During the last 50 years there have been huge strides made in the process of expanding the transparency between the United States government and the people that government rules over. By creating a transparent government the intellectual freedom of the individual is championed and the ability for the government to act outside of the public eye is reduced. It should be viewed as extremely problematic when this transparency is weakened or eliminated, as was the case during the George W. Bush administration. When this happens individual freedoms and liberties that our founding fathers fought so hard for get striped away.
In 1966 the United States congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and on September 6th of that year President Lyndon B. Johnson singed it into law. The passing of this law allowed for previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the US government to become available to the public. For the individual American this created a much-needed shift from a position of need-to-know to one of right-to-know. For many this act was the broadening of the inherent rights for the access of information. It also increased the transparency of the US government.
President Richard Nixon, in 1970, proposed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which began operation on December 2, 1970. The EPA began as an agency of the federal government for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by congress. EPA today employs over 17,000 employees and has a budget of 10.5 billion dollars. They also, traditionally, have worked hard to make all of their research available and accessible to the public.
In 1986, congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know- Act (EPCRA). This act establishes requirements for all levels of government and industry regarding emergency planning and right-to-know reporting on hazardous and toxic chemicals. The community right-to-know provisions were intended to increase the public’s knowledge and access to information on chemicals at individual facilities. It was also intended to help disclose how these facilities used these hazardous and toxic chemicals and how they were disposed of and if any of them were released into the environment either through spills, sewage, exhaust or other forms of pollution. It was believed that communities and governments could use this information to improve safety and public health as well as improve the environment.
EPCRA was passed in response to concerns regarding the safety and environmental hazards created by the storage and handling of toxic chemicals. These concerns became increasingly prominent after the Bhopal gas tragedy in Bhopal, India that caused the death of 3,787 people, a number which was later raised to 15,000 deaths and, depending on which study you read, anywhere from 3,000 to 500,000 injuries. To reduce any likelihood of such a disaster in the United States, congress imposed requirements on industrial facilities.
The Bhopal gas tragedy is the world’s worst industrial catastrophe, happening on December 2nd 1984. At the industrial plant in Bhopal, India a tank that held 42 tons of toxic pesticide overheated and spewed exhaust and pesticide over the city. After this tragic event it became evident to United States lawmakers that the protections against disasters like this is a better-informed citizenry. Right-to-Know legislation understood at its most foundational level that open information concerning what was happening in local industry would help in protecting the people of the US from anything like what happened in Bhopal.
The tragic events of September 11th, 2001 knocked this entire right-to-know system off of its central axis. In the eyes of the United States executive leadership, the concept of fear, the constructed threat of terror and the ideas of preemptive war and national security trumped any concept of intellectual freedom. During the days following the events of Sept. 11th many Americans believed that ideas of national security and freedom to information go hand in hand, yet the Bush administration saw the opportunity to take the US a different direction.
This shift of ideals from freedom to fear can be seen in Executive Order 13233, which restricts public access to the past presidential papers even for the existing president, and can also be seen in the USA PATRIOT Act. It must be noted here that on January 21, 2009, on his very first day in office, President Barak Obama revoked EO 13233 and help usher the United States our of the information dark ages and persistent fear mongering of the Bush administration.
Two example of this push for an information dark age by the Bush administration is found in the burden reduction of the nation’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Program in 2005 and the closing of the EPA libraries in 2006. These are a form of censorship imposed by the executive branch of the US government and problematic for the American people as the transparency established by FOIA and EPCRA were cut off.
The US TRI Program requires industries to report every year the amount of toxic pollution they release into the environment. Prior to 2005, industries were required to annually report the release of any sort of persistent, bioaccumlative and toxic chemicals that would be harmful to the environment and citizens in their area. These industries needed to report these figures to the EPA through a five-page form. In 2005, Kim Krisberg of The Nation’s Health reported that requirements would change to every other year and would also let facilities use a more simplified form (one page as opposed to five) if they did not manage more then 5,000 pounds of pollutants. These diminished forms would reduce the amount of information these industries would need to report to the public concerning the materials that were being handled in their buildings. According to the EPA this was suppose to be an incentive to help reduce the amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment. It is unquestionably clear that this decrease of accountability is an advantage for industry but at the same time ultimately harmful for the people of the United States.
