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“On January 10, 2018 the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) [released] Changing the Digital Climate: How Climate Change Web Content is Being Censored Under the Trump Administration, the third installment of EDGI’s series of reports evaluating the environmental impacts of the first year of the Trump administration. Changing the Digital Climate draws on the …
“Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the transcript of Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee [This testimony is from August 22, 2017] with the support of committee Democrats. Simpson is the co-founder of Fusion GPS. “After speaking with majority and minority committee staff for 10 hours, Glenn Simpson requested …
“The federal government has made significant strides towards making vast amounts of government data freely available to the public, and businesses, researchers, civil society groups, journalists, and many others have put open data to good use. However, recent events suggest that some open government data may be at risk. For example, in February 2017, the …
Executive branch agencies don’t uniformly track claims or report details of settlements paid out via a federal fund – “Requests for information about the broad scope and total cost of sexual harassment settlements from the Treasury Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and more than a dozen federal agencies yielded no clear answers. An administration …
MotherJones: 2017 Was a Big Year for Scrubbing Science from Government Websites. Here’s the List. Are the changes routine, rebranding, or censorship? “Moments after President Donald Trump took the oath of office last January, nearly all references to climate change disappeared from the White House official website. A page detailing former President Barack Obama’s plans to …
The Washington Post: “Nearly a year into his takeover of Washington, President Trump has made a significant down payment on his campaign pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy, a shift long sought by conservatives that could eventually bring the workforce down to levels not seen in decades. By the end of September, all Cabinet departments …
Via LLRX – Legislation Alert: Worrisome Changes to Government Publications Are Possible Peggy Roebuck Jarrett writes about an issue that is significant to law librarians, federal documents librarians, and to the public. The subject is a draft House bill that proposes “to amend title 44, United States Code, to reform the organization, authorities, and programs …
POGO – “Congress is considering a simple but important step in overseeing federal agencies. A recently introduced bill would require a one-stop, easy-to-use, online location for all congressionally mandated reports. This may put an end to the world of lost and hidden government reports. Each year, Congress mandates that federal agencies report on programs, laws, …
The U.S. Has Way Too Many Secrets, December 11, 2017 by The Archive. This article originally appeared in Bloomberg. “A Q&A with Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, on the historical value of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the sins of Julian Assange, and what national secrets are really worth keeping. How much does it …
Politico: “Senate Republicans have declared war on the American Bar Association. Since 1953, the venerable legal organization has played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in assessing judicial nominees and their fitness to serve on the bench.But with the ABA emerging as a major stumbling block in President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the courts, the GOP …
[November 30, 2017– DOJ]: “OIP [Office of Information Policy] published updated guidance for agency FOIA websites. This new guidance, Agency FOIA Websites 2.0, encourages agencies to review their FOIA websites to ensure they contain essential resources, and are informative and user-friendly. While the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 1996 required agencies to use …
“Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director for the ACLU, delivered the tenth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 17, 2017, entitled “Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload.” Following is a …
