Dictator Obama announced a new executive order on Tuesday which authorizes federal agencies to conduct behavioral experiments on U.S. citizens in order to advance government initiatives.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people,” reads the executive order, released on Tuesday.
The new program is the end result of a policy proposal the White House floated in 2013 entitled “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights.”
According to a document released by the White House at that time, the program was modeled on one implemented in the U.K. in 2010. That initiative created a Behavioral Insights Teams, which used “iterative experimentation” to test “interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government.”
The initiative draws on research from University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein, who was also dubbed Obama’s regulatory czar. The two behavioral scientists argued in their 2008 book “Nudge” that government policies can be designed in a way that “nudges” citizens towards certain behaviors and choices.
The desired choices almost always advance the goals of the federal government, though they are often couched as ways to cut overall program spending.
In its 2013 memo, which was reported by Fox News at the time, the White House openly admitted that the initiative involved behavioral experimentation.
“The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help build federal capacity to experiment with these approaches, and to scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials,” the memo read.
To jump-start the programs, agencies are encouraged to recruit behavioral science experts to join the federal government and to develop relationships with researchers in order to “better use empirical findings from the behavioral sciences.”
A fact sheet sent out by the White House on Tuesday shows that researchers at numerous universities and think tanks — from MIT, Harvard, and the Brookings Institute, to name a few — have signed on to the program.
The executive order specifically directs federal agencies to develop nudge programs that help individuals, families, communities and businesses “access public programs and benefits by, as appropriate, streamlining processes that may otherwise limit or delay participation.”
https://archive.is/Lv5Bj
http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/15/president-obama-orders-behavioral-experiments-on-american-public/