Chip Taylor

Legal falsehoods

If it was illegal for politicians to lie to each other, I suppose most of DC would be locked up. But it's not.

Bush administration officials broke no laws in withholding from Congress estimates of the cost of the new Medicare law, according to an internal investigation made public yesterday.

The Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, said a three-month investigation found that administration officials had used aggressive tactics to keep from Congress much higher estimates of the legislation's cost -- $100 billion more than what the president and other officials were acknowledging.

But the effort -- including threats by Thomas Scully, the administration's Medicare chief until December, to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster -- did not violate federal law, the inspector general said.