by TChris

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Bush Administration violated federal law by ordering Richard Foster to withhold from Congress his estimates of the cost of legislation to add a drug benefit to Medicare.

In a report on Monday, the research service said that Congress's "right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable." Since 1912, it said, federal laws have protected the rights of federal employees to communicate with Congress, and recent laws have "reaffirmed and strengthened" those protections.

Had the true cost of the controversial law been known, it is doubtful that Congress would have given the administration the legislation it wanted. The administration solved that problem, like so many others, with a lie, in violation of its duty to "make professional and reliable cost estimates, unfettered by any particular partisan agenda."