Senator Jim Jeffords (I-Vt) stated that the EPA’s proposal would “deny communities up-to-date information about local toxic releases, reduce incentives to minimize the generation of toxic waste and undermine the ability of public health agencies and research to identify important trends (Krisberg).” John Balbus, director of the health program at Environmental Defense and a member of Public Health Association’s Environmental Section stated that the proposal would “essentially take away our ability to track in anything close to real time…It’s clear that this move is designed to benefit industry more then it is to improve the public’s access to information (Krisberg).”
While Republicans would argue that this ruling was designed to help small businesses, Democrats would argue that this endangered public health. As a footnote to this argument, I do tend to question whenever I hear Republicans refer to small businesses, and for no other reason then because that term tends to be loosely defined (if defined at all) and highly constructed to strike an emotional chord in the middle class. I mention this only because, as reported by Kara Sissell by Chemical Week in 2006, the Small Business Administration (SBA) had their hands all over this rule change. OMB Watch, a non-profit who keeps their eye on the transparency of the government, almost made it sound like the EPA was working for the SBA and not for the American people as a majority of SBA’s suggestions concerning this rule change was put into place.
The facilities that held the information from both the TRI reports as well as the research done by EPA scientists were the EPA libraries. In February of 2006 the Bush administration proposed a 2-million dollar budget cut from the EPA’s library system for the 2007 fiscal year. In 2007 the EPA’s total budget was 8-billion dollars. The amount of money allocated to the EPA libraries from that budget was 2.5 million dollars. This proposed budget cut would decrease the EPA libraries budget from 2.5-million dollars to .5 million per year, an 80% decrease. Compared to the overall budget for the EPA this cut accounts for significantly less then .1% of the overall EPA budget. To put this another way, for every $100 the EPA received from the national budget the EPA would send a penny down to their libraries and now the Bush administration wanted to take most of that penny away. This budget cut would ensure the closing of most of the EPA library network.
The EPA library network consists of 10 regional libraries as well as the main library in Washington DC. Even before the budget cuts were approved in congress the EPA began to close down several of its libraries to both the public and the EPA staff. They closed regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City and reduced hours and public access to libraries in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC. On November 30th EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson received a letter from four House Representatives, John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), Bart Gordon (D-Tenn), James L. Oberstar (D-Minn) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). The letter stated, “Congress…has approved neither the President’s 2007 budget request nor the library closure. We request that you maintain the status quo of the libraries and their materials while this issue is under investigation and reviewed by congress (Eberhart, 17).”
However, it was not just the closing of libraries that was restricting information to the public. On December 1st, 2006 a statement was released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) noting that “thousands of on-line documents were de-linked from the agency’s Office of Prevention, Pollution, and Toxic Substances (Eberhart).” Peer also noted that the EPA was “making certain some libraries stay closed by hastily selling their office equipment, and claims that $40,000 worth of furniture and furnishings from the shuttered Chicago office was recently sold for $350 (Eberhart).” On that same day, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the EPA’s chemical library was asked to throw a valuable journal collection into the dumpster. The EPA Office of Environental Information claimed that all EPA-produced documents would be accessible on-line within two years yet for all practical purposes the libraries were closed and public access was cut off.
As the EPA was closing their libraries they were also boxing up their books and resources and sending them to three different repositories where they became un-cataloged and inaccessible. Other materials were recycled or thrown away. One report stated that 380,000 documents on microfiche, 5,550 EPA hard copy documents and more then 16,000 books and technical reports by government agencies were boxed up and made inaccessible. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the EPA’s library system holds 500,000 books, 25,000 maps, thousands of studies and decades of research and that much of it is irreplaceable.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the EPA was only planning to make about ten percent of its library holdings available online and was being held up by copyright issues in digitizing its holdings, limited to unique reports produced by EPA (Oder).
