Commerce Department Fudges Offshoring Report In Election Year

I saw this on Lou Dobbs' show late last night. So, in December 2003 Congress asked the Bush administration to produce a report about the effects of the offshoring trends in America. They were supposed to produce it six months later, in June 2004. The report was never made public until that liberal muckracking institution Manufacturing and Technology News filed a FOIA request. It turns out that the 12 page, $335,000 page (yep, $28,000 a page) report was ready well before the November 2004 elections, but strangely was kept from being released to the public. Further, the conclusions of the final draft, created by political appointees at the Commerce Department, are at variance to the initial conclusions the analysts who worked on the report arrived at. It basically concludes that we can't really be sure what effects offshoring will have on the American workforce. The analysts, however, wrote, among other things, that "there is growing pressure in corporate America to offshore IT work."

Now some people will probably not be surprised that this report didn't make it's way to the public in an election year when the people writing the report are the incumbents, but it's nice to see that dirty laundry gets aired sooner or later. Here's the whole article, read it for yourself.