The Missing Executive Order
I know, with like 200 executive orders already in this administration, it is hard to imagine one was missing. But if I were the victim of some sort of horrible karma and found myself as President, I was thinking about what EO I might sign (other than one repealing all the others). This is what I came up with:
Subject: Federal Transparency
I hereby order that all Federal agencies, from this day forward, follow the letter of the f*cking law in the Freedom of Information Act. All requests will be processed in a timely manner as specified in the law and all redactions will be made solely based on the exceptions allowed in the law and those exceptions will be interpreted narrowly. Redactions in any document released to the public solely to protect the reputation of an individual or agency shall be grounds for immediate termination of those involved [update: here is a famous example]
Further, all public business will be handled through public channels and will be archived as required by law. Anyone attempting to conduct public business through private channels that cannot be archived or FOIA'd will be subject to immediate termination.
Further, within 90 days the US military, the US state department, and all intelligence agencies are required to submit to me proposed updated guidelines and processes for marking documents as classified or secret with the goal of reducing documents with any sort of classification by 90%. Anyone found to be over-classifying documents to protect an individual or agency's reputation will be subject to immediate termination.
If I knew more about Federal organization I would probably propose pulling FOIA officers out of their agencies and into some new group. Maybe we pull out all the Inspector Generals as well and put them in that new group too.
Postscript
Who the heck remembers all the stuff like this to do day 1? I can't remember that my wife told me to start the dishwasher at the next commercial.
I’d also like all financial records published in a common/open, machine-readable format. Ideally future funding would be predicated on timely financial disclosure.
This would also include all foreign recipients, especially the UN.
Also: Any bill proposed to Congress must be written in Word or its equivalent with Track Changes turned on. That way, every word included in the bill, including amendments, must be owned by someone. We need to be able to see who's feeding at the trough.