Obama executive order creates ‘behavioral experiments’ law targeting U.S. citizens

With a stroke of the pen, President Obama on Tuesday created a new initiative authorizing the U.S. government to conduct behavioral experiments on citizens, with the aim of collecting data to streamline government programs.

The Orwellian-sounding order — “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People” — bases Obama’s action on his belief that behavioral science and psychology can tell the government a lot about the governed.

“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,” the order states.

Breitbart noted Tuesday that observing and predicting the way people behave played a key role in the Obama’s political campaign strategy: “The order instructs government agencies to use ‘behavioral science’ — a tactic used by Obama’s political campaigns to harness data from their supporters to target them effectively.”

And The Daily Caller reported that the executive order is an evolution of a 2013 White House proposal titled “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights.”

Here’s how that proposal fits in:

The [“Strengthening”] 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.

Among other directives, Obama’s order authorizes the government to “recruit behavioral science experts to join the Federal Government as necessary,” and to “strengthen agency relationships with the research community to better use empirical findings from the behavioral sciences.”

In other words, it sanctions the sharing among government agencies of an entirely new set of data points on the private activities and tendencies of the American people.

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