Commerce Nominee Penny Pritzker's Dubious Prize

President Obama’s nomination of Penny Pritzker as secretary of Commerce is certain to occasion plenty of scrutiny. A Chicago businesswoman and Hyatt Hotels heiress, she was associated with a bank that specialized in subprime lending and later collapsed; holds part of her fortune, estimated at more than $1.5 billion, in offshore trusts; and is viewed with suspicion by organized labor, which has protested wages at Hyatt and last year organized a boycott of its hotels. All of this is likely to come up at her confirmation hearings this spring. What may not get as much scrutiny is the question of what qualifies Pritzker to lead the Department of Commerce—and whether the sprawling agency has outlived its usefulness and can be led at all.

The Department of Commerce and Labor was established in 1903 to create jobs and improve Americans’ standard of living. But Labor was soon spun off as its own department, and Commerce went on to become something of a catchall, the place to park government functions that other agencies shed and house new ones that had nowhere else to go. It inherited the National Weather Service from the Department of Agriculture and the Patent and Trademark Office from the Department of the Interior. Its 43,000 employees also run, incongruously, the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and more than a dozen other offices.