The Legal Battle for DOGE Transparency
In early February, the news broke that employees of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had received an email ordering them to stop using Slack while lawyers sorted out the matter of “records migration.” The reasons were unclear, but the change had significant implications for communication: according to Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, the transition represented the difference between DOGE’s internal correspondence being covered by the Federal Records Act, and thus subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, versus the Presidential Records Act, which would exclude the office from FOIA. “The administration position is that those records will not be accessible until 2034,” Baron said. “But if they’re subject to FOIA, those records are available now.”
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors
Related Knowledge Center: State surveillance
While government monitoring of personal digital communications has traditionally been associated with authoritarian regimes such as China, the Trump regime has moved to use citizens’ personal information in unprecedented ways.
Digital privacy and data security | FISA — Section 702
Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
Democracy and politics | Signalgate | The CBS submission | Voiceless America