HR 4174/S 2046, [
1]
the Foundations for Evidence-Based
Policymaking Act (FEPA), introduced by House Speaker Paul
Ryan and Senator Patty Murray, is another federal bill that will
increase 1) the non-consensual surveillance of free- born
American citizens, and 2) the probability of a comprehensive
national database on
every American
. This legislation responds
to the report [
2]
by the
Commission on Evidence-Based
Policymaking (CEP), [
3]
an entity created by FEPA's authors.
The justification is to monitor the effectiveness of federal
programs, but deep problems with the bill outweigh any
possible benefits:
FEPA mandates that every federal agency create an
"evidence building" (data-mining) plan that must include
"a list of . . . questions
for which the agency intends to
develop evidence to support policymaking" and "a list of
data the agency intends to collect, use, or acquire to facilitate
the use of evidence in policymaking."
This would allow any
bureaucrats to propose to collect any data on any citizen on
any topic they want, to answer their desired policy questions.
Each agency is also directed to create "...a list of any
challenges" to this goal, including "any statutory or other
restrictions to accessing relevant data." This responds to
CEP's recommendation that "Congress and the President
should consider repealing current bans and limiting future
bans on the collection and use of data for evidence building."
This recommendation presumably covers the student
unit-record prohibition [
4]
and the prohibition [
5]
on creating a
national K-12 student database. [
6]
The Director of the Office of Management and Budget must
then use all these evidence-building (data- mining) plans to
develop "a unified evidence-building plan" for the entire
f
ederal government.
Although the public must be
"consulted,
" and lip service is paid to issues of privacy and
confidentiality of data, these are only items to be considered.
There are no actual prohibitions or even limitations on
proceeding with data collection, regardless of the sensitivity
of the data.
The federal government is demonstrably incompetent at data
security;
moreover,
the government routinely ignores the
overwhelming data it already has that shows the
ineffectiveness of many (most) federal programs. [
7]
There
is no reason to believe an even more enormous trove of data
can be secured, or that it will actually change government
behavior in any meaningful way.
Most importantly
, collecting and holding massive amounts
of data about an individual has an intimidating effect on the
individual-even if the data is never used.
This fundamentally
changes the relationship between the individual and
government.
Citizen direction of government cannot happen
when government sits in a position of intimidation of the
individual. [
8]
A bill like FEPA would be expected from a totalitarian
government. [
9]
Congress should solve the "program
effectiveness" problem by returning to the Founders' vision and
drastically reducing government's bloated size and scope.
This solution would obviate the need for the Orwellian
surveillance scheme initiated by FEPA.
