[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FAKE IT TILL THEY MAKE IT: HOW BAD
ACTORS USE ASTROTURFING TO MANIPULATE
REGULATORS, DISENFRANCHISE CONSUMERS,
AND SUBVERT THE RULEMAKING PROCESS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND INVESTIGATIONS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 6, 2020
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Financial Services
Serial No. 116-84
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
42-808 PDF WASHINGTON : 2021
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES
MAXINE WATERS, California, Chairwoman
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York PATRICK McHENRY, North Carolina,
NYDIA M. VELAZQUEZ, New York Ranking Member
BRAD SHERMAN, California ANN WAGNER, Missouri
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri BILL POSEY, Florida
DAVID SCOTT, Georgia BLAINE LUETKEMEYER, Missouri
AL GREEN, Texas BILL HUIZENGA, Michigan
EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri STEVE STIVERS, Ohio
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado ANDY BARR, Kentucky
JIM A. HIMES, Connecticut SCOTT TIPTON, Colorado
BILL FOSTER, Illinois ROGER WILLIAMS, Texas
JOYCE BEATTY, Ohio FRENCH HILL, Arkansas
DENNY HECK, Washington TOM EMMER, Minnesota
JUAN VARGAS, California LEE M. ZELDIN, New York
JOSH GOTTHEIMER, New Jersey BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas ALEXANDER X. MOONEY, West Virginia
AL LAWSON, Florida WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio
MICHAEL SAN NICOLAS, Guam TED BUDD, North Carolina
RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan DAVID KUSTOFF, Tennessee
KATIE PORTER, California TREY HOLLINGSWORTH, Indiana
CINDY AXNE, Iowa ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois JOHN ROSE, Tennessee
AYANNA PRESSLEY, Massachusetts BRYAN STEIL, Wisconsin
BEN McADAMS, Utah LANCE GOODEN, Texas
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York DENVER RIGGLEMAN, Virginia
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia WILLIAM TIMMONS, South Carolina
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts VAN TAYLOR, Texas
TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii
ALMA ADAMS, North Carolina
MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
JESUS ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
SYLVIA GARCIA, Texas
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota
Charla Ouertatani, Staff Director
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
AL GREEN, Texas Chairman
JOYCE BEATTY, Ohio ANDY BARR, Kentucky, Ranking
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts Member
NYDIA M. VELAZQUEZ, New York BILL POSEY, Florida
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado LEE M. ZELDIN, New York, Vice
RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan Ranking Member
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia
MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio
SYLVIA GARCIA, Texas JOHN ROSE, Tennessee
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota WILLIAM TIMMONS, South Carolina
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on:
February 6, 2020............................................. 1
Appendix:
February 6, 2020............................................. 31
WITNESSES
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Bagdoyan, Seto J., Director, Forensic Audits and Investigative
Service, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)........... 6
Balla, Steven, Associate Professor, George Washington University. 11
Gonzalez-Brito, Paulina, Executive Director, California
Reinvestment Coalition (CRC)................................... 8
Naylor, Bartlett Collins, Financial Policy Advocate, Public
Citizen........................................................ 9
Noveck, Beth Simone, Professor and Director, GovLab, Tandon
School of Engineering, New York University..................... 4
APPENDIX
Prepared statements:
Bagdoyan, Seto J............................................. 32
Balla, Steven................................................ 50
Gonzalez-Brito, Paulina...................................... 53
Naylor, Bartlett Collins..................................... 125
Noveck, Beth Simone.......................................... 136
FAKE IT TILL THEY MAKE IT:
HOW BAD ACTORS USE ASTROTURFING
TO MANIPULATE REGULATORS,
DISENFRANCHISE CONSUMERS, AND
SUBVERT THE RULEMAKING PROCESS
----------
Thursday, February 6, 2020
U.S. House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Oversight
and Investigations,
Committee on Financial Services,
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:38 p.m., in
room 2128, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Al Green
[chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Members present: Representatives Green, Beatty, Perlmutter,
Tlaib, Garcia of Texas, Phillips; Barr, Posey, Zeldin,
Loudermilk, Davidson, Rose, and Timmons.
Also present: Representative Porter.
Chairman Green. The Oversight and Investigations
Subcommittee will come to order.
The title of today's hearing is, ``Fake It Till They Make
It: How Bad Actors Use Astroturfing to Manipulate Regulators,
Disenfranchise Consumers, and Subvert the Rulemaking Process.''
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the subcommittee at any time. Also, without
objection, members of the full Financial Services Committee who
are not members of this subcommittee may participate in today's
hearing for the purposes of making an opening statement and
questioning the witnesses.
The Chair now recognizes himself for 5 minutes for an
opening statement.
This hearing will examine a problem referred to as
astroturfing, which is the practice of creating the false
appearance of grassroots support for a particular policy or
position where none exists, often to the benefit of shadowy,
well-financed interests, and to the detriment of the general
public. Investigations have revealed that astroturfing is used
by unidentified entities to sway regulators who rely upon the
integrity of the public comments they receive in the rulemaking
process.
As we sit here today, according to the SEC Chair, Chair
Clayton, the SEC has launched an investigation of the
submission of multiple fraudulent comments in a recent
rulemaking, comments that were expressly relied upon by Chair
Clayton and the Commission as indicia of broad public support
in urging the adoption of the rule.
As today's testimony will highlight, there is also
troubling evidence of astroturfing at other agencies charged
with protecting consumers and overseeing financial
institutions, including the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau (CFPB) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
(OCC).
We have learned, and we learn every day of new ways that
the Trump Administration is working across Federal agencies to
roll back consumer protections, civil rights, fair housing
protections, access to healthcare for low- and middle-income
Americans, minorities, LGBTQ+ Americans, and others. We cannot
allow this ever-expanding injustice to be compounded by
nefarious actors who would manipulate regulators by fabricating
comments.
Today, we are fortunate to have a panel of distinguished
witnesses who will describe the Federal notice and comment
framework; the flaws and opacity inherent in the current public
comment process; the pernicious impacts of these flaws on the
rules and rule makers; and the potential of such flaws to cast
doubt upon the legitimacy and integrity of the Federal
rulemaking process by this Administration.
At a time when Americans, more than ever, are questioning
the propriety of actions taken by Federal agencies and our most
senior government officials, it is especially important that we
fully understand the scope of this problem, its implications,
and what we must do to restore trust in the integrity of public
comments, rulemakings, and our regulators.
I now recognize the ranking member of the subcommittee, Mr.
Barr, for a 5-minute opening statement.
Mr. Barr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our
witnesses for appearing today.
A key tenet of the Administrative Procedure Act's notice
and comment period is the availability of a forum for citizens
and interested parties to voice their thoughts, concerns, and
opinions on proposed rules that will impact them or their
businesses. As legislators, we provide oversight over the
regulatory agencies as they implement the laws we write, but
public input on pending rules is also important to allow
regulators to hear directly from all interested stakeholders.
Today, we are examining the impact on rulemaking of so-
called astroturfing or fake grassroots campaigns. Large
coordinated letter-writing campaigns are not new. They have
been a key strategy of interest groups across the political
spectrum for decades. Because letter-writing campaigns and
grassroots advocacy are commonplace, regulators don't evaluate
the comments on numbers alone. They have mechanisms in place to
de-duplicate comments and extract the valuable observations
from each comment.
Recently, the Majority sent Comptroller Otting and FDIC
Chairwoman McWilliams identical letters about the public
comment period for the proposed Community Reinvestment Act
(CRA)rulemaking. The letters ask for information about how the
agencies vet public comments based on a report that an outside
group may have submitted fishy comments during a completely
different rulemaking at a completely different agency.
When Comptroller Otting was before the committee last week,
I asked him directly if there was any evidence of fabricated
comments and how, if at all, such comments could affect his
agency's development of a new rule. He said that this is a non-
issue, that the OCC has a system in place to review comments on
their substance, and it doesn't evaluate comments based solely
upon sheer volume.
Earlier this week, Comptroller Otting responded to
Chairwoman Waters and echoed these same observations. Does the
concern over potential astroturfing really warrant this
hearing? I would submit that the answer is no. The Majority's
letter and, frankly, this entire hearing are thinly-veiled
attempts to slow the rulemaking process on a much-needed
modernization to help our communities simply because the
Majority doesn't like the regulators writing the rules.
While not perfect, the FDIC's and the OCC's proposal to
reform the Community Reinvestment Act regulations makes
important strides to bring the CRA into the 21st Century
without compromising the important and original intent of the
law to serve communities across the country.
It provides much-needed clarity for regulated entities to
understand how they will be evaluated and what activities will
qualify for CRA credit. It appropriately accounts for the
expansion of online banking and allows for CRA deserts in rural
or otherwise underserved areas to benefit from investment in
their communities.
I am fortunate to have many great community bankers in my
district in central and eastern Kentucky. I am proud of how
they partner with their neighbors to drive the local economy.
They are committed to helping the low- and moderate-income
borrowers in the areas they serve, and to make investments that
will benefit their communities at large.
