Lobbyists Pushed Off U.S. Advisory Panels
I’d like to read more headlines like this about the Obama administration. This is what people voted for, the idea that private influence could be less powerful than the public interest. We can dream.
Dan Eggen writes in the Washington Post:
Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street’s influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.
The new policy — issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel — may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.
The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don’t have exact…
Obama Secrecy Watch: Don’t Trench on My ‘Executive Prerogatives’
Newsweek reports in its Declassified blog:
As we previously noted, our colleague Weston Kosova gave the Obama administration some much-needed grief on Friday for refusing a federal judge’s recent order to turn over documents showing how big telecommunications firms lobbied to get immunity for their participation in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.
But that is actually only one of many examples of how Obama appointees are standing up for Bush-era secrecy.
In just the last few days, virtually unnoticed by most of the news media, administration officials have:
* Rejected a new Freedom of Information request for White House visitor logs (despite their announced intention to start making such documents public).
* Appealed, yet again, to invoke “state secrets” to block a lawsuit that might shed light on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to countries that practice torture.
* Gotten Congress to pass legislation that would prevent graphic photographs of detainee abuse by the U.S.…
