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But we can begin to glean at least the outlines of what happened when Donald Trump met the law that the late New York Times columnist William Safire said “has done more to inhibit the abuse of Government power… than any legislation in our lifetime.” The results of that clash are as revealing about the 45th president as they are about FOIA.
Trump came into office with the FOIA bar already low. The Obama administration, despite lofty campaign rhetoric about transparency and a first-day-in-office memo urging agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure,” set records for FOIA non-compliance and was caught at one point—by a FOIA lawsuit, naturally—contradicting its public posture by lobbying against FOIA reform behind closed doors. Thus, as MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy put it, comparing Obama and Trump’s transparency records is a case study in “setting high expectations and then failing to meet them in some really critical ways versus setting some really low expectations and delivering what folks expected.”
Trump as president lied prodigiously, withheld White House visitor logs, went months between formal press briefings, made employees sign non-disclosure agreements, attempted to stop the publication of books about his administration, and committed a long list of other offenses against openness.
And when it comes to FOIA, it’s hard to find any statistical category where the Trump administration cleared even the low bar set by Obama. […]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
Despite the Pandemic, Republicans Are Fighting Paid Sick Leave All Over the Country, by Walker Bragman. Under the guise of helping businesses, the GOP is working to bar medical leave mandates in state by state across the country.
More Than Half of All Inmates in Wisconsin Prisons Have Tested Positive for Covid, by Arvind Dilawar. With a civil rights complaint filed in federal court, inmates accuse administrators of flouting CDC guidelines.
‘ I can’t keep doing this’: gig workers say pay has fallen after California’s Prop 22, by Michael Sainato. Drivers say working conditions remain poor after voters approved measure exempting Uber and other apps from labor laws
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES
QUOTATION
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” ~~Edward O. Wilson
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2010—Vice President Biden: ‘The test ban treaty is as important as ever.’
It’s turning out to be a rather eventful week for nuclear weapons news, on both the domestic front and the international stage. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to deal with what’s going on in the US in this post, and address international issues separately.
First of all, the Obama administration is in the home stretch regarding the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR); the President’s national security team met yesterday to discuss the options they will present to the president, so he can make his final decision regarding “U.S. nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture” for at least half of the next decade. It is a legislatively mandated review, and I’ve written about it in several previous posts. Since the meeting was behind closed doors, we don’t know many specifics, but national security expert and Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione has laid out what form he thinks the final NPR should take.
Secondly, today, the administration continued to prove its ability to multitask on nuclear weapons issues. Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he basically expanded on his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from several weeks ago, in which he discussed the proposed budget for the nuclear weapons complex, and why it is important in the overall national security picture.
As Travis Sharp noted at the Nukes of Hazard, Biden’s speech today took the middle ground regarding criticism of the new nuclear budget.
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