These are people who go to work every day happy to serve
their communities. They aren't simply trying to get, ``double
credit for doing half of their homework,'' as one of the
witnesses suggested. More clarity on how they are evaluated for
the CRA and the modernizations under the FDIC and OCC proposal
could allow them to do even more.
As we hear from our witnesses today, I would urge my
colleagues to be cognizant of potential unintended
consequences. Do we really want to restrict citizens'
opportunities to weigh in on important regulations? Is it worth
silencing groups of stakeholders and infringing upon their
First Amendment rights, their rights to participate in the
administrative process, just because you don't like the
regulators who are writing the rules? Public feedback on
important rulemakings is critical to ensuring regulators get it
right.
And should Congress really be in the business of evaluating
whether or not a particular comment is worthy of inclusion in
the record, or whether it should be excluded just because we
don't like the particular regulators at the administrative
agency?
The idea behind the notice-and-comment rulemaking is that
you invite the public to participate. You may not like all of
the comments that are submitted. You may like some of the
comments that are submitted. But the whole point is to have an
inclusive process that allows for public input on the
rulemaking process.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to today's hearing,
and, if I could, I would like to ask unanimous consent in my
remaining time to insert four items into the record: a response
from Comptroller Otting to the Chairwoman's January 15, 2020,
letter regarding the OCC's protocols regarding comments
received during the rulemaking process; a response from Chair
McWilliams to the Chairwoman's January 15, 2020, letter
regarding the FDIC's protocols regarding comments during the
rulemaking process; and two studies written by Dr. Balla on
issues pertaining to astroturfing and the public comment
period.
Chairman Green. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. Barr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, finally, I ask unanimous consent to insert into the
record the opening statement of the ranking member of the full
Financial Services Committee, Mr. McHenry.
Chairman Green. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. Barr. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairman Green. The gentleman yields back.
I welcome each of the witnesses, and I am pleased to
introduce the panel.
We have with us today: Beth Simone Noveck, professor and
director of GovLab, at the Tandon School of Engineering, at New
York University; Seto Bagdoyan, director of Forensic Audits and
Investigative Service at the U.S. Government Accountability
Office; Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, executive director of the
California Reinvestment Coalition; Bartlett Naylor, financial
policy advocate at Public Citizen; and Dr. Steven Balla,
associate professor at George Washington University.
Again, welcome, and thank you for being here today. The
witnesses will be recognized for 5 minutes each to give an oral
presentation of their testimony. And without objection, the
witnesses' written statements will be made a part of the
record. Once the witnesses finish their testimony, each member
will have 5 minutes to ask questions. On your table, you will
see three lights: green means go; yellow is the 1-minute
marker, which means you are running out of time, and you should
begin concluding your remarks; and red means you are out of
time.
With that, Professor Noveck, you are now recognized for 5
minutes for your opening statement.
STATEMENT OF BETH SIMONE NOVECK, PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR,
GOVLAB, TANDON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Ms. Noveck. Thank you, Chairman Green and Ranking Member
Barr, for the opportunity to participate today.
To reiterate, my name is Beth Simone Noveck, and I am a
professor at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York
University, where I direct The Governance Lab (GovLab), which
is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center focusing on the use
of technology to improve governance and strengthen democracy.
At The Governance Lab, we conduct original research that I
include in the project that we have launched today, called
Crowd Law for Congress, about how legislatures around the world
are using new technology to enable public engagement in law,
rule, and policymaking, and to provide training on how we can
adapt those models in this country.
I previously served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer in
the Obama White House, and the Director of Open Government, but
I was also senior advisor for open government to Prime Minister
Cameron. However, I am appearing today in my personal capacity,
based on over 20 years of designing, building, testing, and
researching civic platforms for citizen engagement in
democratic participation.
We are here today because thousands of Federal regulations
are enacted every year that touch every aspect of our lives,
and under the Administrative Procedure Act, the public has a
right to participate. Participation in rulemaking helps us to
ensure that Federal regulations are based on the best available
evidence, not just evidence that supports a single position.
Obtaining information from a wider audience can make it
possible to understand whether and how a regulation fulfills
its legislative purpose. However, technology has created
challenges for public participation. Regulations.gov has made
commenting easier, but it has also inadvertently opened the
floodgates, as we have heard, to fake comments, or what I like
to call ``notice-and-spam.'' But it has also created the
challenge of voluminous comments, comments that are then hard
for agencies to read and parse. A key example is the 2017 FCC
net neutrality rulemaking, which had 22 million comments. A
second and related problem is that of duplicative comments;
only 6 percent of the comments filed in that FCC rulemaking
were actually unique.
But there are remedies to those challenges. Using
artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have developed tools
that can extract meaning and summarize large bodies of text,
for instance, Google and Microsoft have already built systems
that can summarize news as well as legislative bills. The
recently debuted Indian news abrogation app called Inshorts
automatically creates 60-word summaries of articles also using
AI. CitizenLab's software for citizen engagement categorizes
and clusters the text submitted, grouping similar ideas
together using an approach known as topic modeling.
To deal with the issue of de-duplication, Dr. Stuart
Shulman created a tool called DiscoverText in 2007. Although
funded by the National Science Foundation, that tool is not yet
in widespread use in government. And, of course, to handle fake
comments, as we will hear more about today, many people have
called for using CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, which is designed to
separate the bots from the humans, and the newest version of
reCAPTCHA does not even require human intervention--no more
typing of those squiggly words anymore.
In short, researchers have cracked problems far more
challenging than making sense of rulemaking data, and what
Congress needs to mandate the use of better data science tools
to make it possible for Federal agencies to make effective use
of public comments, it has to go beyond fixing the problem
after the fact and reimagine how public participation should
work.
In our research, we are tracking over 100 examples of what
we call CrowdLaw, innovative uses of new technology that foster
public engagement to improve the quality of lawmaking. And let
me conclude with three quick examples.
In 2018, the German government used a free annotation
platform called Hypothes.is to sort expert feedback on the
country's artificial intelligence policy, soliciting expertise
from experts all around the world.
Committees in the U.K. Parliament create online what they
call evidence checks and invite members of the public to
evaluate the evidence upon which a policy is based.
And just recently, a few weeks ago in December 2019, the
Brussels Regional Parliament introduced the use of citizen
juries. Now, every standing committee comprises 15
parliamentarians and a random sample of 45 citizens who
deliberate and formulate recommendations together.
Imagine if we could introduce these innovations here.
Although their current attention is focused on the problem
of astroturfing and cherry picking, the current concern for
regulators and overseers should not just be who signed the
comment, but should be to take steps to foster new and valuable
citizen engagement. Failure to redesign public participation
for the digital age will only put us further behind the growing
number of advanced nations that use new technology today to tap
the collective intelligence and know-how of their citizens and
to improve the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the
rulemaking process.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Professor Noveck can be found on
page 136 of the appendix.]
Chairman Green. Thank you very much, Professor.
At this time, the Chair will recognize Mr. Bagdoyan for 5
minutes for your opening statement, please.
STATEMENT OF SETO J. BAGDOYAN, DIRECTOR, FORENSIC AUDITS AND
INVESTIGATIVE SERVICE, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE
(GAO)
Mr. Bagdoyan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Green, Ranking Member Barr, and members of the
subcommittee, I am pleased to appear before you today to
discuss GAO's June 2019 report on posting practices regarding
identity information and public comments during proposed
Federal rulemaking. As part of our overall review, this is the
first of several planned reports. Extensive data analytics work
continues on the identity characteristics of all public
comments submitted over a 5-year period to the 10 selected
agencies we have reviewed. Additional reports will follow
beginning later this year.
Federal agencies publish, on average, about 3,700 proposed
rules yearly and are generally required to provide interested
persons an opportunity to comment on these rules. In recent
years, some high-profile rulemakings have received extremely
large numbers of public comments. The professor mentioned the
FCC net neutrality rule, which received 22 million comments,
raising questions about how agencies manage the identity
information associated with such comments.
The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) governs the manner
in which many Federal agencies develop and issue regulations,
which includes the public comment process. While the APA does
not require the disclosure of identifying information from a
commenter, agencies may choose on their own accounts to collect
this information.
Today, I will highlight our report's four principal
takeaways regarding how the 10 selected agencies handle
identity information and public comments during proposed
rulemaking.
First, regulations.gov and agency-specific comment websites
collect some identity information such as name, email, or
address, from commenters who choose to provide it, and also
accept anonymous comments. In this regard, the APA does not
require commenters to disclose identity information when
submitting comments. In addition, agencies have no obligation
under the APA to verify the identity of commenters should they
submit such information with their comments.
Second, 7 of the 10 selected agencies have some internal
guidance associated with the identity of commenters, but the
content and level of detail varies, reflecting differences
among these agencies. The guidance most frequently relates to
the comment intake or response to comment phases of the overall
comment process. For example, among agencies of interest to the
subcommittee, the CFPB and the SEC have guidance for intake,
and the CFPB has such also for response.
