Translation: it will be harder to check up on sneaky mishigash officials may have happening. That’s why the “snow job” pic.
With little fanfare and even less disclosure, the Senate late yesterday passed a bill that will, if signed into law, gut the STOCK Act, a transparency measure enacted only a year ago.
The STOCK Act’s history has been one of knee-jerk reactions rather than reasoned decision-making. Yesterday’s vote proved no different, with Senators overreacting and taking a hatchet to the law when a scalpel would do.
The bill enacted last year would require already public financial disclosures of senior congressional and executive branch officials to be put online in order to prevent or root out insider trading. There were concerns that some provisions of the bill were overbroad and would put some government employees at risk. Rather than craft narrow exemptions, or even delay implementation until proper protections could be created, the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements.
The sweeping exemption goes even farther than critics of the disclosure requirements requested. For those to whom online disclosure would still apply (the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation) the Senate bill made electronic filing of the information optional and struck the requirement that online information be searchable, sortable and downloadable, making even the disclosures that remain in the bill tepid and relatively unusable.
Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from non-public information (if anyone thinks high level congressional staffers don’t have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill) but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.