Insights on Oversight 

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.

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.