Third, within the discretion afforded them by the APA,
selected agencies' treatment of commenters' identity
information varies, particularly when posting duplicate
comments, those that are identical or near-identical comment
text by varied identity information. Generally, agencies told
us that they: one, post all comments within the comments
system; or two, maintain some comments outside of the system,
such as in email file archives. However, within these broad
categories, posting practices vary considerably, even within
the same agency or rulemaking docket, and identity information
is inconsistently presented on public websites.
For instance, the SEC posts a single example of duplicate
comments and indicates the total number of comments received,
whereas the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
posts every duplicate comment individually with no indication
of the total number of duplicates received.
Fourth, selected agencies do not clearly communicate their
practices regarding how comments and identity information are
posted. According to key practices for transparently reporting
government data, Federal Government websites should disclose
data sources and limitations to help public users make informed
decisions about how to utilize the data.
In our June report, we made eight recommendations to eight
different agencies in our review, including the SEC and the
CFPB, to more clearly communicate to the public their policies
for posting comments and associated identity information to
regulations.gov and agency-specific comment websites. The
agencies generally agreed with these recommendations and
described actions they plan to take to implement them.
Since then, the SEC has implemented its recommendation in
September 2019, and the CFPB has reported planned actions to do
so.
Chairman Green, this concludes my remarks. I look forward
to the subcommittee's questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bagdoyan can be found on
page 32 of the appendix.]
Chairman Green. Thank you for your testimony.
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito, you are now recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF PAULINA GONZALEZ-BRITO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
CALIFORNIA REINVESTMENT COALITION (CRC)
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. Thank you, Chairman Green, and Ranking
Member Barr, for the opportunity to testify today, and I thank
the subcommittee for holding this important hearing. Good
afternoon.
The California Reinvestment Coalition is the largest
Statewide reinvestment coalition in the country. [Speaking
foreign language.] Because immigrants require it every day and
contribute to building our nation.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is, as Congressman
Meeks described it, at its core, a civil rights law. The law is
meant to address discrimination in lending based on race, known
as redlining, by ensuring that banks meet the credit needs of
all communities, especially low-income communities and
communities of color. The significance of the public
participation process articulated in the law cannot be
overstated.
Through public participation, communities help ensure banks
meet their obligation under the law. In the OneWest-CIT mega
merger of 2014, CRC, our members in southern California, and
local community members engaged in the CRA's public process
with the hope that, through our engagement, we could ensure
that the soon too-big-to-fail bank would fulfill its CRA
obligations.
As community opposition to the merger grew, Comptroller of
the Currency Joseph Otting, then-CEO of OneWest Bank, took the
unusual step of soliciting support for the merger from his Wall
Street contacts and business partners, where there is a clear
conflict of interest, by asking them to submit a form letter
posted on the bank's website to the bank's regulators.
We were later contacted by an individual, who also sent a
complaint to OneWest regulators, who was upset that an
unauthorized email was submitted using his name and address in
support of a bank merger he seemingly had never heard about
before. The comment letter submitted in the person's name
appears identical to the form letter on the OneWest website
that Mr. Otting had sent to his Wall Street friends.
The complaint confirmed our worst fears. Our research of
the letters of support that were submitted in favor of the
OneWest Bank merger uncovered a number of anomalies. Of 593
petitions in support of the OneWest merger, nearly 100 percent
have Yahoo email accounts. This oddity heightened our concerns,
given Yahoo's relatively small share of the email market.
In addition, if the timestamps on the email are accurate,
there was an extremely large number of petitions sent to the
OCC and the Federal Reserve around 2 a.m. on Valentine's Day.
In a review of 25 of those petitions, nearly half could not be
verified by the United States Postal Service as legitimate
addresses.
Further research found approximately one-third of emails
sent to the addresses of these supporters of the merger bounced
back. How many of these so-called supporters of the merger were
not supporters at all, or were not even real people, for that
matter? We do not know.
Mr. Otting led OneWest Bank during this merger, and serious
questions remain about the integrity of the public comment
process during its merger with CIT. Despite our calls for an
investigation, there never was one. But we do know who
benefited from this fake support: OneWest Bank did.
The OneWest-CIT mega merger was ultimately approved by the
bank's regulators, who cited all the letters of support in
their approval order. Now, Mr. Otting is Comptroller of the
Currency and charged with the oversight of the public comment
process during the CRA proposed rulemaking, and we have several
concerns.
First, we fear that two core principles of CRA, community
input and public participation, are in jeopardy under Joseph
Otting's OCC. Astroturfing and fabricated comment campaigns
breed distrust in the system and make it less likely or may
make it less likely that the public would comment in the
future. As a result, regulators may have less access to
information from impacted communities about what is happening
on the ground, far from regulators' offices. Regulators would
then be left with the one-sided picture provided by financial
institutions.
We are particularly concerned, first, that the OCC
approach, the public comment process, as it currently seeks
comment on the proposed rule, would, if finalized,
significantly harm communities and threaten a return to
redlining practices. And second, the Comptroller's public
statements demonstrate hostility to anyone with whom he
disagrees. His quote in The Wall Street Journal demonstrated
this hostility. He was quoted as saying, ``If you don't like
this, you are either economically advantaged by the current
structure, or you don't understand it.''
We call on the OCC to focus on ensuring a fair process that
prevents astroturf campaigns from unfairly manipulating the
result of its current CRA rulemaking process rather than
maligning opponents of its proposal.
Lastly, we continue to call for a full accounting and
investigation into the fabricated comments and astroturf
campaign during the 2014 OneWest-CIT merger. Until we know who
is responsible for the fabricated comments supporting the bank
that Comptroller Joseph Otting led, and what, if anything, was
done about it, we cannot--and the OCC should not be permitted
to proceed with finalizing a regulation that would curtail the
impacts of the CRA.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Gonzalez-Brito can be found
on page 53 of the appendix.]
Chairman Green. Thank you for your testimony.
Mr. Naylor, you are now recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF BARTLETT COLLINS NAYLOR, FINANCIAL POLICY
ADVOCATE, PUBLIC CITIZEN
Mr. Naylor. Chairman Green, Ranking Member Barr, members of
the subcommittee, Public Citizens' 500,000 members and
supporters are self-selected Americans who practice and engage
in democracy on a daily basis. We are the members who figure
prominently in the phone calls to your offices to vote for
bills that come before this committee or on the House Floor.
When some of those bills become law, we are the members who
participate vigorously in the comment process to help the
regulators implement those.
Public Citizen members are public citizens. We are
especially encouraging of engaging in this committee because
the financial crash demonstrated how much damage can be done by
flawed financial policy. The positions that our members
espouse, we think, are widely accepted across the political
spectrum: safe banking; the ability of investors to exercise
property rights; and the concept that racist lending has no
place in America.
And so, when we see a rulemaking docket filled with
comments purportedly from the grassroots that celebrate a
redlining bank or that argue about reducing property rights for
shareholders, we are suspicious, and when we scratch the
surface of these grassroots, what we often find is plastic, is
astroturf.
Case in point: Shareholders have the ability to bring
resolutions before a company's annual meeting. One of the
popular ones is calling on companies to disclose their
political spending. Sometimes these resolutions are adopted.
Corporations don't like this. They haven't liked this for a
long time, and they have mounted an effort to get shareholder
resolutions, and Chair Clayton of the Securities and Exchange
Commission answered that appeal a couple of months ago with a
proposal to do just that, but he did not say that he was
responding to corporate interests; no. He said that he was
responding to Main Street investors, to a military veteran, to
a police officer, to a retired teacher, to a retired couple who
had written in.
Bloomberg News surveyed these seven supposedly randomly
selected letters and found them to be fake. They were from
relatives of the corporate lobbyists: the uncle; the brother;
the in-laws.
When Chair Clayton testified before the Senate Banking
Committee, Senator Van Hollen said that he had been duped. We
think that may be charitable.
Second case: My colleague, Ms. Gonzalez-Brito, has
documented the massive fabrication of astroturf comments coming
out of the OneWest-CIT merger, but why? Why would one engage in
such fabrication? One possibility is buried into the merger
document that said that CEO Otting was going to be paid $24
million if this merger went through. It was in the form of an
employment contract that said, ``If you last 3 years, you get
this much every year, but if you are terminated, then you get
the full $24 million,'' and he was, in fact, terminated a few
months into the merger document.
What can be done? What should this committee do?
First and foremost, as Public Citizen members are frequent
commenters, what we would like is the glide slope from opinion
to the landing path into that regulatory agency to be smooth.
We do not want impediments. That said, we don't want
competition with fabricated comments. Federal law already
provides, under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001, that it is a Federal crime
to misrepresent, to lie, to make fabrications to the
government. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, the number of
cases that have been brought under that Federal code is zero.
We think, without penalties, there is no deterrence.
In the case of Chair Clayton, we have already asked the
Inspector General to look into why it is that he would be
informed by seven fake letters. He did not reference the Public
Citizen letter, the AFL-CIO letter, the CalPERS letter, the
Colorado Pension Fund letter, or the Texas Pension Fund letter.
