NAEYC Children’s Champions Alert

Call Your Representative to Vote NO on Sunset Commissions

July 24, 2006

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives will take up “sunset commissions” legislation (HR 5766 by Rep. Tiahrt and HR 3282 by Rep. Kevin Brady)  – giving to an unelected, politically appointed set of commissions the power to decide behind closed doors whether to eliminate, reorganize or cut funds to any and every federal program and agency, including Head Start, child care, child nutrition, Medicaid, and K-12 programs.  The commissions’ recommendations would be put on a “fast-track” on the Congressional calendar.  Instead of promoting accountability and transparency at the federal level, these bills would radically change the checks and balances of the federal government by shifting the legislative role away from your elected members of Congress in order to make drastic cuts to critical programs and services with limited public input or open debate.  

ACTION:  Call your Representative at 202-225-3121 to vote NO on sunset commission legislation.  Congress needs to do its job of legislating with public hearings, amendments and debate rather than give it away. To find your Representative and a direct phone number, go to www.naeyc.org/policy  Click on Action Center and then put your zip code in the box next to “Elected Officials”

MESSAGES:
Sunset commissions would have extraordinary powers as representatives of the Executive Branch essentially to legislate and determine federal funding for programs with little to no accountability.  The members of Congress are elected and are accountable to the public for making policy and funding decisions, and this balance of powers would be broken if sunset commissions would be allowed to usurp the legislative branch functions, especially with little room for public input or open debate.  For example, they could recommend limiting Head Start to literacy and math; undercut due process and other protections in IDEA; or eliminate the quality set aside in CCDBG.

Sunset commissions would be an unnecessary and expensive duplication of other effective accountability mechanisms. Nonpartisan accountability and oversight mechanisms are in place now: the Government Accountability Office, the Inspector General’s office, and independent evaluations written into authorization bills which would be duplicated by a partisan commission. A 1998 report of the Congressional Research Service concluded, “the commission, ironically, is itself an example of an agency for which a public need does not exist.”

Sunset commissions could reduce Congress to a rubber stamp for an administration’s budget request. As a set of political appointees, the sunset commissions could fast-track the adoption of a president’s budget (which for fiscal year 2007 seeks to eliminate Even Start family literacy, flat fund child care for at least another 5 years which will drop 400,000 children from child care assistance, and make no increase in Head Start) even though Congress routinely is reluctant to adopt any administration’s budget request wholesale.