You Really Have No Idea What or How Your Government is Doing

An interesting article in Puck about a rather literal case of this regime's lack of transparency and its effects on separation of powers. A snippet:

[T]he Trump administration’s uncommunicativeness, and its partisan tilt in what it does share, appears to be next level. Past administrations would send information to both parties simultaneously when communicating with committees, and use staff briefings as an opportunity to build support for a policy on both sides of the aisle. But last month, when the State Department sent budget documents to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, only Republicans got them directly—Democrats had to get them forwarded from their G.O.P. colleagues.

In an administration obsessed with loyalty, it’s perhaps no surprise that access has become another form of leverage. Some disfavored Republicans have also had far less access to administration officials, I’m told, leaving them nearly as in the dark as Democrats. Members more aligned with Trump have been rewarded with better intel.

The dynamic is particularly evident at the State Department, which is undergoing a massive reorganization, and at USAID, an independent agency that is now overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Statute requires that Congress be consulted on any major changes to the aid agency, but Friday was the first time the House Committee on Foreign Affairs was ever briefed on Trump’s decision to terminate nearly every employee—even though Elon Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” back in February....

It’s a familiar complaint these days. A Republican committee aide I spoke with defended the decision to cut out Democrats—after all, this person said, it’s not like the D.C.C.C. would brief Republicans on their midterm plans. The implication, in case it wasn’t obvious: Everything is political now....

When C.D.C. programs, funding, and employees were slashed, for instance, the agency initially planned to brief only the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It was only after G.O.P. members pushed to include their Democratic counterparts, a Democratic source told me, that they were given the briefing as well. But on the Senate side, committee Dems were shut out of a similar briefing. They’ve heard nothing in response to questions about the spread of avian flu, over-the-counter drug regulation, and even who is running the agency these days. (There is still no director, and it’s unclear whether Susan Monarez or Matthew Buzzelli are temporarily in charge.)

I would, of course, want to see more reporting on this. (Yet another reason the decimation and fractionation of "corporate" journalism and its replacement by under- or non-staffed tweet-style junk or Substacks is a net loss, in my view.) I don't treat it as gospel. But the reported facts do not strike me as so wholly unsurprising as to raise no special red flags. And the new elements--the open hostility or indifference to keeping even Republican members in the loop and positive view that the executive branch should mostly communicate only with same-party members of Congress rather than communicating as a matter of course with Congress as a coordinate and for the most part the predominant political branch--build on widely reported and acknowledged factors, such as the regime's failure to staff vast swaths of major positions (let alone staff them with sane and qualified individuals), the degree of incoherence and chaos left in the wake of barely targeted or untargeted cuts, and the more deliberate destruction of government agencies that actually monitor and collect data on what your government is doing.

The story notes that, to their credit, in some cases (but not all) the Republican majority members pushed back on regime refusals to inform it, both generally and specifically refusals to brief Democratic members along with Republican members. Of course Congress as a body could push back still more and could treat the executive branch as a coordinate branch rather than a combination political ally and looming election-level political threat. But it's equally clear that to the extent the story is accurate--and, as noted, most of this is uncontroversially true--the blame lies with Trump and his enablers.