He just happened to have those seven random letters. We hope,
and we have reason to believe that the Inspector General will
be looking into that.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, we think that the public
comment process is important, and we look forward to working
with you to make sure that the likes of Public Citizen are able
to continue to exercise our democracy rights.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Naylor can be found on page
125 of the appendix.
Chairman Green. Thank you for your testimony.
Professor Balla, you are now recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN BALLA, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, GEORGE
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Balla. Thank you.
My name is Steve Balla. I am an associate professor of
political science, public policy, public administration, and
international affairs at George Washington University.
For the past several years, along with several colleagues
at GW, I have been conducting research on mass-comment
campaigns in agency rulemaking. By mass-comment campaigns, we
mean collections of identical and near-duplicate comments that
are sponsored by organizations and submitted by group members
and supporters.
We asked three questions about mass-comment campaigns: Who
sponsors them; what do they say; and how do agencies handle
them?
Now, we focus so far in our research on the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), and the EPA is a good agency to start
with in that it is systematic and transparent in the way in
which it catalogs and reports mass-comment campaigns on
regulations.gov. So, when the EPA identifies a mass-comment
campaign, it creates a record on the website. This record
includes the identity of the sponsoring organization, if that
is known. It also includes a statement of the number of
comments that are submitted as part of the campaign, and it
includes a single illustrative example of the campaign's
comments, usually through a PDF or a Word attachment. Our
analysis is based on more than 1,000 mass-comment campaigns
that occurred during EPA rulemakings over a recent 5-year
period.
So, who sponsors mass-comment campaigns? Well, there is a
diverse mix of sponsoring organizations. Mass-comment campaigns
are regularly sponsored by environmental advocacy groups, labor
unions, and progressive organizations. Collectively, these
kinds of organizations account for about 75 percent of the
mass-comment campaigns in our analysis. The remaining 25
percent are mass-comment campaigns sponsored by regulated
entities. In the case of the EPA, these would be the
agriculture industry and the energy sector, most commonly.
What do mass-comment campaigns say? Again, there is some
diversity in the phenomenon. Some mass-comment campaigns are as
short as a few words. They articulate a directional stance in
favor of or in opposition to the proposed rule, and they say
nothing else. There are other mass-comment campaigns, however,
that incorporate arguments, reasoning, and data analysis.
Now, on balance, mass-comment campaigns shade toward short
statements of directional opinion; that is, those types of
mass-comment campaigns are more common than ones that bring
extensive reasoning and extensive data to bear.
How does the agency handle mass-comment campaigns? Well, in
response to comment documents, we find that mass-comment
campaigns often get mentioned a single time, and the agency
provides a brief response. By contrast, these standalone
comments that we historically associate with the notice-and-
comment process that might be submitted by organizations or
individuals--not duplicates, not near-identical comments, but
standalone comments--typically get mentioned repeatedly in
response to comment documents.
Why would that be the case? It is because the agency is
exhibiting a practice of responding separately to each
argument, each piece of evidence that is presented in the
comment. And so, with more argument, with more evidence comes
more extensive--i.e., more repeat attention--on the part of the
agency in the response-to-comment document.
In my view, these findings demonstrate that the agency is
able to identify mass-comment campaigns, it is able to catalog
them systematically and transparently, and it is able to
respond to them in a manner that is commensurate with their
substantive content. Contrary to hopes that have been
articulated about mass-comment campaigns, particularly early on
in the era of electronic rulemaking, I don't see mass-comment
campaigns as having had a democratizing effect on the
rulemaking process. That was one hope 20 years ago.
I also don't see--and this, again, is contrary to fears
that have been expressed about mass-comment campaigns--them
burying the EPA under an unmanageable avalanche of useful
information. It is my argument that, for the most part, rather
than mass-comment campaigns bringing fundamental change,
whether good or bad, to the rulemaking process, what has
happened instead is that the agency has adopted approaches that
allow it to readily incorporate mass-comment campaigns into its
existing rulemaking practices.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Professor Balla can be found on
page 50 of the appendix.]
Chairman Green. Thank you.
The Chair will now recognize the gentleman from Colorado,
Mr. Perlmutter, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you for your testimony today, and,
Dr. Balla, I think you could probably ask anybody up here on
this dais about mass communications and mass-comment campaigns,
because we all get that, and this is part of the process, and
you say, okay, I got a thousand comments on right to work, and
I got 77 comments on healthy forests. They are all identical.
You just deal with it. So we understand that, and your next
study should be on what we get as Members of Congress.
But I think the thing that I am concerned about is, from
the beginning of this country with Publius and Brutus and the
Federalist papers and the anti-Federalist papers, we knew they
were anonymous and they wanted to speak about policy and
approach to how our nation should be founded. So I am not
afraid of anonymity, and I am not afraid of mass comments.
What I am afraid of is liars and cheats and phony
information that you get because then you are misled. Then, it
does undercut the trust, and, if it is a bunch of bots sending
stuff out that is slightly different and requires specific
answers, I want to know they are bots.
Ms. Novacek, in your testimony and sort of the research
that you have done, can you explain how we might ferret out or
how you would want to see us deal with sort of the bots and
sort of the phoniness that may come as part of an email
approach, or it may be just case by case, I don't know? How
would you go about this?
Ms. Noveck. Thank you for the question.
I think you are asking very much the right question, that
what we need to be asking as a corollary to the issue of, what
do we do about the fake comments, the related or flip side of
that is the question of, how do we extract the valuable meaning
from this corpus of information that we have? We have a large
quantity, maybe mass commenting, as Professor Balla has
mentioned, maybe duplicative comments, maybe a large volume of
individual comments.
The thing that we need to care about, first and foremost,
is this issue of, how do we make it easy for agencies and the
committees that oversee them to extract the valuable meaning
and to do what was the intent of the Administrative Procedure
Act when it called for commenting in the rulemaking process?
What I would do is I would ensure that every agency is
using readily-available machine-learning tools, first to de-
duplicate the comments, and the software has existed for that,
funded incidentally by the Federal Government, for more than 15
years. It would allow us to first say: Let's remove all the
duplicates.
Second is then the issue, because, as you know from your
own work, you can have nonduplicative comments, but it is still
too much for your staff to read, and they have other things to
do during the day, is some of these new tools for summarization
are really crucial. And they are great summarization tools, not
simply from the Googles and the Microsofts and the sort of
high-end tech, but they are stuff--specifically, civic
technologies in the citizen engagement space, and I can name
you a number of free and open-source or relatively cheap tools
that exist to do precisely the job that are in use in various
places to do the job of summarizing citizen comments. I mention
a few of them in my testimony and show some pictures to make it
clear how they do the work of helping regulators extract the
meaning from this volume of information.
And then, in addition, I would say we have to create
additional complementary fora for the reason that we want to
make sure that we are hearing from diverse participants, and I
mean diversity in every way. Cynthia Farina at Cornell Law
School has written extensively about the lack of diversity in
participation. We hear lots from businesses but not necessarily
from individuals. We hear from people who are white and wealthy
and educated, but not necessarily people who don't meet those
criteria, and that is true for all kinds of civic
participation, and people want to participate more. So research
that has been done by Pugh and other groups, every survey that
you look at says people would like to engage and would like to
have opportunities.
So, I would like to see us do more to actually create fora
beyond the fill-in-the box that is available on regulations.gov
to push out rules, to push out the opportunities to comment in
the way that, again, other legislatures and agencies in other
parts of the world and in our own backyard are beginning to
innovate with using tech to create multiple opportunities for
citizens to comment, and that can include expert citizens who
are diverse and have life experience in general.
Let me pause to let you interject there.
Mr. Perlmutter. Well, I have 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1
second. I yield back to the--
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time--
Mr. Perlmutter. --Chair, but thank you very much for your
answer.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Barr, is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Barr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for holding this
hearing, and thank you to our witnesses. I was very interested
in the witnesses' ideas, and I appreciate your insights into
this.
Let me start with Mr. Bagdoyan. Thank you for the GAO's
work in this area.
I was interested in your report about how different
agencies are taking different approaches with this, and it does
appear from your report that many of these agencies are taking
your recommendations and responding to adopt policies and
communicate those policies on how they intake comments.
Do you believe that the APA itself should be amended to
standardize this process more as opposed to just responding to
GAO admonishment, or maybe, in reference to Dr. Balla's
commentary, different agencies may have different approaches,
is that the right approach? Which is the right approach:
Uniformity, or allowing different agencies to approach this in
different ways based on their own circumstances?
Mr. Bagdoyan. That is a great question, Mr. Barr.
I probably won't be in a position to give you an exact
answer right now. I would point out that the APA does allow
comments to come in, in any shape or form. The agencies have
discretion to treat those comments as they best see fit, which
is, I think, what our report on policy and practice shows.
I will note, though, that we have ongoing data analytics
work. It is in two parts, if I may explain it briefly for you.
