The U.S. Senate yesterday voted to drastically limit government agencies’ spending on conferences, capping per-conference spending and cutting all government agencies’ conference budgets to 80 percent of what was spent in 2010, among other provisions.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) offered the legislation in response to the burgeoning scandal about the cost of a General Services Administration (GSA) conference in Las Vegas, and the conduct on the officials and planners responsible. On Tuesday, Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN’s The Situation Room that criminal “charges including misuse of GSA credit cards and allegations of bribery,” could result from the investigation.
The planning and oversight of the GSA’s annual Western Regional Conference has been criticized by industry organizations ranging from the Society of Government Meeting Professionals to the U.S. Travel Association.
While the Senate vote is very preliminary—it was to add an amendment to a largely unrelated bill focused on postal reform—it was passed on a “voice vote,” meaning no senator objected.
The proposed legislation comes after David Axelrod, a senior advisor to President Barack Obama re-election campaign, told NBC’s Sunday morning Meet The Press television show, the president was more than angry about the GSA scandal.
“I think it's fair to say [the president is] apoplectic because we'd made a big effort to cut waste, inefficiency, fraud against government, saved tens of billions of dollars doing it on just this very kind of thing,” Axelrod said, according to an NBC transcript of the show. “And so this was very enraging to him. And of course he acted quickly and the administration acted quickly and changed the management there.”
A uniform meetings policy
The Coburn amendment “would establish a single cross-agency conference spending transparency policy, ensuring all federal agencies are reporting the same data and are fully accountable for conference spending,” according to an explanation posted by Sen. Coburn.
The legislation would require extensive, quarterly public disclosure of the costs, purposes, and content of every conference held by every government agency and organization. It would apply to any “meeting that is held for consultation, education, or discussion; is not held entirely at an agency facility; [and] involves costs associated with travel and lodging for some participants,” according to the text of the amendment [see below] on the Library of Congress website.
According to a
release on Sen. Coburn’s website provisions include the following spending limitations:
Reduces the amount an agency can spend on conferences to 80 percent of the amount spent in 2010.
- Caps amount that can be spent on a single conference at $500,000 (unless the agency is the primary sponsor).
- Allows non-federal foundations and sources to provide financial support for a conference, but requires a listing of such sponsors and a certification that there is no conflict of interest resulting from support received from each.
- Prohibits sponsoring more than one conference per year per organization.
- Limits to 50 the number of employees from a single agency traveling to an international conference.
The amendment also has a number of public disclosure provisions. According to Sen. Coburn’s release, it “requires a quarterly summary posted on the agency’s website of each conference supported or attended by an agency in the preceding 3 months, including:
- An explanation how the conference advanced the mission of the agency;
- Total cost of attendance and support for the conference;
- Primary sponsor of the conference;
- Location of the conference;
- A justification of the location including cost efficiency of the location;
- The dates; and
- The number and a listing by title of agency and non-federal employees whose attendance at the conference was paid for by the agency.”
Beyond this, the text of the amendment requires that each agency post detailed information about any presentation made by any agency employee at a sponsored conference on its public website. This would specifically include “any minutes relating to the presentation; any speech delivered; any visual exhibit, including photographs or slides; [and] any video, digital, or audio recordings of the conference.”
[To find the text of Sen. Coburn's amendment, click on
this link to the Library of Congress website and scroll about three quarters of the way down to the section called SA 2060.]