Anti-Social Security

As Bush's panel on Social Security tries to skirt open meeting laws, Democrats prepare to attack the president's privatization plans.

By Jake Tapper

Aug. 27, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- For those Americans who are worried that the Social Security system will prove to be as reliable a source of income as the latest McDonald's Monopoly Sweepstakes, last week's interim meeting of the 15-member President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security should be of interest. The meeting's agenda is "a review of historical experience in administering portable personal accounts," but the group's larger purpose is to recommend to President George W. Bush sweeping changes to the Social Security system.

The meeting had potential for drama. Nonpartisan experts believe Bush's budget would have dipped into the Social Security surplus had it not been for some last-minute budgetary chicanery. Democrats insist it still might. And there was some more sleight of hand when it came to federal open meeting laws; the General Services Administration's new interpretation of the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act open meeting law took effect just two days before the commission was to meet, allowing its members to meet privately Wednesday morning as long as they bifurcated into two "subcommittees," exploiting a loophole in the federal sunshine laws. Good government groups -- still angry over the closed-door Energy Task Force meetings headed by Vice President Dick Cheney -- insist that by holding closed meetings in the morning the commission is, in the words of Common Cause president Scott Harshbarger, "skirting the spirit of our open meeting laws."

When I show up for the commission meeting at the Loews L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, there doesn't appear to be too much public outrage, though. Or even interest. In the lobby, a few colorless men speak in hushed tones of "solvency," but the meeting machinations are hardly Ludlum-esque. I don't see any other reporters trying to peek into the closed-door meetings, certainly none outside the solarium where one of the meetings began to convene over breakfast.

Clearly visible as it is, right off the Grand Ballroom where the public meeting will later take place, the private gathering doesn't seem remotely dark and foreboding. A projector has been placed near the table, no doubt ready for all sorts of visuals about how the system's going to start paying out more in benefits than it's receiving in payroll taxes in 2016, and how the system itself, without reform, is going to go bust in 2038.

The makeup of the commission is a stacked deck, with every one of the 15 members generally supporting Bush's plan for partial privatization of Social Security accounts. Many Social Security reformers worry that may hurt any chance for a constructive, bipartisan plan to save Social Security.

"I'm very supportive of the commission, but it's been discredited," former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., will later tell me, having worked closely in the Senate on the issue with former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., the commission co-chairman. "It lacks credibility when all of the members favor some modification of what Bush campaigned on. It needs some dissenters. It needs some skeptics. But they're a bunch of smart people. Regardless, its composition is nowhere near as important as what Bush does with its recommendations."

Commission member Tim Penny, a former Democratic representative from Minnesota, says the commission will present its report to Bush at either the end of November or beginning of December. Having pursued the unenviable task of fiscal responsibility in the Democratically controlled U.S. House from 1982 to 1994, Penny thinks of himself as a realist when it comes to tackling tough political matters. He's more than aware that many pols who somehow get distracted along the path to bold and meaningful reform excuse themselves to get some popcorn never to return.

Penny, however, says that when he was asked to join the panel last spring he "was assured that the president was serious about this." And he became convinced. In a subsequent meeting with the president, Bush told Penny that reforming the current system is "a leadership issue" designed for the presidency, a "leadership issue" he would meet head-on.

While Penny acknowledges that Bush's campaign-trail pronouncements about Social Security "were a little vague," he does point out that it was on the trail that Bush began not only making the case for partial privatization of Social Security accounts, but also alluding to some of the tough choices ahead. Promising that he would "preserve the benefits of all current retirees and those nearing retirement," Bush would say nothing about those of us who expect to collect Social Security down the road. It's an implicit acknowledgment of "some restriction of benefits," as Penny puts it.

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