As early as July 5th 2006, 10,000 EPA scientists, engineers and other technical specialists asked Congress to stop the Bush administration’s budget cuts. The letter that was signed by these 10,000 employees stated that about 50,000 original research documents would become completely unavailable because there is no budget to digitize them. They also noted that there were no plans to maintain interlibrary loan documents (Library Journal, 07/05/2006).
Representative Bart Gordon nicely sums up much of the what was happening in the EPA libraries when he said, “The Agency’s modernization effort is characterized by poor planning, failure to communicate with its employees, the public or Congress and failure to protect unique government assets (Oder).”
Many libraries, at that time, did not support these actions caused by the Bush administration. The American Library Association (ALA) President then was Leslie Burger. In the December 8th 2006 edition of the New York Times she was quoted as saying, “In the age of terrorism, when the safety of our food and water supply, the uninterrupted flow of energy, and, indeed, so much of our environment has become a matter of national security, it seems particularly dangerous to take steps that would hinder our emergency preparedness (Eberhart).”
Burger also testified before Congress pertaining to the ALA’s position concerning the closing of the EPA libraries. In this hearing she stated, “There continues to be a lot that we don’t know: exactly what materials are bing shipped around the country, whether there are duplicate materials in other EPA libraries, whether these items have been or will be digitized, and whether a record is being kept of what is being dispersed and what is being discarded (American Libraries, March 2007).”
On September 30th 2008 the closed branches of the EPA library system reopened thus ending a 30-month campaign by the Bush administration to restrict the availability of the EPA materials. What was left in the wake of all this were the scattered and incomplete library collections and little resources to undergo an in-depth digitization process. Reopened facilities were to be staffed by a minimum of 24 hours over four days per week.
PEER Assistant Director Carol Goldberg stated, “While we are happy that EPA is re-opening its libraries, we are disturbed that the minds which plotted their closure remain in charge (PEER, September 29, 2008).”
According to PEER, the new policies in the reopened libraries was still less access then before they were closed. Most of the reopened libraries were housed in less space then before and the library in Chicago reopened without permanent furniture or shelving. Resources that were sent back to the libraries were broken collections and out of order and many of the libraries were only able to provide core reference materials (PEER, September 29, 2008).
On September 30th of 2010 the EPA released their 2011-2015 strategic plan. In it they state that the EPA holds three core values: Science, Transparency and the Rule of Law. This is the first strategic plan issued under the Obama administration. OMB Watch stated, “The strategy…seems to respond to repeated complaints by public interest groups that science had taken a backseat to politics at EPA under the Bush administration. The “Expanding the Conversation on Environmentalism” strategy ties directly into the Obama administration’s open government efforts to improve participation and collaboration at agencies (OMB Watch).”
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson stated that the EPA “will take broad steps to expand the conversation on environmentalism to communities across America, building capacity, increasing transparency and listening to the public (OMB Watch).”
OMB Watch stated, “It is through this strategy that the agency’s strategic plan seems to offer the most opportunity for progress on open government issues. To achieve greater community engagement, the agency plans to incorporate a list of transparency principles into its regular functions (OMB Watch).”
The Right-to-Know laws that I mentioned at the beginning of this article were always intended to be general requirements established to keep US citizens safe from the industries in their community. What the Bush administration did was to create rules based on particularities, such as fear and terrorism, to help them gain more and more control over pubic information and then distribute it to only those whom they wanted to have it. This allowed for a closed and secretive government.
Perhaps no US President has usurped more power into the executive branch of the US government then George W. Bush. In the process he completely closed down his administration from the public’s eye and commandeered freedoms away from the American people. In general, those who promote an idea of a transparent government and open access to information tend to be Democrats. If it were not for the actions of many Democratic Representatives in Congress during the later years of the Bush Administration it is possible that American would still be sitting in the information dark ages of the mid-2000s. It is my hope that the events I just wrote about will be a reminder of where our country was less then 5 years ago and how far we have come during the Obama administration.
[I have linked to all of my resources that are openly available on the internet. Below are sources you many need to look up using the databases at your local library. The database I suggest is Academic Search Premier. If your library does not have it suggest that they get it then email me and I will send you all the PDF files.]
