[P2P-F] obama's record on transparency

[Michel Bauwens]

*Transparency Watch: A Closed
Door*<http://www.cjr.org/feature/transparency_watch_a_closed_door.php>
CURTIS BRAINARD - Columbia Journalism Review
*The cancer of secrecy creeps across the consciousness of our culture,
invading every nook and cranny. Years ago Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson
Institute, told me over dinner one night that the American obsession with
secrecy, which in science really took hold with the Manhattan Project, would
eventually cripple the country. Putting a secret stamp on something just
tells your enemies which file cabinets to look in. In contrast, he said,
look at ! lasers -- then one of the most cutting edge areas of applied
science -- "It was all done in the open literature. The developments came so
quickly, and were so numerous, they had to publish the submission date.
There might already be more advanced and newer information. The Soviets
could not keep up, and it was hard for them to know what was truly
substantive."*
In July 2009, just months after President Obama took office promising to
revolutionize government transparency, leaders of the Society of
Environmental Journalists participated in an hour-long conference call with
public-affairs staffers working for Lisa Jackson, the new head of the
Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson’s office wanted to hear what the
reporters’ gripes were when it came to access, and Christy George, then the
society’s president, and her colleagues obliged, outlining their most
persistent problems: the requirement to seek permission for interviews with
agency scientists and experts, and difficulty arranging those interviews;
the requirement to have press officers, or 'minders,” on the phone during
interviews; and the glacial pace of processing Freedom of Information Act
requests. Jackson’s assistants asked for the benefit of the doubt. 'We’re
no! t the Bush administration,” George recalled them saying. 'Those days are
left behind.”

For a while it seemed that might be true. The agency finally released a
ruling, suppressed by the administration of George W. Bush, which states
that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public welfare by contributing to
climate change, and therefore can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. And
it took smaller but appreciated measures, like opening more lines on press
calls to accommodate reporters from smaller outlets and conducting those
calls later in the day to accommodate reporters on the West Coast.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon was short-lived. One of the first signs of
distress came during a January 2010 press call to discuss the EPA’s new
budget. The agency surprised reporters by declaring that everyone on the
line except Jackson was speaking on background. When members of the Society
of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) later complained, two press officers
conceded that the on-background rule was foolish, as George reported in an
issue of group’s quarterly newsletter. Yet the agency pulled the same stunt
three months later. Then things got even worse.

Responding to President Obama’s Open Government Directive, which ordered
executive departments and agencies to 'take specific actions to implement
the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration,” the EPA
launched two websites to solicit public comments about how to fulfill that
obligation. In March 2010, SEJ weighed in with a list of nine
recommendations. Days later, during the group’s next conference call with
the agency, Adora Andy, the EPA press secretary at the time, 'scolded us for
daring to comment publicly on their transparency policies,” says Ken Ward
Jr., chairman of the group’s Freedom of Information Task Force, who
participated in the call. Moreover, Andy threatened to break off the
discussions between the EPA and the society (she never did, and the talks
are ongoing). 'I was shocked,” says Ward, a reporter at The Charleston
Gazette in West Virginia. 'Here we were talking about concerns that
journalists have about the ! lack of transparency. Then we dutifully submit
public comments about the way we thought they should interact with the
press, and EPA hammers us for it. To me, it showed that EPA just doesn’t get
transparency.”

Ward isn’t the only one feeling let down. After Obama issued a number of
directives designed to improve general transparency and access on his first
day in office, he homed in on science, the environment, and public health as
areas needing particular improvement. The focus was a no-brainer. The Bush
administration had earned a reputation for quashing the free flow of
scientific information. In what became the most infamous example of its
meddling, top NASA climate scientist James Hansen told The New York Times in
2006 that the administration had tried to stop him from speaking out about
the threat of global warming by ordering the space agency’s public affairs
staff to review his upcoming lectures, papers, and online postings. Today, a
slew of reporters complain that such gag orders are still a problem and that
transparency and access to information is often just as bad, if not worse in
some cases, than it was under the Bush administration.

A survey of science, health, and environmental journalists, conducted by CJR
and ProPublica, suggests that while his record so far is more mixed than the
anecdotal evidence from journalists indicates, President Obama has clearly
not lived up to his promise on transparency and access. As has been the case
on many fronts with Obama, the expectations among journalists that things
were going to improve were so high, a failure to live up those expectations
was almost inevitable.

