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Friday, January 4th, 2019

‘War on transparency’: US agency plans crackdown on information requests

Author:     Jimmy Tobi
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Sat 29 Dec 2018 03.00 EST
 Link: ‘War on transparency’: US agency plans crackdown on information requests
Stephan:   One of the first thing authoritarian governments do is seek to control what information citizens can have access to -- always with the goal of limiting access as much as possible. If citizens can't get access they won't know what kind of grifting is going on, and how big it is. Well, Trump, true to that form is trying to limit what you can know, and the media is dropping the ball. I haven't seen a single story about this on American television, or in the U.S. print media. But the British press is covering it, thank goodness.

 

There has been an ‘unprecedented surge’ in requests under the Freedom of Information Act since Donald Trump took office.
Credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty

Trump administration officials took steps on Friday to crack down on transparency at one of the largest US federal agencies, proposing a slew of changes that could make it harder for the public and media to obtain records of agency dealings.

The proposal is part of an effort to grapple with what the interior department describes as an “unprecedented surge” in requests under the Freedom of Information Act (Foia), the United States’ pre-eminent open government law, since 2016 when Donald Trump took office.

Among other wide-ranging revisions to its Foia regulations, the interior department’s proposal would enable the agency to reject Foia requests that it considers “unreasonably burdensome” or too large, and it would allow the agency to impose limits on the amount of records it processes for individual requesters each month.

The department oversees hundreds of millions of acres of public land, including national parks, as well as the […]

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