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The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
[This post is adapted from our forthcoming book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.]
Today we want to clarify something important about preserving government information. There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age.
When a new president is inaugurated, one expects new policies. The number of changes and the speed of change may vary for different administrations, but we expect that every administration will be different in some ways from its predecessor. After all, that is part of the reason we have elections. Also, information that the government publishes is updated all the time, not just when administrations change. Laws and regulations are added and amended and rescinded, new economic and environmental and census data are collected and published, government recommendations to the public (like the Department of Agriculture’s “food pyramid” guidance) are revised.
Changes in government information are normal in a democracy.
Because change is normal, it is essential to preserve government information – even “non-current” and “out of date” information – in order to document those changes. This is not a new idea, but a long-accepted principle of democracy. Citizens need a record of what a government’s stated values were and when they changed, what actions it took and when it took them, what data it collected and generated at specific points in time, and so forth. It is important to preserve even information that later proves to be inaccurate in order to document what the government knew and when it knew it.
Because published government information is the evidence for a democracy, its preservation is essential.
In the era in which government information was published in paper formats, preservation of that information relied on libraries. The information was distributed to FDLP libraries based on the needs of the communities that those libraries served. Beginning in 1962, Regional FDLs received and retained all the paper publications in the FDLP system. When new information superseded or replaced old information, the old information was not erased or discarded; it was preserved in Regional FDLs and in every FDL whose community valued that older information. In the print era, it was taken for granted that, once government information was released to the public, it would not be withdrawn or altered or lost.1
In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.
Some digital government information is actively preserved by GPO, NARA, and the Library of Congress. Some government-collected data are preserved by law or by tradition. But the laws that allow this are weak and government preservation of government information suffers from large gaps. Non-government projects (notably the Internet Archive and the End-of-Term Archive) use web harvesting to attempt to acquire and store government information, but these projects are, by their nature, incomplete and their long-term guarantees of access are fragile. As a result of all this, the public can no longer assume that any given piece of government information will not be withdrawn or altered or lost.
The early actions of the incoming Trump administration (as well as the actions of the first Trump administration) have brought the vulnerability of digital information to the public’s attention (see our previous post “Federal information scrubbing has begun”) and the public is rightfully worried. That vulnerability is, however, not limited to this administration. Digital government information was being lost before President Trump.
The current crisis of imminent loss of information exists not only because government information is being changed, but because it is being erased. The erasure is possible because of the gaps in the current preservation infrastructure.
The scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented and certainly requires immediate short-term action. But librarians and archivists and citizens should use this current crisis to demand more than short-term solutions. A new distributed digital preservation infrastructure is needed for digital government information.
James A. Jacobs
James R. Jacobs
- Even when information was withdrawn for some reason, there was a record of the withdrawals. (See this spreadsheet listing withdrawn documents 1981 – 2018, collated from GPO’s no-longer published “Administrative Notes” newsletter.) ↵
Inside the Fall of the CDC
Following on the heals of yesterday’s Politico piece documenting Political Interference in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), today ProPublica released a story “Inside the Fall of the CDC” which tells the more complete tale of how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, long the gold standard in the world on public health, could crumble in the face of “unprecedented political interference in public health policy, and the capitulations of some of the world’s top public health leaders.” This is a sad story made all the more disturbing as this same playbook is being followed across many executive branch agencies. The Trump administration is “appropriating a public enterprise and making it into an agent of propaganda for a political regime,” one CDC scientist said in an interview as events unfolded. “It’s mind-boggling in the totality of ambition to so deeply undermine what’s so vitally important to the public.”
When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.
With more than 216,000 people dead this year, most Americans know the low points of the current chapter already. A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity.
How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far?
ProPublica obtained hundreds of emails and other internal government documents and interviewed more than 30 CDC employees, contractors and Trump administration officials who witnessed or were involved in key moments of the crisis. Although news organizations around the world have chronicled the CDC’s stumbles in real time, ProPublica’s reporting affords the most comprehensive inside look at the escalating tensions, paranoia and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. And it sheds new light on the botched COVID-19 tests, the unprecedented political interference in public health policy, and the capitulations of some of the world’s top public health leaders.
