The White House is committed to releasing visitor files. But it does not intend to disclose the names of the participants in virtual meetings, which is the primary way of interacting until the coronavirus pandemic eases.
And although Biden has received honors for keeping the American public informed, mainly by resuming daily press releases in the White House, he has not yet held his own press conference.
“The steps they have taken are welcome, but insufficient for the moment and the need,” said Alex Howard, a public advocate leading the Digital Democracy Project at the Demand Progress Educational Fund, an arm of a left-wing party. group. “They must continue to show ‘their work’ by opening cabinet meetings, disclosing information and using political capital to emphasize that ‘open by default’ is not just an option but an obligation in the government.”
For dozens of good government groups left and right, it is not enough to simply be Trump. They call on Biden to do more, including resolving the issues in transparency laws that need to be resolved by his predecessor’s actions. These include faster response to public records requests; issuing advice of the Office of Legal Advisers; review of classification policies; and the release of logs of virtual meetings and physical meetings at other locations where the president and his assistants travel.
Over the past few days, the groups have been sending letters to the White House questioning practices and asking for policy changes. The center-left Brookings Institution has released a new 70-page ethics report calling for more openness to restore confidence in democracy after Trump broke the norm to the norm.
“We have now learned that the system was too weak,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics. He is now a fellow member of the government oversight project. ‘And we’ve been fighting tooth and nail for four years to get the documents we need. [Biden] to set up new systems so that the next administration will follow it. ”
Trump wanted to speak directly to the media, but blocked access to government in numerous other ways – from halting the White House’s daily personal information session and failing to release his tax returns, to sometimes keeping his schedule secret, to refuse to release all visitor files to forced to release some under a court order.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrety and a critic of government secrecy, said the Trump administration had even stopped announcing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – a practice he plans to crack down on. Ask Biden government to start over again. year.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has repeatedly said that Biden and his staff want to bring ‘truth and transparency’ back to the White House.
They have made progress: the administration has begun issuing exemptions to officials to circumvent restrictions on former lobbyists. (The first enables Charanya Krishnaswami, senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security, to make decisions about the same areas in which she worked for her former employer, Amnesty International.)
Intelligence officials released a long-awaited report in which they concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
And the White House has held an information session every day, except weekends and holidays since Biden was inaugurated. Psaki usually spends about an hour appealing to every reporter who attends and does the Covid restricted briefings even answer some questions from the public on Twitter.
But in other areas it falls short. Biden has yet to hold a news conference, even after meeting virtually with his first foreign leader, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is tradition.
The White House did not respond to questions about certain policies, including the citizen petition and the comments, but said Biden makes transparency a priority.
“During the campaign, President Biden committed himself to restoring ethics and transparency to the government, and in his first weeks in office, he took important steps to achieve this, including by re – establishing daily press briefing, establish comprehensive ethical guidelines for the government, and promise to release visitor files regularly on a regular basis, ”said Mike Gwin, spokesman.
Trump is not the only measure for Biden in terms of transparency in government. Obama too. And up front, the current president’s record is harder to compare.
On his first full day in office, Obama offered a comprehensive promise of transparency and issued an executive order and two memoranda that made openness the suspicion at agencies. Many public advocates say Obama has fallen short of his goals in many areas. But they still say Biden should have issued a presidential memorandum on his first day of office to set out his transparency goals.
“This kind of initial announcement at least sets the tone on paper for the Obama administration,” said Ryan Mulvey, a FOIA expert and policy adviser at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a nonprofit founded by conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch, said. “We have never seen anything like it from President Biden. … It’s disappointing. ”
In addition, Republican lawmakers have complained that Biden has revoked an executive order from Trump instructing agencies to post clues explaining the policy. An estimated 70,000 documents have been posted since 2019, according to the Liberatarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. Some agencies have begun to take down the documents.
At a briefing, Psaki said agencies do not need to take information down and criticized the Trump executive order for creating “unnecessary hurdles and cumbersome processes for agencies that wanted guidance from the public.” In some cases, the information was delayed by a few weeks or even a few months, she said.
Prior to the inauguration, Psaki announced that the White House would return the disclosure of its visitor files – a practice that Obama began eight months into his presidency, when the government would regularly release and archive visitor files for its core offices, with one exception. Trump stopped the practice, though after a lawsuit he agreed to allow monthly visitor files for some offices in the White House, including the Office of Management and Budget.
When Biden promised to bring the stumps back, it was seen as a return to the Obama norm. But Covid changed the basic concept of visiting the White House and changing expectations about what should be revealed.
Norm Eisen, who served as Obama’s ethical tsar and was at the helm of the Brookings report, where he serves as a senior fellow, said Biden should disclose virtual logs, although he understands the obstacles to announce online meetings, including the lack of a centralized, pre-existing list of virtual visitors similar to the one that maintains secret service for physical visitors. Still, he said the government in Biden could make the distinction of releasing video meetings for a certain number of participants or for certain topics.
“For the Covid era when so much is being done remotely, there needs to be accommodation for it,” he said.
The White House does offer lectures on some of the virtual meetings that Biden and other White House officials are hosting, recently with groups campaigning for arms restrictions. The information, such as the daily schedule of the president and vice president, is usually disseminated through an email list with more than 10,000 recipients.
A White House official has confirmed he will not release virtual logs. “Virtual meetings will not be subject to release – in the same way that previous administrations did not release telephone logs, but we plan to regularly release the participant lists for personal meetings in the White House,” the official said.
Biden has also not yet restored the popular petition program for citizens. Two years after his term, Obama launched the We the People page on the White House website to give the public a voice on what issues he should address. If a petition receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will respond officially within 30 days. More than 38 million signatures appeared on more than 473,000 petitions during Obama’s term.
The Trump administration surprised many public prosecutors by keeping the page. Dozens of petitions have been created, including those urging him to release his tax returns and place his businesses in a blind trust, but many people complain that their signatures are not counted. The whole initiative has finally been abandoned and has yet to return.
The Trump administration has also been slow to activate the White House comment line, which is often used by senior citizens who do not want to use the site. According to a former Trump official, all of this was abandoned in the last year of his presidency following the outbreak of the coronavirus. Biden did not start it again, although he accepted comments online and by email. According to the White House, Biden reads some of the letters he receives every night in an information book to give him a sense of the national mood.
“President Biden has taken promising first steps towards transparency, including by promising to release White House visitors’ files and the report on the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said Anna Diakun, a Knight staff lawyer First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said helped compile a letter to the White House. “But these steps are not enough, and the Biden government has not yet announced a broader plan to satisfy its commitment to an open government.”