We surveyed a random sample of members of SEJ, the Association of Health
Care Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and
Investigative Reporters and Editors on several issues, including the
processing of Freedom of Information Act requests, access to experts, and
overall transparency. Responses were anonymous and nearly four hundred
journalists responded out of the roughly 2,100 selected to participate.
(Survey results reflect the opinions of those who responded, and may not
reflect the opinions of the entire sample.) Those who responded were
seasoned, with nineteen years in journalism on average, including an average
of fourteen years covering science, environment, or health beats. Most
respondents were either full-time staffers or freelancers for print or
online publications.

To some extent, the survey contradicts the impressions of journalists who
complain that the situation is worse under Obama than it was under Bush.
Neither administration was rated 'strong” or 'very strong” in any category
by a majority of respondents. But overall, Obama received higher marks in
nearly every category. Thirty percent gave Obama a 'poor” or 'very poor”
grade on overall transparency and access to information, compared to 44
percent for the Bush administration. Most-42 percent-gave Obama a 'fair”
grade overall.

Likewise, Obama got better marks than Bush in four specific categories of
transparency and access: interview permissions, interview minders, online
databases, and processing foia requests. Unsurprisingly, given his directive
to make more government information available online, Obama showed the
greatest amount of improvement over Bush in the databases category, with 31
percent giving the administration a 'strong” or 'very strong” grade.
Progress in the other categories was small to insignificant, however, and in
each one most respondents gave both Obama and Bush of 'poor” or 'very poor.”
Respondents with more experience tended to have harsher opinions, giving the
Obama administration generally lower marks.

Marginal progress, however, does not an open government make, and the fact
that a third of survey participants said Obama is basically doing a poor job
overall does not bode well for the free flow of information. His
administration is clearly trying, just not quite as hard as he suggested it
would.

Felice Freyer, for instance, who chairs the Association of Health Care
Journalists’ Right to Know Committee, says the committee’s effort to fight
secrecy has followed a course nearly identical to the one described by
leaders of SEJ. In April 2010, the association began a series of meetings
and phone calls with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about improving access to federal
experts. But progress has been difficult to elusive.

Responding to Obama’s calls for openness, the FDA created a Transparency
Task Force a few months after his inauguration. The health-care association
joined ten other journalism organizations and more than two dozen individual
journalists to send a letter to the task force demanding that it end the
requirements that journalists obtain permission to conduct an interview, and
that public information officers listen to interviews. Six months later,
representatives of the association met with Jenny Backus, who became the top
press secretary at HHS, to voice some of the same concerns. Backus defended
the department’s policies requiring interview permissions and minders, but
expressed a desire to work with the press. 'She gave us her line about, ‘We
really want to help reporters, and we believe in transparency,’ ” Freyer
says. 'She even told me that HHS believed the regional media were important,
and that it wasn’t just talking to The Washington Post and The N! ew York
Times. But she also promised us a list of all the media contacts in HHS, and
then never delivered. She talked about having us come to meet with the
department’s pubic information officer at this convention in September. She
said she’d look into it, and then never did. So she never really followed up
on most of what she promised.”

Such neglect has real-world consequences. Around the same time, Freyer was
working on a story for The Providence Journal, where she’s been the medical
reporter since 1989. Ten percent of the obstetrician-gynecologists in Rhode
Island had admitted to inserting a type of intrauterine device (iud), a form
of birth control, into hundreds of women, which had not been approved by the
FDA for use in the United States and which they’d obtained illegally at
discount prices from foreign sources. The FDA launched an investigation,
about which Freyer had questions. Unsure which press officer to approach,
she filled out the 'Timely Response E-mail Form” on the agency’s website.
Several hours passed with no response, so she called and spoke with a press
officer. He suggested that Freyer e-mail her questions to him, which she
did. Nothing. When she called again two days later, the press officer said
he was waiting for a response from his superiors. He suggested that she
resubmi! t her questions for a third time. She did, to no effect. Several
more days passed and she sent yet another e-mail asking if she could expect
answers, and if not, why. 'At this point, all we can say is that the FDA is
continuing to look into these cases,” the press officer replied.

Freyer recounted the saga in an online article for the AHCJ:

I published my story, stating that the FDA had declined to answer any
questions. Four days later, the FDA posted a ‘consumer update’ on its
website referring to the Rhode Island controversy and warning consumers
against iuds. . . . It turned out the fda’s position was not the ‘No
comment’ I received. The agency had quite a lot to say on the matter, but
had declined to say it in the newspaper serving the hundreds of women
throughout Rhode Island who were distressed and frightened by the IUD
incident. They deserved better from the agency that was supposed to be
protecting them.