The first is a survey of actual commenters to see whether
they actually sent those comments in. So that will be one
significant data point for us to analyze. And then, we also
have ongoing work where we are analyzing tens of millions of
comments that were submitted to various agencies during the 5-
year period covered by our work, and, based on those results,
when we combine those results and see what, if anything, we can
make of those results, then that would generate our policy and
process procedure and perhaps technology mix of solutions, but
I just can't comment on that right now.
Mr. Barr. Let me associate myself with the comments of my
friend from Colorado about the--I agree with him. The concern
is false, as opposed to mass or anonymous comments. I agree
with my friend from Colorado on that.
Dr. Balla, however, I do want to ask you this: Should
regulators generally err on the side of openness and
inclusivity when soliciting feedback from interested citizens,
given your research into the EPA, for example, being able to
handle these mass communications in a fairly orderly way?
Mr. Balla. As a researcher, I am going to argue against my
self-interest, because as a researcher, I love uniformity,
because uniformity allows me to access more information, more
readily, and so that is the way that I can do a bigger scale
study that would help broaden our general understanding of this
phenomenon. But my argument is that agencies vary in the scope
of their regulatory activity, and so a one-size-fits-all
solution, I think, is quite scary, and I would argue strongly
against it. So I would argue for a light touch on any kind of
restrictions that would increase the friction, if you will, for
submitting public comments.
Mr. Barr. Right. So, erring on the side of openness and
inclusivity as opposed to exclusion helps?
Mr. Balla. Absolutely, because agencies vary in their
capacity.
Mr. Barr. Ms. Noveck had some interesting ideas about
artificial intelligence, and I think she said summarization
tools. Is there any risk of injecting bias into the process of
screening out comments, however?
Mr. Balla. Again, just to echo what Professor Noveck said,
technology-wise, the solution has existed for a long time.
Agencies can set duplicate thresholds at varying levels, and so
they can separate out the duplicate content in a body of
comments from those pieces that are unique contributions. So
that technology exists, and agencies ought to be encouraged to
use that to the extent that they don't yet.
Mr. Barr. I have many more questions, but my time has
expired.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentlelady from Texas, Ms. Garcia, is recognized for 5
minutes.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you
for bringing this topic to the table.
It completely baffles me that people go to this end to
corrupt the comment period, and I especially don't like it, if
it refers to our Astros in any way, but I understand Senator
Bentsen's point, because there is a big difference between
astroturf and grassroots.
But I want to start with you, Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. I was
really intrigued with the work that you have done, and I know
that you mention in your written comments that you have called
for an investigation.
Tell us what has happened or what we can do to help?
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. Thank you for your question.
I do want to mention that these complaints were made by an
individual who had no idea that these comments were made, that
the opposition to the merger was made without his consent.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right, you cited four examples--
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. Right. There were four examples. The
OCC was made aware of these prior to the approval order, and it
is not clear that the OCC did anything at the time except to
ask the bank to respond to these complaints by these
individuals.
We would like to know what the OCC did, if anything, if the
bank did respond. It is not clear whether they did anything
beyond that. And they definitely did not, in their approval
order, cite that there were fraudulent comments. So, that is
concerning.
We would like the Inspector General to begin an
investigation and see if the OCC has put anything in place so
that we are not just dealing with volume of comments, but that
we are dealing with any fake comments that may come in as the
CRA proposed rule is being looked at now, and as comments are
coming in to that CRA proposed rule. So we ask that Congress
ensure that the OCC is set up not just for volume of comments,
but any fake comments that may come in as to this proposed
rule.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, and we will work with the
Chair to see if we can help in that area.
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. Thank you.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. And my second question is for Mr.
Bagdoyan. And I just need to clarify. You all had been using
the word, ``duplicates.'' So are you referring to duplicates in
the sense of the same person sending to or duplicates in the
massive emails, or both?
Mr. Bagdoyan. Yes, that is a great question, Ms. Garcia,
and what we are referring to is comments that are identical,
every word--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. So the mass--
Mr. Bagdoyan. The structure of the comments--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. --copy-and-paste kind of comment?
Mr. Bagdoyan. Correct. Near duplicates are essentially the
same comment with some variation in the wording or the sentence
structure.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right. And do most agencies limit
comments to one person, that you would not get the same person
sending a duplicate?
Mr. Bagdoyan. I think it is an open process, and comments
are accepted at face value as they come in. I don't think there
is any kind of a screening out--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. What about the anonymous ones? Those
are, in my mind, a little problematic.
Mr. Bagdoyan. Sure.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. How many anonymous comments do we
really get, and is there any reason that we might want to
figure out a way to make sure that people identify themselves?
Mr. Bagdoyan. The APA allows the submission certainly of
anonymous comments, and agencies, in the spirit of the law, do
allow those to come in. They don't really analyze them in any
specific way, but, as I mentioned in my response to Mr. Barr
earlier, we are in the process of analyzing a vast trove of
comments that were submitted over a 5-year period. I would say
it is in the tens of millions, and we will have, hopefully,
when our work is completed, better insight in terms of the
identity characteristics of each and every one of these
comments, and, if we are able to roll up those numbers, we will
have a better sense of how many are anonymous and what other
things are associated with those comments.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right.
My last question is for Mr. Naylor. You were talking about
recommendations in policy changes. You told us one, and I just
felt like you were going to say more. My question to you is, is
there anything specifically that you think is the single-most
important thing that we do, and then, also, has there been an
increase in these fake comments within the last year or the
last 2 years?
Mr. Naylor. Thank you, Congresswoman.
We have not tracked the incidence of fake comments, but, as
you know, you have an urgent problem right now. Comptroller
Otting is planning to gut the Community Reinvestment Act. Chair
Clayton is planning to gut shareholder resolutions, and both of
these are being based, in part, on astroturfing. So, if this
committee can communicate in any way that that should not
stand, then I invite you to do so.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Okay.
Chairman Green. The gentlelady's time has expired.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you. I yield back. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Green. The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Posey, is
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Posey. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and Mr.
Ranking Member, for holding this hearing on the Administrative
Procedure Act in general and astroturfing more specifically.
The creation of false impressions of widespread
spontaneously arising grassroots movements is a poor raw
position to something that is, in fact, a real problem, as you
all have expressed, and I am glad there are more people aware
of it.
Number one, most people believe that their elected
representatives make all the laws, which is a grossly
inaccurate understanding of how this place and many State
Governments work. They are unaware that, in most cases, most
laws are made by unelected people, unrecallable people,
unaccountable people, and they do it without having the
statutory authority that they are supposed to have, and they
have been able to get away with doing that for decades.
I have read in multiple sources that the odds of someone
being hauled into Federal court for a violation of the law are
1,000-1 in favor of it being a law--i.e., administrative rule
enforceable as a law--that an unelected, unaccountable
bureaucrat wrote, not one that lawmakers actually passed. It
is, I think, the biggest problem with the operation of our
government.
If a Federal employee is caught stealing cash, hopefully,
they are prosecuted. If a Federal employee is caught stealing
equipment, whether it be a copy machine or a backhoe,
hopefully, they are prosecuted. But Federal employees routinely
steal the resources of hard-working Americans, American
businesses, and American households with absolutely no
consequence whatsoever, and that is why we need to have some
authority. And the astroturfers are partners in that crime, I
believe.
Every Member of Congress gets a copy every day of the
Federal Register, which is mostly administrative rules,
proposed changes to rules, Executive Orders, and they range
from that thick, to five a day this thick, and I don't know a
single Member of the House or the Senate who reads them because
we can't do anything about them. We have abdicated total
control to the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, and the
only way we can change any rule that they make is to pass a
bill in opposition to it, and you all know how simple that is
to do up here, right?
Dr. Balla mentioned the EPA. The EPA has outlawed the use
of glider kits based on flawed information, criminal
information that has been deemed false. They won't change their
rule. You mentioned it. That is just one of many.
The FDA. How well-intended can you be, but you want to put
all of the premium cigar manufacturers out of business so that
children don't smoke premium cigars. I guarantee you there is
not a child in the United States of America who has ever smoked
a premium cigar. They don't have the statutory authority to do
that. They have been confronted with it, and, instead of
admitting they are wrong, what do they do? They give the
industry the finger and say, we are going forward anyway.
Even the CDC seems to have engaged trolls and astroturfers
when they want issues put forward.
The last time Congress addressed the Administrative
Procedure Act to change it, to try and make it right, they
basically said, ``You have to do a cost-benefit analysis on any
rule that causes over a $100 million impact.'' So, if you just
impact every family in the United States by a total of $99
million, et cetera, you don't have to do anything, and of
course a lot of the agencies don't comply with that
requirement.
So, it took 8 years to fix this problem in one State, and
we haven't even started to kick it off here. Maybe this hearing
will serve as the kickoff, Mr. Chairman, and, if it is, I
applaud you for that.
And I'm almost running out of time here. I wish I could
tell you about how we fixed it in Florida. It is a riveting
story.
But, Dr. Bagdoyan, are you aware of any rulemaking
processes that have gone into litigation based on alleged
astroturfing?
Mr. Bagdoyan. I am not, but we can certainly look into it
and get back to you, sir.
