Pritzker's Progress

[Commentary] President Barack Obama presumably nominated Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary for reasons other than her record-breaking fundraising as his 2008 campaign chair. And we assume it's despite her history of investing in toxic mortgage-backed securities and her family trusts' allegedly copious use of offshore tax shelter strategies.

Let us hope the President chose Pritzker to reorganize and streamline government, starting with a Commerce Department that is "an outdated bureaucratic maze" and "produces redundancy and inefficiency." Those are the words President Obama used in January 2012 to ridicule Commerce, adding in the White House East Room that the department was "a mess" and that "these kinds of inefficiencies exist across government." Obama's proposal at the time was for Congress to grant him "consolidation authority" to combine executive branch functions, specifically singling out the five housing agencies and the six shops that deal with business like the Commerce Department and the Export-Import Bank. For some reason none of this came up this week when President Obama introduced Pritzker, though those now forgotten words are worth recalling in the context of the sequester panic. Congress never gave President Obama his consolidation power, but in the 16 months since he asked for it the President seems to have concluded that government is now so efficient it can't tolerate even modest budget cuts without laying off park rangers and meat inspectors. The Commerce job is notoriously one of Washington's least influential. So if she wants to make a difference, perhaps Pritzker can resurrect the agenda to fix a broken government. At least she'd have something to occupy her days.