Freyer e-mailed the press officer with whom she’d corresponded as well as
the fda’s chief press officer to ask what had happened. When neither
replied, she e-mailed Backus at HHS, who finally got the FDA to apologize
for its unresponsiveness and promise to do better. Backus was replaced
shortly thereafter, however. As Freyer put it, the association had to 'start
all over again,” and transparency problems have continued under Backus’s
successor, Richard Sorian.

At the beginning of 2011, for instance, the FDA stunned reporters while
announcing changes to its medical-device approval process. The announcement
was under embargo and the agency’s press officers barred journalists seeking
outside comment from sharing information about the changes with experts
until the embargo lifted. The association wrote a letter of protest,
pointing out that the prohibition 'rewrote a long-standing compact between
reporters and various public and scientific organizations,” which typically
allows reporters to share embargoed material with sources while working on
their stories. Members of the Right to Know Committee pressed the matter,
and in June the FDA reversed course. Around the same time, HHS also finally
released the list of senior media officials in each of its divisions, which
the association had been requesting for about a year.

Despite these victories, and the launch of what will be ongoing quarterly
conversations with hhs’s public affairs staff, Freyer is unsure how much
progress has been made. 'The big issue is that reporters who’ve been at this
for a while remember being able to call up and talk to the people who
actually knew what was going on, not just spokespeople, and that’s become
increasingly difficult,” she says. 'So I don’t see milestones here. It’s
been an ongoing problem that we’re chipping away at.”

The Obama administration’s transparency problem not only affects access to
federal scientists and highly politicized environmental and medical science.
It’s also about access to government documents and databases, and basic
research. In 2006, allegations emerged that an electron microscopy research
group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which receives millions
of dollars a year from the Department of Energy, had fabricated data.
Suspecting lax oversight, freelance reporter Eugenie Samuel Reich, now a
contributing correspondent for the journal Nature, filed a FOIA request for
files related to the ensuing investigation, which had been initiated and
organized by the lab itself. The Department of Energy rejected the request,
so Reich bided her time until the 2008 presidential election ushered in a
new administration. When Obama made his pledge about openness and then
appointed Steven Chu and a number of other 'scientists with excellent
reputations” to the! department, she believed there would be a 'change of
heart.” There wasn’t. Reich filed a lawsuit under the FOIA in 2009, which a
federal district judge in Boston finally dismissed in April of this year, to
her amazement.

'This record had nothing to do with national security-not even the
government claims it does-so it is a very good test case of how other,
non-security-related records are being handled,” Reich says. 'The
government’s court filings have been relentless and extraordinary, with
numerous deliberate references to the need for privacy, confidentiality, and
respecting the proprietary rights of government contractors.”

Some of President Obama’s most vociferous critics on the transparency front
will grudgingly concede, as our survey seemed to suggest, that his
administration has made marginal progress. 'A lot of colleagues would stone
me for saying this, but it actually has gotten better,” says Joe Davis, the
director of the SEJ’s Freedom of Information Project. 'And I think one of
the most illustrative cases in point is the one about coal ash.” In December
2008, a coal-ash containment pond at a power plant in Tennessee burst,
spreading toxic waste across hundreds of acres and dozens of homes. The
spill was the last skirmish in the society’s long battle over transparency
and access with the Bush EPA, which took eleven days to release the results
of its first tests of the sludge. An agency official under the new Obama
administration promised to do better, but in June 2009, SEJ accused the EPA
of 'hiding” a list of high-hazard, coal-ash impoundments across the
country,! some of which posed potential threats to residential communities.
At first, the agency echoed the post-September 11 Bush line about guarding
the information for national security reasons. 'Terrorists were less of a
threat than a good rainstorm, which might sweep away any of those
impoundments,” Davis says. 'But eventually they released the list, so we
have that information and the communities [near the impoundments] know about
them, and maybe safety measures will be put in place. That information would
not have come out under the Bush administration. That’s the difference.
However, I will also say in my next breath that the Obama administration
hasn’t lived up to its promises. They raised our expectations so high and
the distance we’ve come is disappointingly short.”

One thing that helped raise those expectations was the memo that President
Obama sent to John Holdren, then awaiting confirmation as director of the
White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in March 2009.
It directed him to draft a plan to improve scientific integrity throughout
the executive branch. A key provision was the development of a public
communications plan. Obama gave Holdren 120 days to complete the assignment.
Now, more than two years later, the plan is still not in place. In August
2010, more than a year after they were due, the Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility-a nonprofit alliance of local, state, and
federal natural resource professionals-submitted a FOIA request to Holdren’s
office for a copy of the recommendations and related policy documents. After
two months passed with nothing from OSTP, the group sued.