Mr. Posey. Okay. Dr. Balla?
Mr. Balla. I am not aware of any either.
Mr. Posey. Is anyone aware of any?
Okay. It seems likely that mass-comment campaigns will be
seized on by a rulemaker when they support a position that the
rulemaker has already embraced and otherwise ignored.
Have any of you seen instances of that before?
Ms. Noveck, you are smiling. I think we all have if we are
honest about it, but Ms. Noveck?
Ms. Noveck. It is not a phenomenon of new technology. We
always like the evidence that supports our point of view.
Mr. Posey. Okay.
Mr. Chairman, I see I am out of time, so I yield back.
Thank you.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Davidson, is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Davidson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the
committee and our guests for an important hearing highlighting
the tension between the way we make our laws, the way we
regulate the country in the absence of laws, and, frankly, the
impact on the American people.
It has been highlighted by my colleague, Mr. Perlmutter,
really going back to the origins of the country and the ability
to make private comments. Sometimes, today, that is under the
biggest attack. I would say, in this committee, in Financial
Services, the ability to have some modicum of privacy with your
financial life is heavily diminished.
For example, when I hear people say, ``Oh, we should know
the identity of everyone who comments,'' are we really
proposing something along the lines of the Bank Secrecy Act,
where you have know-your-customer provisions for every comment
that comes in? And should every congressional office only do
that if they are constituents? And clearly, constituents are
only citizens; so we should discount the noncitizens, right?
So, when you look at how you go down the way this goes is,
as has been highlighted, we all receive comments from many
forums, where people duplicate them. They are individuals. They
are organizations across the political spectrum. I seem to get
a lot from some group called the Resistance Movement--resist,
resist bots. Any number of resist, #resisting show up in my
comments.
And I can't imagine there is any incentive for this group
or group of people, individuals, to dump these comments on as
we are reviewing legislation, but of course it happens, and the
same thing happens through our regulatory state, and, as Mr.
Posey highlighted, it can be really high stakes.
We have regulators in position, and I really think that the
remedy has to be that we have to reclaim the Article I powers
of this body and, frankly, we need to have a government that is
only big enough to fit inside the Constitution, and Congress
does the things that are enumerated, and we reserve to the
States the things that aren't enumerated because there is more
local control on those things. And I will say there is a clear
consensus that the Federal Government and Congress should do
some things that aren't enumerated.
For example, healthcare. Not an enumerated power. Broad
consensus, we should have some sort of Federal role there. We
could amend the Constitution to make it clear exactly what is
the expectation. Those are high bars, and, in the absence of
our action here in Congress, we have simply said, well, this
would be really important, like the EPA. We want clean air and
clean water; you all figure it out.
And when they do it, as we saw, Dr. Balla, you highlighted,
particularly with the waters of the USA action, a regulatory
agency using something called Thunderclap to spoof comments,
totally fake comments, the epitome of astroturfing, by a
regulatory agency to support what they wanted to do anyway,
causing great harm to industry, to farmers especially, whose
comments were disregarded, not taken into consideration. And
thankfully, in that case, the system worked as it should,
Congress reclaimed its authority, we moved it through the House
and the Senate, and the President signed it, and we revoked it.
And in the interim, the courts worked as they should and said:
This exceeds your constitutional authority; it is outside the
bounds.
So, Dr. Balla, could you highlight, given the background
that you do there, with the EPA, kind of the tension that
exists and what worked well, and what do we still need to
address?
Mr. Balla. Sure. The one question to ask is, do comments
matter? And I want to separate that question into two parts.
Does the forum or the venue through which the comment comes in
matter, mass-comment campaigns versus stand-alone, and separate
that from the identity of the commenter? And what we find is
that actually there is quite an overlap in the EPA's context in
terms of who does mass commenting versus stand-alone comments.
So, it is hard for us to separate out: Is it the mass-
comment campaign; is it the venue itself, the vehicle of
delivery that matters, or is it what is actually said?
According to the Administrative Procedure Act, it is substance
that matters, not the identity of the commenter.
And so, to bring this back to the issue of anonymous
comments, one thing you might be concerned about is, agencies
can be quite powerful, as we have heard, they have a lot of
authority, and there are stakeholders who might be in a
vulnerable position if their identity, when they criticize an
agency, is revealed. And I think we might want to tread
carefully about limiting anonymity in public commenting.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Rose, is now recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Rose. Thank you, Chairman Green and Ranking Member
Barr, for holding this hearing today, and thank you to the
panelists for being here. I wonder, Dr. Balla, if you might
continue where you left off?
Mr. Balla. Sure. Agencies are--what are their
responsibilities? It is to address the substance, the relevant
matter in their comment, in their corpuses of comments that
they receive. They are not instructed by the Administrative
Procedure Act to pay attention to identity. They are instructed
to pay attention to relevant matter.
And so, again, do comments matter? In my experience, if we
think about the administrative rulemaking process, it is a
legal administrative process governed by the EPA, but that, of
course, occurs in the context of a larger political system.
What does that mean for us? Do we have evidence that mass-
comment campaigns affect the outcomes of rulemakings? I don't
think we can say that because, in the period between a notice
of proposed rulemaking and a final rule, a lot of inputs happen
into the system. There are public comments. There are ex parte
communications. There might be advisory committee meetings.
There are all kinds of inputs that can happen in the rulemaking
process.
But what I think we can say is that mass-comment campaigns
have been justified, have been used by both political parties
amid both Administrations of both political parties to justify
actions that they already would like to have taken. And so, in
the context of the Waters of the United States rulemaking,
Administrator McCarthy came to Capitol Hill and said, ``We have
heard over one million comments; 87.1 percent of them are in
favor of this rule.''
The rule was finalized shortly thereafter, in line with
those comments.
Was it those mass-comment campaigns that were mainly
submitted by environmental advocacy groups like the Sierra
Club, and the NRDC? Was it those mass-comment campaigns that
led the agency to that end point? I am quite skeptical that
that was the case. I would argue that was the approach that the
agency was already planning to take in the rule and the mass-
comment campaigns provided no legal or administrative
justification for taking that action, but they provided sort of
a larger political justification. Thank you.
Mr. Rose. Beyond the case that we have been discussing of
the Obama-era EPA and the Waters of the United States
rulemaking, is there pervasive evidence of agency-generated
astroturfing?
Mr. Balla. I am only aware of that one particular case,
that one particular thunder-clap instance, but that doesn't
mean there aren't others. I just don't know.
Mr. Rose. And I direct this question to you and also Mr.
Bagdoyan. Are there any laws or regulations specifically
addressing agency staff encouraging or generating comments?
Mr. Bagdoyan. I am not aware of any, but again, I would be
happy to look into that and get back to your staff on it.
Mr. Rose. I would appreciate that. Are there any procedures
that either of you are aware of in place to monitor or detect
agency personnel generating comments or encouraging comments
beyond the normal opening of the comments for public comment?
Mr. Balla. I am not aware of any.
Mr. Bagdoyan. I am not either, but that doesn't mean they
don't exist. I will add that to my to-do list.
Mr. Rose. Thank you.
And, Dr. Balla, I am also wondering, is there any analysis
that you have done or research that you are aware of, on
selection bias by agency personnel as they prioritize comments?
Has that question ever been looked at?
Mr. Balla. What do you mean by, ``selection bias?''
Mr. Rose. Well, pulling out or providing preference to the
comments that supported the position that they perhaps already
had.
Mr. Balla. That certainly happens in the public sphere,
right? Again, if we come back to the Waters of the United
States rulemaking, that is, in fact, what was going on in that
case, for sure.
Mr. Rose. And I am wondering, I know one of the panelists
talked about diverse comments or encouraging diversity among
those commenting, but I am curious if that doesn't--I guess I
would fear that that would become just a vehicle for soliciting
the comments that you want to hear when they are absent from
the voluntary comment process. Dr. Balla, have you seen
anything that you can point to for us there?
Mr. Balla. What I would encourage agencies to do is, if
they feel that they don't have the information they need to
move a rulemaking forward, use advance notices of proposed
rulemaking where you ask general questions and direct
stakeholders and affected parties towards issues that you think
you need help, where you have information gaps. So, I don't
think it is a bad thing for agencies to direct commenters in
particular areas where they have gaps in their understanding.
Mr. Rose. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I yield back.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentlewoman from California, Ms. Porter, is recognized
for 5 minutes.
Ms. Porter. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity
to join this subcommittee today.
Mr. Naylor, in December, a few months ago, the nonprofit
you work for wrote a letter to the SEC asking the Commission to
investigate some suspicious letters submitted during the public
comment period on a new rule that the SEC had issued, and that
rule would shrink shareholders' rights to hold corporate
interests accountable. And your letter raised concern
specifically about the actions--the comments of SEC Chair
Clayton. And he had directly quoted some of these public
comments to make the case for the SEC's proposed rule. Who did
the Chair say had submitted the letters, the comments that he
cited in support?
