Yesterday President Bush announced the creation of a new office in a rare rose garden appearance. The 'statistics czar' will oversee a new national clearinghouse of analysis and conclusions drawn from measured data. These data include surveys, physical measurements and institutional reports.
"This is a move to make the country and its polity more secure, and to insure alignment across all the wide panoply of government agencies," Scott McClellan, press secretary, explained at a follow-up press conference. "The President is embracing the 9/11 Commission's exhortation to appoint an intelligence czar. But, as intelligence is for the most part digested statistics, the President has opted to move the centralization and vetting of information upstream in the interest of efficiency."
John Negroponte, the newly appointed National Intelligence Director, will be directly overseeing the new presidential appointee whose office will also process FOIA requests; considerees for the position include Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. "I personally asked the president to include the oversight of this function in my portfolio.
"Statistics can be a brutal weapon in the hands of America's enemies, and controlling access to any information -- raw or calculated -- regarding the state of the union or the credibility of any administration initiative is fundamental to the mandate the voters granted the President last November."
The President has been embarrassed by government statistics several times in the past, forcing him to discount the White House's official acknowledgement of anthropogenic global warming in 'Climate Action Report 2002' saying "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy (Ari Fleisher later clarified that Mr. Bush had been briefed on the report;)" forcing him to put a gag order on actuary Richard Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pass his prescription drug bill with a cost understated by at least $100 billion; and notably forcing him to discount cost projections of the invasion of Iraq of two to five hundred billion dollars, which are turning out themselves to have been optimistic.
The administration has recently started to get a handle on the problem. For example, the State Department recently stopped publication of its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which was this year expected to show another worldwide increase in terrorist activity. A 30 per cent budget cut for the US Geological Survey allows the government to deter proactively the creation of information, widely deemed to be more effective than blocking its release.
However, addressing an assembly of Little League coaches today, Vice President Dick Cheney explicitly disavowed political motivations for the move. "It sickens me that in a free society, obstructors of liberty can assign partisan motivation to the most self-abnegating impulse. Secretary Negroponte and the President have been quite clear in their purpose in creating this new office.
"No longer need policy makers on K Street or Capitol Hill fear inconvenient or contradictory releases from refractory agencies. No longer must newsmen and women in approved media outlets have to choose between conflicting statements from different federal authorities, nor must they beg like starving curs from one secretariat to another for scraps of whatever data is available that day."
Members of the national media are excited about the move. "Since this information is approved and made available centrally, there's no longer a need for a second source [to confirm the information,]" enthuses Paula Zahn, of CNN's 'Paula Zahn NOW.' "I'm delighted by the prospect of living in a world where we no longer worry about angering the administration by reporting of government data."
