How the Department of Commerce Smothers What It’s Supposed to Promote
15th April 2014
“I ran for office pledging to make our government leaner and smarter and more consumer friendly,” President Barack Obama reminded a group of small businessmen at a January 2012 White House gathering.
You can see why the audience needed a refresher course. The president’s two signature legislative accomplishments, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, had heaped unprecedented amounts of regulation onto the business sector at a time when full-time jobs were scarcer than they’d been in three decades. So to bolster his economic bona fides, Obama was now advocating greater executive-branch power to make the federal bureaucracy more responsive to business concerns. “Let me be clear,” he vowed. “I will only use this authority for reforms that result in more efficiency, better service, and a leaner government.”
The target of Obama’s tweaking that day was the Department of Commerce, the century-old rectangular behemoth on Constitution Avenue. Currently headed by the wealthy Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, whose family fortune derives from the Hyatt hotel chain, Commerce’s mission is to “promote job creation and improved living standards for all Americans by creating an infrastructure that promotes economic growth, technological competitiveness, and sustainable development.” Yet even the president recognizes that Commerce, like many other federal agencies at the nexus of the government and the private sector, has often been better at promoting its own bewildering bureaucratic growth.