The White House has pledged to release visitor records. But it does not intend to disclose the names of participants in the virtual meetings, which are the main form of interaction until the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
And while Biden has received praise for keeping the American public informed, especially when resuming daily White House press conferences, he has yet to give his own press conference.
“The steps they took are welcome, but insufficient for the moment and the need,” said Alex Howard, an open government advocate who runs the Digital Democracy Project at the Demand Progress Educational Fund, an arm of a left-wing group. . “They need to continue ‘showing their work’ by opening cabinet meetings, disseminating information and using political capital to emphasize that being ‘open by default’ is not just an option, but an obligation across the government.”
For dozens of good left and right government groups, simply not being Trump is not enough. They are now asking Biden to do more, including fixing his own problems in the transparency laws that his predecessor’s actions have shown need to be fixed. This includes responding to requests for public records more quickly; publication of opinions from the Legal Advisory Office; review the classification policies; and dissemination of records of virtual and physical meetings in other locations where the president and his advisers travel.
In recent days, these groups have sent letters to the White House, questioning practices and calling for policy changes. The center-left Brookings Institution published a new 70-page ethics report that called for more openness to restore confidence in democracy after Trump broke rule after rule.
“Now we find that the system was very weak,” said Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who is now a member of Project on Government Oversight. “And we’ve spent four years struggling tooth and nail to get all the documents and we need to [Biden] to set up new systems for the next administration to follow. “
Trump liked to speak directly to the media, but he closed access to the government in several other ways – from interrupting the White House’s daily press conference and failing to release his tax returns, to occasionally keeping his agenda a secret, to refusing to release all visitor records until forced to disclose some by court order.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy and a critic of government secrecy, said the Trump administration has even stopped publicizing the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal – a practice he plans to ask the Biden government to address. starting over. year.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has repeatedly stated that Biden and his team want to bring “truth and transparency back” to the White House.
They made progress: the government began posting exemptions granted to officials to circumvent restrictions on ex-lobbyists. (The first allows senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security, Charanya Krishnaswami, to make decisions in the same areas where she has been lobbying for her former employer, Amnesty International.)
Intelligence officials released a long-awaited report concluding that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
And the White House has been holding a briefing every day, except on weekends and holidays, since Biden opened. Psaki usually spends about an hour calling each reporter who attends Covid’s restricted meetings and has even answered some questions from the audience on twitter.
But in other areas they have fallen short. Biden has yet to give a press conference, even after meeting virtually his first foreign leader, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is tradition.
The White House did not answer questions about certain policies, including the citizens’ petition and the comment line, but said Biden is prioritizing transparency.
“President Biden pledged himself during the campaign to restore ethics and transparency to the government and, in his first few weeks in office, he took significant steps to accomplish this, including reestablishing the daily press conference, implementing comprehensive ethical guidelines for the administration and promising to regularly release visitor records again, ”said spokesman Mike Gwin.
Trump is not the only measure for Biden when it comes to transparency in governance. Obama too. On this front, the current president’s record is more difficult to compare.
On his first full day in office, Obama offered a comprehensive promise of transparency, issuing an executive order and two memos that made opening up a presumption in the agencies. Many open government advocates say Obama has fallen short of his goals on a number of fronts. But they still say Biden should have issued a presidential memo on his first day in office to outline his transparency goals.
“That kind of initial announcement at least formally set the tone for the Obama administration,” said Ryan Mulvey, a FOIA expert and political adviser to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by conservative megadonators Charles and David Koch . “We haven’t seen anything like that yet from President Biden. … it’s disappointing. “
In addition, Republican lawmakers complained that Biden rescinded a Trump executive order that required agencies to issue guidance documents that explained the policies. It is estimated that 70,000 documents have been published since 2019, according to the Liberatarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. Some agencies started to remove the documents.
In a briefing, Psaki said that agencies are not required to override information and criticized the Trump executive order for creating “unnecessary obstacles and complicated processes for agencies that wanted to bring guidance to the public”. In some cases, she said, there was a delay of a few weeks or even a few months in the disclosure of the information.
Psaki announced before his inauguration that the White House would bring back the release of his visitor records – a practice initiated by Obama eight months after his presidency, when the government regularly released and archived visitor records at its headquarters, with exceptions. Trump discontinued the practice, although after a lawsuit he agreed to allow monthly publication of visitor records for some White House offices, including the Office of Administration and Budget.
When Biden promised to bring the logs back, it was seen as a reversal of Obama’s rule. But Covid changed the basic concept of visiting the White House and changed expectations about what should be revealed.
Norm Eisen, who served as Obama’s ethics czar and led the Brookings report, where he serves as a senior member, said Biden should disclose virtual visitor records, although he understands the obstacles to publicizing online meetings, including the lack of a centralized system. and a pre-existing list of virtual visitors similar to the one that the Secret Service maintains for physical visitors. Still, he said the Biden government could make the distinction of releasing videoconferences for a certain number of participants or for certain topics.
“For the Covid era, when so much is being done remotely, there must be an accommodation for that,” he said.
The White House provides readings for some of the virtual meetings that Biden and other White House officials hold, most recently with groups pushing for gun restrictions. The information, as well as the daily schedule of the president and vice president, is usually disseminated through an email list of more than 10,000 recipients.
A White House official confirmed that he would not release virtual logs. “Virtual meetings will not be subject to disclosure – in the same way that previous administrations did not disclose telephone records – but we are planning to regularly release participant lists for face-to-face meetings at the White House,” said the official.
Biden has also not yet restored the popular citizen petition program. Two years after the start of 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 face. If a petition received more than 100,000 signatures, it would receive an official response within 30 days. More than 38 million signatures appeared in more than 473,000 petitions during Obama’s term.
The Trump administration surprised many supporters of the open government by maintaining the page. Dozens of petitions have been created, including those urging you to release your tax returns and place your business in blind custody, but many people have complained that their signatures have not been counted. The whole initiative was abandoned and has not yet returned.
The Trump administration also took a long time to activate the White House commentary line, often used by senior citizens who do not want to use the site. He abandoned everything together in the last year of his presidency after the coronavirus outbreak, according to a former Trump official. Biden did not restart it, although he does accept comments online and in the mail. Biden reads some of the letters he receives in a briefing book every night to give him a sense of the national climate, according to the White House.
“President Biden has taken the first promising steps towards transparency, including promising to release the records of visitors to the White House and the report on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said Anna Diakun, a lawyer at the Knight Institute First Amendment at the University of Columbia, who helped write a letter to the White House. “But these measures are not enough, and the Biden government has yet to reveal a broader plan to fulfill its commitment to open a government.”