Pay to Play

The High Price of Pay to Play

By Larry Pressler

President Obama should sign an executive order forcing government contractors to disclose their political spending.

Sometimes, the present looks eerily like the past. In 1997, the year I retired from the United States Senate, the two biggest names in politics were Bush and Clinton, gas was below $2.50 a gallon and Duke was still breaking the hearts of college basketball fans everywhere.

Other times, forces previously dormant end up morphing into once-unimaginable proportions that threaten the future. Such is the case with the flood of undisclosed and unaccountable dark money pouring into American politics.

Since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, “charitable” groups that don’t disclose their donors have spent more than half a billion dollars to influence our elections – or, more precisely, the actions of our government and our elected officials.

There’s a lot that bothers me about dark money. One thing that particularly concerns me is that I have no way of knowing how much money companies that receive billions of dollars in federal contracts from Congress are funneling through these dark money conduits. I don’t know how much federal contractors are spending to fund the election of the very people who grant the contracts.

As an independent, I believe in small government, the primacy of individual rights and the importance of free markets. But the principles I fought for in the Senate for 18 years are at risk when government contracts are steered to businesses that pay for access instead of being awarded on the basis of merit. And we all pay a price for maintaining such a system.

Unfortunately, the problem continues to get worse. The 15 largest federal contractors – those who build our bridges or provide body armor for our soldiers overseas – received almost $130 billion in taxpayer dollars from the federal government in 2013, but only one quarter of them fully disclosed their political spending. So how can we know if these companies earned our money fair and square or if they just greased the right palms? When Congress hands out billion dollar checks to companies that have paid for preferential treatment, that’s not a free market. That’s not small or smart government. And it’s certainly not a cost-effective use of our money.

When businesses vie for our tax dollars, we the people deserve to know whether they spent money influencing our elections and, if so, where the money went. Without this basic information, we can’t make informed decisions at the ballot box and we can’t hold our elected leaders accountable. Conservatives, moderates, and liberals around the country recognize that this is crony capitalism, and we must put a stop to it now.

That’s why half a million Americans have already called on President Barack Obama to sign an executive order that would require all federal contractors to play by the same common sense rule: Disclose every penny they spend to influence the political process. And why thousands more across the country rallied last Wednesday to demand the White House show us the money.

Free and open competition means no company has to pay to play, and it means we all have greater clarity on how our government does business. Since the ‘90s, the money-in-politics problem has gotten much worse. This simple, long-overdue action would go a long way toward restoring a dose of transparency and faith in our democracy.

Yogi Berra once famously quipped, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” When it comes to federal contractors flooding our elections with dark money, I hope we can look back in 20 years and say it ‘aint so.