Lack of Transparency in the Obama Administration is Very Transparent

At a February 2010 New Hampshire Town Hall meeting President Obama famously boasted that independent reports rated his administration as the “most transparent in the modern era.” Oh what a difference four years makes. Taxpayers continue to see Washington waste money and hide behind archaic rules that enable all sorts of ways to conceal and obfuscate exactly what elected officials are doing.

The biggest roadblock to transparency has been the Obama administration.  This is ironic considering that President Obama often criticized the lack of transparency in previous administrations throughout the 2008 presidential campaign. The promises made nearly six years ago as President Obama began his transition into the White House were supposed to usher in a new and sweeping change of course for a city that thrived on working in secret. Today, there are reports of secrecy, stonewalling, corruption, and even abuses of power that reach into various federal agencies all under the Obama Administration.

Here are just a few recent examples of continuing stories that undercut the credibility of transparency during the Obama administration:

Obamacare: A recent report in the Washington Free Beacon detailed some information about withheld documents:

The House Oversight Committee slammed the Treasury Department on Thursday for withholding documents related to the committee’s investigation of the administration’s expansion of subsidies in the Obamacare exchanges.

IRS scandal: A Breitbart article detailed “extraordinary steps” being taken in order to get answers on lost emails:

In a landmark victory for Judicial Watch, the federal judge ordered the IRS to submit sworn declarations detailing what happened to Lois Lerner’s “lost” emails and what steps were being taken to find them.

Even some of the administrations more sympathetic observers in the press are starting to speak up on this issue. In March of this year, New York Times reporter James Risen gave one of the most damning indictments of the administration’s oft-viewed reputation for press secrecy:

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” [emphasis added] The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

The credibility problem on transparency for the Obama administration reaches into far more than IRS targeting and Treasury’s secrecy on Obamacare. TPA has detailed secret programs that threaten legitimate businesses the White House doesn’t like, as well as out right cronyism at the FCC when it comes to creating new rules and guidelines. Last year President Obama claimed that his was, “the most transparent administration in history,” to a Google hangout; and while the President may be able to claim a few victories on that front from some new rules set forth in 2009, the fact of the matter is that distinction simply does not match the facts. There are continued efforts by this administration to play down some of the worst behavior at the IRS.

A secret program at DOJ called “Operation Choke Point“ has been targeting business owners while Congress conducts oversight into why the program is being implemented in the first place. There are still unanswered questions about the Obamacare rollout, and what led to the disastrous website rollout last October that has continued to cost taxpayers money as the federal exchange is still being repaired.

The calls for transparency not only deal with domestic programs like Obamacare, or agencies with regulatory power like the IRS and EPA. There are also those concerned with the lack of transparency when it comes to civil liberties. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been criticizing the Obama administration on issues ranging from Guantanamo Bay detention to whistleblowers, even going so far as to sue the government in order to obtain more facts to shed some light on what some say are invasions of privacy and infringements on civil liberties.

In 2012 The Atlantic, another publication usually sympathetic to the President, detailed the ACLU’s battles with the Obama administration over transparency and commented on the level of secrecy being employed:

Far from being praiseworthy, the prevailing executive-branch attitude toward secrecy is an abomination, as is evident from even a cursory look at its real-world manifestations.

It’s very easy to attack those engaging in secrecy in government, and it is also very easy to showcase a few new rules to offer the appearance of significant change. Unfortunately, what’s not easy is hiding the blatant disregard for transparency in government when you engage in it everyday.