“A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is wielding so much power that its records will likely have to be opened to the public under federal law.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said the vast and “unprecedented” authority of DOGE, formally known as the U.S. Digital Service, combined with its “unusual secrecy” warrant the urgent release of its internal documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The authority exercised by USDS across the federal government and the dramatic cuts it has apparently made with no congressional input appear to be unprecedented,” Cooper wrote in a 37-page opinion.”
“In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the Trump administration is arguing that its much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is exempt from public records requests.”
…
“”All aspects of the government must be fully transparent and accountable to the people,” Musk posted on X earlier this month. “No exceptions, including, if not especially, the Federal Reserve.”
At a White House press conference earlier this month, Musk said, “We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible, so all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
And again, Musk declared last November: “There should be no need for FOIA requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.”
But DOGE has struggled to make its data public while also claiming exemption from FOIA, which is a recipe for maximum opacity, not transparency.
Between the shifting claims of how much taxpayer money DOGE was going to save, the release and quiet deletion of error-filled data, and now attempts to hide DOGE from public record laws—well, it doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) upcoming Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting on March 13 was abruptly canceled via email on Wednesday. The committee was to consider the selection of strains to be included in the influenza virus vaccines for the 2025–2026 flu season. This is the second vaccine-related advisory meeting canceled since Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took over at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
No reason for the cancellation was given, and the committee members were warned against forwarding the email. It suggested that members decline to answer questions from media.
So much for Kennedy’s pledge earlier this month of “radical transparency.” He added, “We will make our data and our policy process so transparent that people won’t even have to file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request.”
In addition to suggesting members of the FDA’s vaccine committee stifle themselves, the HHS will publish a notice next week in the Federal Register to eliminate public comment on that agency’s plans and decisions. While past meetings have been open to public scrutiny and participation, it is not clear if the new limits will apply to future meetings of the committee.”
…
“Noting that the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the worst flu seasons in a decade, Infectious Diseases Society of America president Tina Tan warns that “cancelling a critically important Food and Drug Administration meeting that is vital to the development of effective flu vaccines for next flu season is irresponsible.” She adds, “Cancelling this meeting means vaccine makers may not have the vital information and time they need to produce and distribute targeted vaccines before the next flu season. If the FDA meeting is not immediately rescheduled, many lives that could be saved by vaccination will be lost.”
RFK, Jr.’s HHS promises that the FDA “will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.”
“DOGE deserves some credit for simply trying to map the federal government—a gargantuan endeavor that involves over 100 agencies, each a matryoshka doll of sub-agencies and offices. As former federal technology officer Marina Nitze wrote in Reason today, the amount of nonsensical rules, regulations, and turf battles means it’s a Sisyphean struggle to make even the most basic improvements to federal websites and tech systems.”
“What would be better than FOIA?
An employee of a federal agency, who was sick of constantly having her email searched for records requests, once floated the idea to me of proactive disclosure: Just redact and release everyone’s emails on a rolling basis.”
” The new study..compared the prices hospitals posted online (as required under new federal regulations) with the prices obtained in phone calls conducted by the team posing as potential patients.
They contacted 60 hospitals across the country, a mix of top-ranked facilities, hospitals that primarily serve low-income people, and the other hospitals in between. They asked about two procedures for which comparison shopping is more common: vaginal childbirth and a brain MRI.”
…
“It was rare for the advertised price on the web to be the same as the price quoted over the phone. Less than 20 percent of hospitals provided the same price through an online price estimator as they did when someone spoke to a member of the billing department. In many cases, the disparity was significant, with more than a 50 percent price difference depending on whether you checked on a website or called for a quote.
And in a handful of cases, the price more than doubled depending on how you asked. At two hospitals, MRIs were listed online at $2,000, but “patients” were given a price of more than $5,000 when they called. Five hospitals offered a price of $10,000 for vaginal childbirth over the phone, but the price posted online were twice that much.
There didn’t seem to be a clear pattern of which quotes were higher. Sometimes they were higher over the phone, sometimes higher on the website.
The researchers said they took pains to make sure they were getting apples-to-apples comparisons, going so far as to give specific billing codes during their scripted calls with hospital staff. It didn’t matter.”
…
“Research had already found prices for the same services vary wildly at different hospitals. The top-line findings of this new study reveal that it can be difficult to even determine what the price for a given service is at a given hospital. That is a problem both for the 10 percent of the US population that is uninsured as well as people enrolled in high-deductible health plans, which are becoming more common.”
…
“the researchers made one other note in their study: They found poor correlation between brain MRI and vaginal childbirth prices within an individual hospital. In other words, some facilities would have high MRI prices compared to others but low prices for delivering babies — with no discernible economic reason for that disparity. It’s chaos.”
“The New York Post first reported in 2021 that Biden used at least three pseudonyms—”Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters,” and “JRB Ware”—on emails that mixed family and government business. The aliases were reportedly discovered in emails found on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
The Southeastern Legal Foundation, a legal nonprofit group, filed a FOIA request in June 2022 for all emails associated with the aliases. In its initial response to SLF’s FOIA request, NARA said it had identified roughly 5,400 records potentially responsive to its request. However, NARA has yet to turn over those records. On Monday, the SLF filed a FOIA lawsuit to compel production.
“All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it,” SLF General Counsel Kimberly Hermann said in a press release. “The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden’s nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. The American public deserves to know what is in them.””
…
“Whether or not those emails contain government business or evidence of impropriety that Republicans have been searching for, the use of multiple pseudonymous email addresses and aliases, at the very least, creates suspicion for FOIA requesters. How are watchdog groups and records requesters supposed to know the government is performing complete searches if the existence of alternate or private email addresses isn’t revealed?
However, despite criticisms from transparency groups, the practice has been fairly widespread for at least the past few administrations. Obama-era EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used the alias “Richard Windsor” and her private email address in messages with lobbyists. Former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch also used alias email addresses. Trump-Era EPA administrator Scott Pruitt had four government email addresses.
The Obama administration defended using alternate government email addresses as necessary for high-level political appointees since the flood of emails to their public inboxes made those accounts unreasonable to manage.
At a 2013 press conference, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney assured reporters that “this is a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties, and, as the story itself made clear, any FOIA request or congressional inquiry includes a search in all of the email accounts used by any political appointee.””
“Yes, those publications have liberal biases. And, yes, some progressives are using the Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch reports to undermine the conservative majority’s legitimacy and push dangerous court expansion plans. But all of these nondisclosures, luxury trips, and gift-taking still seem sleazy.”
“Units like these don’t just suffer from a lack of transparency and use tactics likely to spawn violence. Their rhetoric attracts “police officers who enjoy being feared,” Balko notes, and it positions these officers as both elite and beyond the normal rules. There are all sorts of horror stories about similar units, such as Detroit’s STRESS unit (“Over a two-year period, the units killed at least 22 people, almost all of them Black”) or Los Angeles’ CRASH unit (“More than 70 officers were implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation”).
Memphis has now disbanded the SCORPION squad.”
…
“This is far from the first time that police have drastically misrepresented the way things went down before surveillance footage or body camera videos showed that they weren’t telling the truth. To distill this to its essence: Police lie. They lie to protect themselves. They like to give their activities a more noble sheen. They lie to dehumanize those they arrest or aggress against. And yet members of the media often take cops at their word and move on.”