President Joe Biden’s pledge of a transparent government has died in darkness, and now, there are new efforts to push Congress to require the administration to be more forthcoming about the costly regulations it is imposing on the nation.
While the White House, on its first day, promised to “bring transparency and truth back to government,” the president actually eliminated key Trump-era rules aimed at killing old regulations, limiting new ones, and requiring that all federal guidance be easily searchable by the public.
The result has been that several agencies, especially those driving the president’s most liberal agenda items, such as climate change, are not making guidance public.
“It’s a dangerous trend,” said Clyde Wayne Crews, Washington’s regulatory watchdog with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
He said transparency in government used to be a bipartisan issue. Even Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was a Senate Democrat, backed a GOP effort called the “Guidance Out of Darkness Act,” sponsored by Sens. Ron Johnson, James Lankford, and Ted Cruz.
But it turned partisan under President Donald Trump and has continued that way under Biden, with the president reversing Trump’s historic sunshine push.
For example, Biden killed a Trump executive order demanding that every agency post in a single portal all of its “guidance” that drives many regulations. Many of those portals have been taken down and give web searchers a “404 Error,” said Crews in his latest report on regulatory dark matter.
He even found some that joke about the missing data. “While I find the noncompliant pages frustrating, some agencies wear their defiance with a sense of humor. Among these are NASA’s, ‘The cosmic object you are looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon,’ and the Peace Corps’s, ‘Not all who wander are lost … but we can’t find the page you were looking for,’” said Crews.
And it’s not just the administration being opaque, he said. Republicans in Congress also play a role when backing new legislation heavy with regulations, such as the computer chip bill making its way through the House and Senate this week that is likely to unleash new iterations of voluminous guidance, said Crews.
The number and pages of rules and guidance that are now hard to find are staggering.
Crews said that owing primarily to the old Trump executive order, 107,000 guidance documents remain accessible, whereas before Trump, just a few thousand were easy to find.
And because Biden killed that order, EO 13,891, many agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, are no longer complying.
Of Biden’s executive order killing Trump’s transparency rule, he said it “is almost punishing the public. It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.”
Crews said he plans to continue issuing reports on the difficulty in finding Biden administration agency rules with hopes that a new Congress will seize on the issue and pass legislation requiring transparency so that succeeding administrations can’t change the practice with new executive orders.
“Much of the future will be governed by federal guidance documents,” he said. “We need to get a handle on it.”
