This semi-weekly report highlights how American Oversight is leading the way for improved accountability in government. 


** Insights on Oversight
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Do you ever feel like there are more scandals than you can keep track of? We get it. At American Oversight, we’re constantly spotting new issues while keeping the pressure on for long-term accountability. To help keep things in perspective, here’s a glimpse into how we’re making sense of it all at American Oversight.
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In a crisis, it’s common for government officials to focus on the problem at hand and give short shrift to transparency. A mercurial president with a record of punishing critics only exacerbates that instinct towards secrecy. But we need to keep sunlight on the powerful, to learn what they are doing, to identify errors, and ultimately, to ensure the country does better next time. We also can’t let coronavirus be the only thing that defines this administration, whose errors and corruption have been unprecedented. Can you imagine if President Trump escapes accountability for Ukraine just because he fails on Covid-19 so spectacularly? For that, too, we need transparency.

It’s going to take a fight to get answers. And it’s going to take the public meeting the moment as citizens. That means taking care of each other and staying engaged to ensure our government is honest and accountable. It also means looking back on past and ongoing scandals — remember Ukraine? Family separation? — with fresh eyes. The administration’s pandemic response is just the latest in a long line of corrupt, incompetent, scandalous behavior. For example, Trump’s handling of Puerto Rico’s plight after Hurricane Maria now looks like one example in a pattern of malicious disregard and negligence in the face of disasters.

President Trump doesn’t want us to know the truth. He has dismissed having any responsibility for the inadequate response to coronavirus — and while the administration was slow to respond to the spreading outbreak, it has been quick to clamp down on public transparency and oversight. The White House took the unprecedented step of classifying coronavirus-related meetings, and multiple federal agencies have begun citing coronavirus as an excuse for delaying responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Most troubling, the president said he intends to ignore the congressional oversight provisions of the $2 trillion response bill that was passed last week — potentially allowing the administration to withhold information from a special inspector general or to spend taxpayer dollars to protect his family’s business interests before reviving Main Street.

This makes our work even more vital. The Trump White House tried a strategy of total obstruction during the Ukraine investigation, but we were able to use FOIA to uncover hundreds of pages of records that were withheld from Congress, shedding light on crucial details of the president’s scheme.

With Trump once again signaling that he will obstruct congressional oversight, our team is already working at full speed to make sure the truth comes out. As we wrote last week, a pandemic is no time for secrecy ([link removed]) .

So even as the crisis swirls, step back and examine the full scope of this administration's record. I think you’ll agree, transparency is just as, if not more, important now than it ever has been, with the government at all levels taking actions that will have grave impacts on the public’s health and civil rights, actions that have already intruded deeply into daily lives. The public has a right to know what government officials knew and when ([link removed]) , to whom they were talking ([link removed]) , and what decisions they made behind the scenes ([link removed]) .

James Madison gave us words to guide us: “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Keep informed. Protect yourselves. Protect our country.
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Thank you for sharing our commitment to uncovering the facts, holding our government accountable, and restoring integrity to our public institutions.

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The American people have a right to a transparent and ethical government. We're holding the Trump administration accountable—because Congress won't.

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