” pledge wasn’t anything new for the GOP. In August, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) promised that passage of health care reform would put Republicans back in charge on Capitol Hill in 2011 and put him in a position to repeal the bill. In September, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told conservative activists that a Republican Congress would “pass repealer bill after repealer bill” undoing the work of President Obama and the Democrats, with health care reform first in their sights.

But as Republicans gravitate towards a repeal message for the 2010 elections, they’re running up against the reality that health care reform would be prohibitively hard to roll back. According to conservative health care analysts, legal analysts, and political strategists, if President Obama signs health care reform into law, Republicans will have extremely limited opportunities to repeal any part of it.

“Anyone who thinks they’ll be able to repeal ObamaCare is kidding themselves,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “If they want to stop it, they need to stop it now.”

In conversations with TWI, conservatives identified a few hurdles for a hypothetical, repeal-minded GOP Congress. The first is that in their most optimistic scenario, in which Republicans like Barton and Bachmann hold committee chairmanships, Barack Obama will be president, wielding a veto pen, until at least January of 2013. The second hurdle — one that Republicans aren’t considering, but Democrats are — is that once it passes, health care reform will win back public support. And the third hurdle is a provision of the bill that, according to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and other conservatives, may not ever be subject to new legislative oversight. The road ahead for repeal looks so daunting that many conservatives are looking at legal challenges, not GOP wins, as the most promising way to challenge health care reform.

Edmund Haislmaier, senior fellow in health policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, was more optimistic than some about Republicans’ chances of repealing the bill, and said that candidates would be shrewd to run in 2010 promising as much. “Still, there’s always a danger of entrenchment,” Haislmaier told TWI. “Believe me, I’d rather have the thing not pass.”

Still, Democrats, in public and in private conversations with TWI, have been more specific about what parts of the bill they’ll campaign on than Republicans have been about what parts they’ll campaign against. In a Dec. 24 press release attacking Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), one of the few Republican senators viewed as potentially vulnerable in 2010, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee charged that Burr “will have to look North Carolinians in the eye and pledge to repeal health care reform which will have afforded coverage to 1.7 million North Carolinians, brought down costs for families and small businesses, ended appalling insurance practices, and lowered the deficit.”

Republicans, while talking generally about repeal, have not beaten back Democratic arguments about the most popular aspects of the bill — health insurance exchanges, a ban on denying insurance for pre-existing conditions, and filling the so-called “doughnut hole” gap in Medicare Part D funding. Much of their criticism focuses on the idea of a “government takeover” and on health care mandates that would not come into effect until 2013 or 2014. In a Dec. 27 interview on “This Week,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the bill a “big problem” for Democrats and claimed that “the surveys indicate the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to this effort to have the government take over all of their health care.” According to Democratic strategists, McConnell’s failure to get more specific, or to out-and-out promise that his party will repeal the bill, revealed that the party is not fully behind a “repeal” message.

“You attack the expansion of government,” said Ret. Lt. Col. Allen West, a Republican candidate for Congress in Florida whom the National Republican Congressional Committee views as one of its strongest challengers. “Improving and reforming our health care should not require more levels of government — health care exchanges, health care czars. We make that argument. That’s the way we start to peel the onion back.”

But West’s take on the “repeal” message gets into a matter that came up in the final days of the Senate debate, when DeMint claimed that Section 3403 of the bill would make it impossible for the Senate to ever abolish the newly created Medicare Advisory Board.

“We will be passing a new law,” DeMint warned in a floor speech, “and at the same time creating a Senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law.”

DeMint’s warning was quickly picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who told his listeners that “there are unrepealable aspects of the bill,” and that because those aspects “violated” the Constitution, conservatives would have better luck challenging the bill in court than trying to repeal it. Some conservative legal experts started laying the groundwork for such a challenge months before the bill passed in the Senate. In July, the conservative Federalist Society published a paper by Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith which analyzed the possible avenues for a constitutional challenge to health care reform, such as arguing that a mandate violated the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religious expression, the “free exercise clause,” or the Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause,” which bars the government from seizing private property without payment. In November, Urbanowicz participated in a Federalist Society strategy session that delved deeper into the rationales for possible challenges. And on Dec. 21, this research informed an “memo to the movement” from the Conservative Action Project, a coalition of movement leaders that includes former Attorney General Ed Meese and FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe.

“We urge you,” wrote conservative leaders in their memo, “to make this point to members of the U.S. Senate—and if a bill passes the Senate to impress upon members of both chambers of Congress—that the key provision in the healthcare legislation violates the U.S. Constitution.”

“Once a bill like this is enacted, it’s difficult to repeal,” Urbanowicz explained to TWI. “If it passed, I can see any number of groups finding a way to challenge it in court. Any taxpayer could file this challenge. I think you’d see multiple challenges in multiple district courts, given the really novel nature of the law and the controversy with which it was passed.”

The constitutional challenge route, however, is a trickier, slower, and less dramatic response to the health care bill than a Republican pledge to repeal it if the party takes back Congress.

“If the Obama health plan becomes law,” said the Cato Institute’s Cannon, “we will never get rid of it.”