Mr. Naylor. It was a Frank Capra moment, in fact, when the
Chair discussed these. He made reference to a Marine veteran
and a retired teacher and so forth, and it was with some
ceremony and reverence that he explained that these were Main
Street investors that he had surveyed.
Ms. Porter. Okay. So, he cited an Army veteran and a Marine
veteran, a police officer, a retired teacher, a public servant,
a single mom, and a couple of retirees who saved for
retirement. Bloomberg News investigated and discovered that
those letters were, in fact, submitted by a trade group, and
the Bloomberg article is entitled, ``SEC Chairman Cites Fishy
Letters in Support of Policy Change.'' We believe these
letters, these comments were actually forged, and your letter
goes on at length about forced arbitration clauses, how
damaging these arbitration clauses are. Explain to the
committee how forced arbitration clauses relate on that
shareholder proposal? What was at stake here for the American
public in making this--why is it important to get this right?
Mr. Naylor. There are only a few lines of accountability
for corporations. There are the laws that you pass. There is
litigation to support these laws. There are whistleblowers that
we saw play out during the impeachment. And there is
shareholder activism, which is when shareholders decide that
they are going to make companies accountable. We saw this play
out, for better or for worse, with Enron, with Wells Fargo, and
with others.
In forced arbitration--ironically enough, a former Harvard
professor, Hal Scott, believes that a certain company, in this
case Intuit, should bind their shareholders to forced
arbitration if they believe the company is misrepresenting its
financial figures. And that is the kind of thing that a
shareholder activist can do. Happily, shareholders rejected
that, I think, 98 to 2. So, that is where the two kind of
converge.
Ms. Porter. Can you tell the committee what astroturfing
refers to? It is the title of today's hearing.
Mr. Naylor. In our opinion, astroturfing is just fake
grassroots. It is the appearance of grassroots commentary on
something which, in fact, is the fiction generated by the very
corporate interests that the likes of us are trying to control.
Ms. Porter. And in your opinion, would you consider Chair
Clayton's reference to these fake comments of an Army veteran,
a Marine veteran, a single mom, and a couple of retirees, would
you consider that an instance of astroturfing?
Mr. Naylor. Or if not, beyond astroturfing, he represents
that he did a random sample across America and just happened to
put his hand into the jar of comments and selected these. There
were hundreds, if not thousands of comments from the likes of
us, all arguing for stronger shareholder rights. These were
essentially the only ones that argued against that. I would say
that is a misrepresentation. I think that is something that
falls under 18 USC Sec. 1001, that says, you are not supposed
to tell untruths to the United States Government or else there
are consequences.
Ms. Porter. So, in your opinion, we could use that statute
to--
Mr. Naylor. You should explore that statute.
Ms. Porter. --pursue the trade groups, the lobbyists who
are behind these fake, forged comments because the comments,
what the investigation suggests is that these comments were not
private individuals pretending to be other private individuals.
They were actually lobbyists and corporate lobbying entities
and trade associations submitting fake comments. We could
investigate them, we could prosecute them, the government?
Mr. Naylor. I believe that should be explored. These are
corporate lobbyists using actual people as stooges. They are
pawns. They are victims in one sense. But the real victim is
the American public who--
Ms. Porter. Tell me why you think they are victims?
Mr. Naylor. Because they didn't write these letters. They
just happened to be the cousin, the uncle, the in-law who said,
oh, yes, sweetie, you are a lobbyist, do whatever you like. But
now the public sees their name is on something that they
probably do not subscribe to.
Ms. Porter. Thank you.
Chairman Green. The gentlelady's time has expired.
The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Loudermilk, is recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Loudermilk. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for
being here. I would like to kind of continue on with something
Ms. Porter brought up, the Bloomberg story. I think, in the
Bloomberg story, they highlighted seven people who supposedly--
their names were used, but they didn't submit comments. I
actually have in my hand here, it was the organization that
orchestrated the comments was an organization of 60 Plus, who
went back to each one of these people, and I actually have
declarations of five of those people who say they actually did
submit those comments. They were able to track them down after
the story was printed.
Apparently, when Bloomberg called them about this, they
didn't necessarily remember or know exactly what the reporter
was talking about. So, just out of clarity, I would like to
submit these to the record, Mr. Chairman, these affidavits,
these declarations of statement that they did actually submit
those comments.
Chairman Green. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. Naylor. That is fair, Congressman, but let me just try
to restate what I think is--
Mr. Loudermilk. Hang on a second. I just want to make sure
that we did that. There are a couple of areas I want to get
into. We will get to that if I have time. Something Mr. Naylor
said a little while ago, Mr. Balla, that is a little
concerning, is he made the comment that the OCC is making a
rulemaking process decision based off of fraudulent comments
that they have received regarding the Community Reinvestment
Act, but I heard you answer a question a little while ago that
indicated that we don't have evidence of--and then some others
have commented on this, that there has been no evidence that
rulemaking decisions, or that these campaigns or false comments
have actually resulted in the decision in rulemaking.
My question is, do we have evidence that the OCC and the
FDIC have been receiving fraudulent comments during the
Community Reinvestment Act process?
Mr. Balla. I can't answer that question. I don't have any
knowledge about that particular case. I just want to reiterate
the general point that I was making, in that even after decades
of research on the topic, ``do public comments matter,'' the
answer is still quite muddled. And so, this has nothing to do
with the nature of the comment, whether they are mass-comment
campaigns, fake-comment campaigns; it is going back to pre-
rulemaking.
Now, I don't want to argue that we need to be paralyzed in
our ability to make a causal inference between the submission
of a comment and the decision of an agency, but I do want to
suggest that identifying that particular connection is quite
tough--
Mr. Loudermilk. Right, right. I understand that.
Mr. Balla. --in a case study context or a large end
context.
Mr. Loudermilk. And I remember something Ms. Noveck said.
Basically, if a comment supports the direction that you are
wanting to go, you are going to accept it. And I think that is
just human nature.
But Mr. Naylor, your comment, if I didn't misunderstand it,
you indicated that the OCC is using these false statements to
make decisions on the CRA. Was that correct?
Mr. Naylor. If Comptroller Otting had any credential to be
Comptroller, it was the consummation of a merger between
OneWest and CIT, and that merger was built in no small part on
astroturf, on fake comments. And so the person who is now
fabricating, dismantling the CRA, is somebody whose career has
2 feet into a very serious problem.
Let me just point out one thing about Chair Clayton's
comments. Had he said, ``I have seven letters, one comes from
the brother-in-law of a lobbyist, one comes from the uncle of a
lobbyist, one comes from the in-laws of a lobbyist,'' that is
far different than a marine veteran, a retired schoolteacher,
and a police officer. Thank you.
Mr. Loudermilk. Okay. Even though they may be the same
people?
Mr. Naylor. Same person, but a corporate lobbyist's brother
is a little different atmospherics than a retired police
officer.
Mr. Loudermilk. Okay. Honestly, I do find occasionally that
lobbyists also tend to be experts in certain careers and
fields, and they often do have opinions. I'm not defending
them.
But Mr. Balla, as you said, these campaigns are nothing
new, correct?
Mr. Balla. That is correct. They were--
Mr. Loudermilk. They have been going on--
Mr. Balla. --postcard campaigns in the old days.
Mr. Loudermilk. Exactly. I am running out of time. Mr.
Bagdoyan, quickly, I was on the Science, Space, and Technology
Committee when we were investigating when the EPA actually was
using social media to go out and generate false comments on the
Waters of the United States rulemaking. You investigated that,
did the report on that, is that correct?
Mr. Bagdoyan. That was a legal opinion, Mr. Loudermilk. I
was not involved with the work, but I am familiar with it, yes.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Loudermilk. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Green. The Chair now recognizes the gentlewoman
from Michigan, Ms. Tlaib, for 5 minutes.
Ms. Tlaib. Thank you so much. I don't know if Mr. Naylor or
someone else can help me out. Do you think brothers-in-law of
lobbyists are experts?
Mr. Naylor. They can be experts, but as long as you say
brother-in-law of lobbyist, then that helps establish that we
are not dealing with average, randomly selected Americans.
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. And can I just give an example? In the
OneWest merger, Mr. Otting solicited support from Wall Street
vendors, lawyers, and business contacts who had financial
interest in the bank when he asked for support of the merger.
And so, in that case, there was a clear conflict of interest in
those he was asking for support. So, I am not sure I would call
those experts in the community needs of the bank that he was
asking for support.
Ms. Tlaib. No, I agree. And conflict of interest is
something that can really poison various institutions and
policymaking, I agree.
Mr. Naylor, help me out here. If there is a bully in my
son's class, and his teacher makes a rule against bullying,
like, you can't bully, it would be wrong if the bullying was
continuing, and this particular bully, he was literally
bullying 12 people in the class; would it be wrong if that
bully paid those 12 kids that he was bullying to tell the
teacher that they loved getting bullied?
Mr. Naylor. It has been a while. I think that would be
wrong, but actually, public--
Ms. Tlaib. No, it is pretty common sense.
