Coyote Blog

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.

Nearly 200 new Executive Orders?  If I do nothing else I can still blog for weeks just going through the list.  (Update:  the full list of actions is here.  The list of past EO recissions is here.)

Over a third of these are reversals of Biden EO's, which I can't really complain about.  Hopefully student loan bailouts are dead for good, for example.

Some are the usual brand of political virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the one asking all government departments to go after inflation). Everything old is new again:

Some of the EO's are a new and uniquely Trumpian brand of virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the Gulf of America).  Maybe Canada will respond by renaming Lake Superior as Lake Canada or Lake Trudeau.  I don't get quite as worked up about renaming Mt Denali back to Mt McKinley, but the justification is hilarious -- to celebrate American greatness.  By naming it McKinley?!  So was Mt Jewel a non-starter?

But the EO's that really caught my eye and I want to comment on first are the ones declaring national emergencies, presumably to give the Administration special authority to pretty much ignore every other branch of government.  I really hate this idea, but it is particularly incredible given that Trump and the Republicans (rightly) chafed for years under authoritarian actions taken by the President and various governors under the guise of a COVID emergency.  So having railed for four years against declaring a national emergency to buff up the Administration's unaccountable power, Trump is going to declare two?

The border emergency declaration is not unexpected, and though I disagree with it, at least the situation there has the virtue of being fairly unprecedented (at least in the size of the border crossing numbers).  But energy?  What the F is the national emergency in energy?  Sure there is a lot of stupidity in our energy policy and lots of things that need fixing, but there has been for decades.  Having lived through the gas lines of 1972 and 1978 and the Three Mile Island emergency and oil prices that have swung from $10 to $130 and back again over time, its hard to imagine anything in the current energy markets that could be considered an emergency (now if we were all living in Germany, I might come to a different conclusion).  (Update, here is the Energy Emergency EO)

One other bit of bipartisan hypocrisy.  For the last several years Democrats have blasted Conservative critics for carrying every challenge of a Biden law or regulation down to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Texas, who became a pretty reliable go-to judge when a national injunction was wanted.  Where did the Republicans ever get this idea?  Perhaps from Democrats, who carried every Trump EO and regulation over to Hawaii and Judge Derrick K. Watson who would reliably enjoin all of Trump's efforts.  My guess is that Judge Watson is about to get busy again.   Maybe we should have an over-under betting pool to the first national injunction of a Trump EO.  In 2017 it was 7 days, for example, from the time Trump issued his travel ban until it was first enjoined and 9 days between the 2nd travel ban and when Watson issued his national injunction.