'War on transparency': US agency plans crackdown on information requests

[Judi Lynn]

Trump administration criticized for trying to make it harderto obtain records of interior department dealings

Jimmy Tobi
Sat 29 Dec 2018 03.00 EST Last modified on Sat 29 Dec 2018 03.01 EST

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 country’s endangered species programs. Under the Trump administration, the department has embarked on a aggressive agenda of opening these lands to oil and gas drilling and mining while rolling back a wide variety of environmental regulations.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/29/trump-administration-interior-department-foia-changes

[mr_lebowski]

1. And we have to read about this in The UK Guardian BECAUSE???

Something like this should be in every US paper and being discussed at length on every news program.

And frankly the US news misses stories like this REGULARLY as they follow Trumps twitter distractions and other nonsense all day, every day instead.

Apart from NYT, Rachel and a handful of others the US media is fucking pissing me off soooooo much with their inattention to what's REALLY IMPORTANT for the US public to know about.

[Gumboot]

2. Exactly. So much for 'press freedom'.

They're 'free' to shill for Wall Street and AIPAC 24/7, but a huge story like this...?

Buried. It's censorship by omission.