Mr. Naylor. --policy on that is not well-developed, I guess
I would have to say.
Ms. Tlaib. Yes. I understand the Public Citizens Chamber
Watch investigated the 2015 case by contacting each of the 12
small business owners to see if their opposition to the rule
was, at minimum, misleading and so forth. Is that correct?
Mr. Naylor. Yes.
Ms. Tlaib. It was revealed that more than a fourth of the
small business owners were actually lobbyists for the
brokerage. And I am sorry if I--I was chairing another
committee, so I apologize if this is repetitive. But it is good
because truth matters, right? Mr. Naylor, can you describe in
detail what else the investigation revealed?
Mr. Naylor. Well, context, and thank you for the question,
Congresswoman. This was an Obama-era rule that said brokers
aren't supposed to rip off their customers. They are supposed
to advise stuff that is in their best interest and not
something that is going to fatten their own pocketbooks, which
should be good for everybody, including small business.
In lobbying against this, the Chamber supposedly found
several dozen businesses that said they would lose their
trusted adviser, which I found a little surprising. So I called
them all and found, as you say, that some of them were, in
fact, Wall Street brokers themselves. Others didn't answer the
phone. One woman said that the ability to use her trusted
adviser had allowed her to grow her business employment over
the last decade, and I asked her how many employees she had,
and she had grown it by one.
So, in other words, these were pawns, as we discussed with
Congresswoman Porter. The law was going to help them, but the
Chamber of Commerce, serving Wall Street interests, was going
to sacrifice these pawns to make a misrepresentation, in my
opinion, to this committee and the Labor Committee to fight the
fiduciary rule so that Wall Street could save $17 billion a
year in inflated commissions that they were then charging.
Ms. Tlaib. In my district, we don't call it a con. We
actually call it cheating. It is cheating.
Mr. Bagdoyan, based on your role as Director of Forensic
Audits and Investigative Services at GAO, what have you learned
regarding the ability of a well-funded corporate industry to
misappropriate the identity of ordinary Americans and create an
illusion, or what I call misleading, lying, a widespread
support for pro-industry positions not only during the notice-
and-comment period of the rulemaking process but while lobbying
Members of Congress?
Mr. Bagdoyan. Well, a lot of organizations send in these
mass mailings. I don't have any evidence to the extent that
that happens and by whom. That is not something that we have
focused on. Our work has focused on the policy and practice of
identity information. So, that is what our analysis--
Ms. Tlaib. You should probably get into looking at this.
What can we do to help you look into something like this?
Because we don't want industry to hijack the public process
that is for ordinary Americans to be engaged in. I just left
another committee hearing about the Trump Administration
repealing and changing the mercury standards, basically what
has been working to reduce 80 percent of mercury output, and
now they are saying, no, no, no, we are going to go and fix it,
and now it is open to people commenting. I want moms and
regular folks to be able to say: Don't do this.
What can we do to help support you taking a deeper dive
into this, so that again, this process is really transparent?
Mr. Bagdoyan. Sure, yes, I take your point, and what I can
offer, like I have explained to other members of the
subcommittee, is that we have ongoing data analytics work that
is focusing on identity characteristics of comments. And we are
also surveying commenters to see whether the comments they
submitted were indeed by them, rather than someone else posing
as them, and our plan is to actually engage into some deeper
dives into those responses that we do receive.
Chairman Green. The gentlelady's time has expired. I will
ask you to put your comments in the record, please.
Mr. Bagdoyan. Yes, sir, thank you.
Chairman Green. Thank you. At this time, the Chair will
yield himself 5 minutes.
Mr. Balla has indicated that there is a question, in terms
of evidence of adverse effect emanating from mass-information
campaigns. Maybe not in those exact words. I would yield time
to you, Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. Can you give us some indication as
to whether or not this was evidenced in the case that you
cited?
Ms. Gonzalez-Brito. In the case of the OneWest-CIT merger,
we had a bank that was foreclosing on, in some cases, we are
hearing up to 100,000 families across the country, that had one
of the worst reinvestment records in the State of California
and had a CRA plan that was approved by its regulator that was
one of the worst in its State. And none of this was addressed
in the merger order by both of its regulators, and when it was
approved, the merger was approved, the fake comments that were,
that the bank's regulator had notice of before the approval, as
I mentioned earlier, was not dealt with or investigated before
the merger approval order.
So, here we have a public comment process in which hundreds
of organizations and community members commented on, and there
was evidence of fake public comments. None of that was
investigated. Fake Yahoo email addresses were generated, and we
still don't know who was responsible. And the CEO of that bank
is now running the CRA rulemaking that is happening now. So,
not only is there an adverse impact on the merger that was
approved, but now we have a CRA rulemaking by the OCC, where we
don't know if they have a system in place to ensure that fraud
is not taking place in that rulemaking. There are a lot of
questions that need to be answered, an investigation that needs
to take place, and we want to make sure that the public
rulemaking process is--that there is integrity in that process.
Chairman Green. Mr. Naylor, I am looking at your testimony,
and you have indicated that, with reference to the affair that
Bloomberg uncovered, that the 60 Plus group was funded by an
entity. Would you care to express what you have given to me as
your written statement?
Mr. Naylor. Well, 60 Plus is a group that is known to the
public generally as a sometime Koch-funded group that fights
for the right, fights against regulation, fights for that which
gets in the Koch business' way. The false front in front of the
effort to gut shareholder resolutions, we believe begins and is
generally overseen by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The false fronts have included something called the Main
Street Investors Coalition. It's not very difficult to uncover
because its own website, before it took it down in shame, said
it was funded by the National Association of Manufacturers. Why
are these guys upset? Because the one thing about capitalism
and apparently the CEOs don't like is people showing up at the
annual meeting and saying they would like the CEO and the board
to do things a little differently.
They have been arguing against shareholder suffrage for a
long time. And to do that, they need to make it look like
actual shareholders want this, are tired of this, and so they
created these false fronts, including the efforts done through
60 Plus.
Chairman Green. Quickly permit me to ask some questions
that would necessitate raising a hand. Is there a significant
risk of misinformation masquerading as legitimate public input?
If you believe such is the case, kindly extend a hand into the
air.
All but one, I believe.
Mr. Bagdoyan. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I am not in the position
to comment on that. I just don't have the evidence right now.
But we are working on it.
Chairman Green. Okay. I greatly appreciate it.
Are we adequately policing the comment process? If you
believe that we are adequately policing, would you kindly
extend a hand into the air?
Mr. Balla.
And can these problems that have been called to our
attention today be remedied with technology? If you think so,
kindly extend a hand into the air? We have two, Ms. Noveck and
Mr. Balla. Let the record reflect such.
Friends, I greatly appreciate your testifying. The ranking
member has asked for a privilege. He would like to have an
additional 1 minute, and I will accord the privilege, without
objection. And I will have a minute as well.
Mr. Barr. Okay, I appreciate the gentleman. Let me just
clear up one thing. From what I understand, we don't have any
evidence whatsoever that, in the CRA rulemaking process, there
is any evidence of any fraudulent comments being submitted. I
raised this issue with Comptroller Otting when he was here last
week, and he testified that there was no evidence of any
fraudulent comments submitted in the CRA process, and I want to
make that clear for the record.
In terms of false fronts, there may be, in various
agencies, false comments over the course of this, but I think,
with the example from the EPA in 2015, you have this on all
sides, fraudulent comments. It is not just on one particular
side. You have it everywhere.
And the final point is, in many cases, the industry
representatives should have a right to comment, and some of the
witnesses seem to be suggesting that someone who has an
interest in the rule--
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Barr. --doesn't have a right to comment on it, and that
makes no sense whatsoever.
Chairman Green. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Barr. I yield back.
Chairman Green. Thank you.
The Chair now yields himself 1 minute, and I would note
with a degree of interest that you would mention Mr. Otting,
because I did ask him questions when he was here, and he
vehemently denied any involvement or engagement by his business
and his associates.
But I think, Ms. Gonzalez-Brito, you have given us
information to the contrary. Is it unusual for people who have
been involved in activities that are adverse to their best
interest to deny involvement? Is it unusual? If you believe
that it is unusual for persons to deny involvement in
activities that are adverse to their best interest, would you
kindly raise a hand?
Let the record reflect that no one has raised a hand.
With this, I yield back the balance of my time.
Without objection, on behalf of Professor Noveck, I would
like to offer for the hearing record a report that she has
authored entitled, ``Crowdlaw for Congress: Strategies for 21st
Century Lawmaking.''
I thank the witnesses for their testimony, and for devoting
the time and resources to travel here and share their expertise
with this subcommittee. Your testimony today has helped to
advance the important work of this subcommittee and of the U.S.
Congress.
The Chair notes that some Members may have additional
questions for this panel, which they may wish to submit in
writing. Without objection, the hearing record will remain open
for 5 legislative days for Members to submit written questions
to these witnesses and to place their responses in the record.
Also, without objection, Members will have 5 legislative days
to submit extraneous materials to the Chair for inclusion in
the record.
This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:11 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
February 6, 2020
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