Finally, last December, Holdren released a memo providing guidance to
departments and agencies about how to improve scientific integrity and
openness. The document immediately drew criticism from transparency
watchdogs for 'legitimizing,” as the SEJ put it, interview permissions and
minders. A few days later, OSTP released the related policy
documents-meeting notes, progress reports, congressional testimony-that the
public employees group had requested. They were heavily redacted, but in the
snippets that weren’t SEJ’s Joe Davis saw the fingerprints of a suspect he
believes has played a key role in thwarting progress toward openness and
access over multiple administrations: the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB), which has the power to review and approve programs, policies, and
procedures throughout the executive branch.

The documents that OSTP released revealed that, in fact, Holdren and company
had sent their transparency recommendations to OMB by June 2009, on schedule
to meet Obama’s original deadline, and that the effort foundered there. More
than a year later, the two offices were still trying to settle on a final
draft of the recommendations, which weren’t released until December 2010,
more than seventeen months behind schedule. Last May, Holdren once again
extended the deadline for departments and agencies to submit draft policies,
which were due around the time this article went to press.

'omb, an agency with very little in-house scientific expertise, has been
monkeying with science for a very long time, and asserting authority over
the science process in the federal government,” Davis says. 'It provides an
ideal mechanism for interference.”

There are other mechanisms. Even in departments and agencies with special
expertise in the sciences, there is often an entrenched corps of civil
servants that resists transparency and access-often as a result of turf
battles and a sense that bosses, and their edicts, come and go-and survives
from one administration in the other. New appointments often do nothing to
help matters. Numerous reporters pointed out that the top press officers at
departments and agencies often are recruited from a president’s campaign
staff, with disastrous results. 'They want to run government agencies like
they’re political campaigns and they don’t seem to understand that there
ought to be a difference,” says SEJ’s Ken Ward Jr. 'All the information that
EPA has about its inspections, its enforcement, its science-that belongs to
the public.”

Changing the culture of secrecy is a lot harder than redecorating the Oval
Office. Some watchdogs believe that transparency and access have steadily
diminished since the 1970s, as successive administrations clamped down more
tightly, and with a greater sophistication, on the free flow of information
to the public. Indeed, many veteran reporters I spoke to think that the very
establishment of press policies and guidelines, not unlike those that Obama
called for, are what led to problems in the first place. These edicts were
supposed to open and streamline communication between government and the
press, but by codifying practices such as the dreaded interview permissions
and minders, they actually gave government a mechanism to block journalists
when it was politically pragmatic to do so. In early August, for example,
the EPA finally released its scientific integrity proposal, as per John
Holdren’s instruction. But it did exactly what transparency watchdogs
feared: it encour! aged scientists to interact with the press, but required
that they inform their superiors about those interactions and instructed
public affairs staff to 'attend interviews,” thereby formalizing the
permissions and minders policy that journalists complain about.

Contrary to the notion that Obama would, as he promised, usher in a sea
change in terms of transparency, there is a case to be made that, when it
comes to controlling information via press policies, Obama is the savviest
practitioner ever. Consider his adroit use of digital media as a defining
example. His Open Government Directive made an unprecedented amount of
federal scientific data available online. His administration touts that
accomplishment as proof of transparency, but critics say that is
disingenuous. In practice, the databases demonstrate how the Obama
administration treats communication as a one-way street. Data, after all,
rarely speak for themselves and reporters want, more than anything, to talk
to the officials who collected and analyzed them. As Felice Freyer found out
when she attempted to speak with the FDA about its investigation of
unapproved intrauterine devices, however, the administration often prefers
to publish statements online, or via social media! , than make them directly
available to journalists. It’s a duplicitous game that allows Obama to claim
that his administration is living up to its promises. Yet almost any science
reporter in the country will tell you that nothing could be further from the
truth, and that even if the Office of Science and Technology Policy produces
a plan for scientific integrity and transparency, it could make matters
worse, not better.

Reporters on the science beat may have to accept that the days of easy
access are gone-and plenty of them already do. Groups like the Society of
Environmental Journalists and the Association of Health Care Journalists are
still pushing for an end to interview permissions and minders, as well they
should. But even their most optimistic members merely cross their fingers,
knowing that if they held their breath, they’d surely expire.

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