Origins of the COVID19 Virus
Lately the President and Secretary Pompeo are arguing in the media that China purposely created the COVID19 as a weapon. There are no formal statements at the Whitehouse or State Department websites. The DNI has issued a statement at its website, and GPO has agreed to catalog the news release for its historical value. Times’ journalists reported that the Administration’s strategy is to blame China as a political strategy to divert the public’s attention from its handling of COVID19 outbreak in the U.S.
Recently the Trump Says China May Be ‘Knowingly Responsible’ for Virus By Mario Parker April 18, 2020, 4:10 PM PDT Updated on April 20, 2020, 1:15 AM PDT
‘President Donald Trump raised the prospect that China deliberately caused the Covid-19 outbreak that’s killed over 39,000 Americans and said there should be consequences if the country is found to be “knowingly responsible.”‘
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-18/trump-suggests-china-may-be-knowingly-responsible-for-virus
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, ODNI News Release No. 11-20, April 30, 2020 Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19 WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence today issued the following Intelligence Community (IC) statement:
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19
G.O.P. Aiming To Make China The Scapegoat: [Foreign Desk] Martin, Jonathan; Haberman, Maggie. New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]19 Apr 2020: A.1.
“The strategy could not be clearer: From the Republican lawmakers blanketing Fox News to new ads from President Trump’s super PAC to the biting criticism on Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter feed, the G.O.P. is attempting to divert attention from the administration’s heavily criticized response to the coronavirus by pinning the blame on China. With the death toll from the pandemic already surpassing 34,000 Americans and unemployment soaring to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/politics/trump-china-virus.html
Trump to replace Health Inspector General
Trump to replace Health Inspector General who criticized coronavirus response, BY GRACE SEGERS, MAY 2, 2020 / 4:47 PM / CBS NEWS
‘President Trump announced his intent to nominate a new inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), weeks after acting inspector general Christi Grimm released a report detailing shortages of testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals responding to the coronavirus pandemic… Mr. Trump criticized Grimm in early April, calling the findings in her report “wrong.”‘
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-christi-grimm-trump-to-replace-health-inspector-general-who-criticized-coronavirus-response/
Hospital Experiences Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results of a National Pulse Survey March 23-27, 2020 WHAT WE FOUND Hospitals reported that their most significant challenges centered on testing and caring for patients with COVID-19 and keeping staff safe. Hospitals said that severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff. They also reported that widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) put staff and patients at risk. In addition, hospitals said that they were not always able to maintain adequate staffing levels or to offer staff adequate support.
https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-20-00300.asp?utm_source=web&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=covid-19-hospital-survey-04-06-2020
Report: https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-20-00300.pdf
The U.S Government Offices has cataloged and made available to the public. https://permanent.fdlp.gov/gpo135372/oei-06-20-00300.pdf
co-published on govdoc-l and freegovinfo.info.
Mapping the Trump administration’s corruption across the executive branch
One of the things that most scares me about the current administration is the terrible — and possibly long-term — erosive effect it is having on the entire executive branch. One of the best books to document this systemic tragedy is Michael Lewis’ Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy (many libraries have access to it via Overdrive so check your local public library. They’re still working hard even during the pandemic!)
If you can’t get your hands on Lewis’ book, then check out the American Prospect, which has done a massive investigation into the Trump administration’s dodgy practices.
In three years as president, he has transformed the executive branch into a giant favor factory, populated with the agents or willing partners of virtually every special interest. Add up all the routine, daily outrages—the quasi-bribery and quasi-extortion, the private raids on public funds, the handouts to the undeserving, the massive flow of cash, jobs, and freebies back in return—and Trump’s attempt to squeeze a little re-election help out of the fragile government of a desperate Eastern European country does not loom particularly large in the reckoning … The Trump administration has brought its brand of corruption and self-dealing to every agency in the federal government, and it’s hard for anyone to keep on top of it all. We’ve mapped it out for you. Click on any agency building below, and unlock an extensive dossier of the activities happening inside.
via Mapping Corruption.
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