Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
After a second commentator was outed last week for failing to disclose contracts with the federal government, President Bush said he would stop paying commentators to tout his administration’s programs and policies.

Maggie Gallagher, a syndicated conservative columnist who writes about marriage, revealed that she had been paid $21,500 to do work for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to promote marriage as a way of strengthening families.

In 2002, Gallagher helped ghostwrite an essay that appeared in a religious magazine under the byline of HHS official Wade Horn. Gallagher also helped with presentations and wrote brochures that went mostly unused, reported the Washington Post, which broke the story about the contract.

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said to the Post. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

She later published an apology on her web site. “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative,” she wrote. “I would have, if I had remembered it.”

Gallagher and the HHS’s Wade Horn both tried to distance her contract from the recent scandal involving $241,000 in taxpayer funds channeled to commentator Armstrong Williams by the Education Department to push Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind program.

Gallagher said that she was given a contract due to her status as a “marriage expert,” and was hired to inform government research and publications, not tout Bush’s agenda in her columns.

Press reports noted that five months after winning her contract, Gallagher published a National Review Online editorial and wrote columns chastising critics and promoting Bush’s plan.

In the midst of last week’s dust-up, President Bush said his administration should no longer pay commentators to plug policies, saying there “needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press.”

“But all our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying, you know, commentators to advance our agenda, ” Bush said, reported the Reuters news agency. “Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”

Shortly after Bush’s remarks, the administration acknowledged that a third commentator, syndicated conservative columnist Michael McManus, also had been paid to help the HHS with its marriage initiative. Neither McManus nor the HHS had disclosed the relationship previously.

Last week’s disclosures follow a series of controversies over the administration’s use of taxpayer funds to promote policies in materials condemned as “covert propaganda” by Congress’ nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which will be investigating the payments to Armstrong Williams.

An analysis released last week by Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee reported that Bush’s spending on contracts with major PR firms nearly tripled since he came into office, reaching at least $88 million in 2004.

The total spent on such efforts during Bush’s first term was $250 million, nearly double the $128 million spent during President Clinton’s second term, reported USA Today.