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Fwd: Government Messing Around With Public Information



--- Paul Nielson <p.nielson@home.com> wrote:
> Date:         Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:52:20 -0700
> Reply-to: Discussion of Government Document Issues
> <GOVDOC-L@lists.psu.edu>
> From: Paul Nielson <p.nielson@home.com>
> Subject:      Government Messing Around With Public
> Information
> To: GOVDOC-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
>
>
> From: OMB Watcher Online Vol. 2 No. 13
>
> Welcome to the OMB Watcher Online.  The Watcher can
> also be
> found at
> http://www.ombwatch.org/ombwatcher/current.html
>
>
> Over the last several months, government information
> has been becoming more
> and more elusive. It's happened at the Health Care
> Financing Administration
> (HCFA), the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and
> the Department of Defense
> (DoD). And although some of these problems have been
> brought to the
> attention of both the National Archives and OMB, it
> is not clear that either
> will take any actions against the agencies involved.
> Indeed, to do so would
> expose the appalling lack of policy on these matters
> and both agencies'
> failures to come to terms with electronic messages
> and records and to
> provide clear guidance to agencies. Below is a list
> of some of the
> disappearing acts now playing at government
> agencies. Details on the efforts
> behind the magic are available on OMB Watch's
> Information Policy pages.
>
> HHS - June 2001 Thomas Scully, the new head of the
> HCFA, announced an agency
> plan to release more information about nursing
> homes, health maintenance
> organizations and other providers that serve
> Medicare recipients. Shortly
> thereafter an agency spokesman insisted there was no
> such plan, and Health
> and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson
> said the issue was being
> addressed but did not want anyone to think the idea
> involved "ratings."
>
> FEC - May 2001 The FEC removed from the public
> record all the files of an
> investigation of coordinated campaign activity
> between the AFL-CIO and the
> Democratic Party. The investigation had been dropped
> last year and the
> records had undergone lengthy staff review to cull
> out confidential
> materials. In May, the FEC made 6,024 pages public
> but four days later,
> without giving any public notice or explanation,
> pulled all the records from
> public access. According to George Lardner of the
> Washington Post, the
> Democratic National Committee's (DNC) general
> counsel, Joseph E. Sandler,
> said the withdrawal was prompted by vigorous
> complaints from the DNC and the
> AFL-CIO and their belief that some of the material
> is exempt from disclosure
> under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In a
> follow-up story on June
> 21, Lardner wrote that internal FEC papers obtained
> by the Washington Post
> through FOIA reveal that the Commission has rejected
> demands by the DNC and
> the AFL-CIO to suppress the vast majority of the
> records of the
> investigation. The FEC is considering narrower
> requests to shield some
> records that the DNC claims would reveal the Party's
> methods for identifying
> and getting out the Democratic vote.
>
> Defense Dept. - June 2001 According to an Associated
> Press report in early
> June, the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector
> General's Office, the
> Pentagon agency charged with rooting out fraud,
> destroyed documents and
> substituted fakes to win a passing grade in an audit
> of its own operations,
> according to an internal inquiry. The document
> destruction cost the
> government thousands of dollars last year.
>
> The archive of messages for a DoD webmasters list
> were destroyed --
> apparently without a records schedule having been
> created for the list and
> its messages, and certainly without the permission
> of the National Archives.
> Making the destruction even more egregious is the
> fact that this archive of
> messages had been requested under FOIA and the
> request denied. A Wed, May
> 23, 2001 posting raises legitimate concerns about
> liability, resources and
> exposure of vulnerabilities, but, in the end, the
> decision was made that "in
> assessing risks and benefits, it appears that
> retaining the archive is or
> will become more of a liability than a benefit,
> despite its value to
> individual members. Thus, we have come to the
> difficult decision that the
> archive needs to be shutdown, all postings deleted,
> and all backups of those
> archives destroyed." And so they were.
>
> And a recent struggle for information between the
> National Archives and the
> Bush administration involves the memos and papers of
> former president Ronald
> Reagan. A June 7 AP story and a June 10, 2001
> Washington Post story by
> George Lardner revealed that the Bush administration
> is holding up release
> of 68,000 pages of presidential records that offer
> an insider's view of how
> decisions were made in the Reagan White House. The
> Presidential Records Act
> of 1978 was enacted following Watergate and former
> President Nixon's attempt
> to hold on to his papers and tape recordings. Nixon
> said they were personal
> property. The act made presidential records
> government property, beginning
> with President Reagan's.
>
> The law also put a 12-year hold on a category of
> records containing
> "confidential communications requesting or
> submitting advice between the
> president and his advisers, or between such
> advisers." The confidential
> memos, letters and briefing papers passed among
> Ronald Reagan and his top
> advisers were to have come out in January of this
> year. However, two days
> before President Reagan left office, he issued an
> executive order that gave
> him as "former president" and "the incumbent
> president" in twelve-year's
> time the right to take 30 days to review these
> papers and to invoke
> executive privilege for any and all of the
> documents. In late February, the
> National Archives gave the White House the 30-day
> notice. At the end of the
> 30 days, the White House ordered a 90-day extension
> - until June 21. On June
> 6, the White House Counsel ordered another 10-week
> delay - until August 31.
> The delays are to permit the President to decide
> whether to invoke "a
> constitutionally based privilege or take other
> appropriate action."
>
> Legally, the documents can no longer be withheld by
> provisions in either the
> Presidential Records Act or the Freedom of
> Information Act, but Reagan's
> executive order is being used to nullify the
> Presidential Records Act.
>
> According to the AP, White House officials say the
> Reagan documents are the
> first that would have been released under a
> presidential records law passed
> in 1978. They say care must be taken to make sure
> it's done right. But
> historians think President Bush is worried about
> what some of his top aides
> might have written when they worked for Reagan in
> the 1980s. As the story
> notes, Secretary of State Colin Powell was on
> Reagan's national security
> team; Budget Director Mitchell Daniels Jr. was
> Reagan's political director;
> and Chief White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was
> on Reagan's Council of
> Economic Advisers. White House chief of staff Andrew
> Card, Interior
> Secretary Gale Norton and Ken Dam, nominated for the
> No. 2 job at Treasury,
> all also worked for Reagan. And George Herbert
> Walker Bush was Reagan's Vice
> President.
>
>
>
>
> The OMB Watcher Online is a publication of OMB
> Watch, 1742 Connecticut
> Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20009; (202) 234-8494;
> (202) 234-8584 fax
> Please send comments and questions to
ombwatcher@ombwatch.org


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