Under the United States Constitution, no funds may be expended by federal agencies, or their officers or employees in the executive branch, except by way of an appropriation made by an act of Congress. The \u201cAppropriations Clause\u201d of the Constitution is not only an express assignment of appropriations authority to the Congress, but has also, as explained by a unanimous Supreme Court, been long understood \u201cas a restriction upon the disbursing authority of the Executive department\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Congress has made it clear that federal agencies are not to use public funds to finance campaign tactics and grassroots propaganda. By law, official HHS funds cannot be used \u201cfor publicity or propaganda purposes … designed to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress … ,\u201d according to and Section 503(a) of Division F and Section 717 of Division D of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act or for \u201cprinted or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner … an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy … ,\u201d according to 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1913.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other words, HHS can\u2019t spend taxpayer money to solicit support for partisan legislation. Although there\u2019s little chance of mounting a successful lawsuit against the \u201cState Your Support\u201d link, signers of the petition should be aware that they are doing much more than giving their name. They\u2019re also permitting the Obama Administration to retain their email and postal addresses for future contacts and solicitations, perhaps even for financial contributions. Of course, we can be sure that none of the names and numbers given will be misused or passed along to third parties, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2026turn a taxpayer-funded federal website into a self-serving online petition! That\u2019s exactly what Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has done with the front page of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Between links to FLU.gov and another to Stop Medicare Fraud, there is an icon under HealthReform.Gov where a visitor can \u201cState Your Support\u201d for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[475,473,186,474,476,395],"class_list":["post-2014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-chuck-grassley","tag-connie-hair","tag-hhs","tag-human-events","tag-kathleen-sebelius","tag-obama-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2026,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions\/2026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}