My post yesterday wondering aloud whether the Obama administration was walking away from its transparency commitments was slightly premature. Memoranda were being issued/reported on as I wrote, and this morning’s Washington Post describes some of the technical glitches that befuddled White House staff on day one. The texts of the executive orders President Obama signed yesterday are now online, but his memoranda on transparency aren’t yet. Helpfully, they’ve been posted by the Sunlight Foundation.
But I think my post was sound in the main, because I was looking for actual pro-transparency deeds from the new administration, and they haven’t materialized. I appreciate the sentiments voiced in these documents, but don’t find myself wholly impressed with the actual transparency measures the White House has taken.
What I’m hearing is the transparency dog that didn’t bark: The Obama team set a
great precedent in the transition with the Seat at the Table program, but there’s no sign that such a thing will be implemented in the White House. Why not?
We can expect an “Open Government Directive” within 120 days and new guidelines for the Freedom of Information Act, but I would have appreciated seeing President Obama’s commitment to openness illustrated the best way possible: through the direct and immediate commitment of his own White House operation.
The White House will not be run as openly as the transition was. The agencies, already predisposed against transparency, will see this as a sign of weak commitment and will whittle away even more fiercely at the good sentiments President Obama’s expressed in his transparency memoranda.
(“Thanks for inviting me!” said the skunk at the garden party.)
The new Whitehouse.gov went live shortly after Barack Obama became president yesterday. It has much of the look and feel of his transition Web site, Change.gov.
Among the featured items on the homepage today (they will change regularly, of course) is the site itself and the new administration’s commitment to transparency. However, the actual terms of that commitment come up pretty anemic.
In a post on the White House blog, Director of New Media Macon Phillips says:
President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Executive orders and proclamations? Information about senior leadership and the President’s priorities? That’s not breaking any new ground on transparency.
The transition’s “Seat at the Table” program required “any documents from official meetings with outside organizations [to] be posted on our website for people to review and comment on.”
The decision to port this practice over to the White House has either not been made, or has been decided against. Given that meetings are already happening, it will be a tough policy to implement if it is not implemented right away.
There is an “Office of Public Liaison” (and intergovernmental affairs) on the Whitehouse.gov site, but it’s nothing more than an email submission form at this point. “More ways for you to interact” are promised.
Words aren’t deeds, and it’s already too late to demonstrate a day-one commitment to transparency. Let’s hope the first steps of the new administration are not steps away from the important transparency precedents set by the transition.
Update: As I wrote this post, news stories were coming out about new executive orders coming out dealing with ethics and transparency. Though I haven’t been able to find them yet – hint hint, Whitehouse.gov – the change to the interpretation of FOIA sound like a welcome, if modest, step in the right direction.
The memo from John Podesta articulating the transition’s “‘Seat at the Table’ Transparency Policy” is redacted. Redactions are kind of a red flag to transparency fiends, but they’re probably appropriate (a name, an email address).
The overall “Seat at the Table” program is a decent step forward. You can get a look at the documents submitted to the transition, search them (somewhat clumsily – and not more often than once every 15 seconds), and comment on them.
So carry on transparently, Change.gov!
Jesse Walker has a terrific feature story looking “Beyond the Fairness Doctrine” in this month’s issue of Reason magazine. I highly recommend it. It’s an in-depth exploration of what an Obama Administration means for the future of tech and media policy. Walker rightly opens the piece by noting that “The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president.” The danger, however, is that an Obama FCC will still pursue a variety of onerous regulatory objectives that could do a great deal of damage to markets and free speech.
Walker touches upon the various issues that will likely be a priority for an Obama Administration and the Left-leaning media reformistas like Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, and New America Foundation. Those policy issues include: net neutrality, “localism” mandates and increased “community oversight” regulations, media ownership rules, minority ownership requirements, increased merger meddling, spectrum policy, and other new “public interest” obligations.
Of course, as Walker also correctly points out, it is difficult to see how things could get much worse than they have been under Bush Administration’s FCC and the leadership of Chairman Kevin Martin. Walker was kind enough to quote my thoughts on this point: “Martin is the most regulatory Republican FCC Chairman in decades,” I told him. “He wants to control speech and will use whatever tools he has to get there.”
I stand by those words, but I am also aware that things could get worse — much worse — under a Democratic FCC influenced by radical Leftist activists like Free Press. Indeed, in our new book A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I inventory the many looming threats to media and technology freedom that exist today and show how most of them arise from the Left. As Walker notes in his article, however, it is unlikely that a re-empowered Democratic FCC would come right out of the gates with the same sort of command-and-control approaches they’ve employed in the past. And we’ll still have to worry about some right-of-center lawmakers and regulatory joining some of these misguided campaigns. “The real danger,” Walker concludes in his piece, “is more subtle and more mundane. It’s a bipartisan bureaucracy slowly, steadily increasing its power.” Make sure to read Jesse’s entire piece. Great stuff.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.