The EPA under administrator Lisa Jackson has been exceptionally heavy-handed and secret email accounts have the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation wondering what it means for transparency.
The administration has a real issue with transparency; yesterday I discussed the closure of Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste storage and how the president secretly told his staff to starve it and kill it while he publicly created a ‘blue ribbon commission’ to determine the best option for storage, and the top critic of Yucca Mountain on that blue ribbon commission then got put in charge of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Obama’s FDA was also found to be spying on scientists who disagreed with official conclusions.
But Jackson has been exceptional, stating that cleaner natural gas is the reason for her latest job-killing policies, and showing that turning scientists into politicians does not make for more honest politicians, it just shows that scientists can be as heavy-handed as lawyers. She also created pointless automobile standards and even advanced the idea that the EPA’s ability to monitor greenhouse gases made them more powerful than Congress. Social authoritarian from the left delights Mother Jones and Grist but it’s bad for the bulk of society that does not like allowing benevolent despots, because administrations change and sometimes benevolent despots can be on the other side.
So the people in Congress responsible for insuring there is actual transparency in government want to know what else “Richard Windsor” discusses. That is the name of Jackson’s email alias. Jackson was not the first. Carol Browner, former director of the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator started the trend. She became famous for having her hard drive reformatted when she was about to have her computer subpoenaed but she said it didn’t matter because she never used email on a computer anyway.
They sent a letter asking if there are more aliases that the Obama administration is using to avoid transparency and if, for example, she communicates with outside people using them. And which other agencies are now using these secret emails to avoid disclosure?
We’ll have to see if executive privilege gets invoked once again when it comes to full disclosure and honesty with the public.