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The Trump administration has decided to stop voluntarily disclosing the names of visitors to the White House, ending one of the Obama administration’s most prized (or touted) transparency advances. “This kind of secrecy will allow big donors, lobbyists and special interests to have unknown levels of influence in the White House,” David Donnelly of Every Voice, told The Washington Post’s John Wagner. It’s worth noting, though, that the Obama Administration never agreed to make its visitor records comprehensive and always insisted that these were privileged records that they weren’t required to disclose under the Freedom of Information Act.
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Former lobbyists are attaching themselves to the Trump administration like barnacles to a ship, report Eric Lipton, Ben Protess, and Andrew Lehren for The New York Times. In several cases, they are coming on board to work in posts directly overseeing the industries they lobbied for, a violation of the administration’s own ethics rules—but as the Times report notes, Trump is secretly issuing waivers to those rules.
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Responding to the administration’s call for comments on what regulations to cut, industry groups are proposing extending oil and gas leases in the Gulf, ending studies looking at the impact of coal tar, and eliminating a requirement that employers report their injury and illness records electronically to the Labor Department so they can be posted “on the internet for anyone to see,” Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post.
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Speaking of transparency, thousands of people rallied over the weekend to demand that Trump release his tax returns. In response, our little Twitler chirped, “Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!” Princeton University professor Sam Wang responded, “I realize we are all desensitizing, but note this attempt to delegitimize the free speech of the opposition. An authoritarian move.”
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From Sarah Ellison’s lone profile of the Trump White House in Vanity Fair comes this gem of how policy is made:
“At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave [son-in-law Jared] Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign’s only economic adviser.) Kushner operated in much the same way when it came to crafting Trump’s tax plan—calling up someone for help out of the blue. Given the initial absence of pros who could do the job properly, he also tried his hand at writing speeches. Responding to criticism from the boss (“Jared, this is terrible!”), Kushner said, according to a person familiar with the episode, “I’m not a fucking speechwriter. I am a real-estate guy.”
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Opposition watch: The rise of the “counter-resistance”? Historian Rick Perlstein travels down the rabbit hole of far-right websites and bulletin boards, and finds a subculture of gun-lovers who think that “antifa” (anti-fascist) anti-Trumpists on the left are plotting violent resistance, and therefore have to be confronted by organized violence.
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How we live today: Fusion’s economics writer Felix Salmon takes aim at crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and their efforts to muscle in on longstanding self-help networks that people have relied upon to pay for things like health care and education.
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Algorithms + authoritarianism = United Airlines, writes John Robb.
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SumofUs explains WhyEveryoneHatesUber.com.
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Tech and politics: The Hillary Clinton campaign has given its email list along with analytics and voter modeling tools to the Democratic National Committee, report Sam Levine and Sam Stein for The Huffington Post. The list includes more than 10 million new names that weren’t on the DNC voter file. Bernie Sanders has not shared his list, they note. Continuing his listening tour with the world’s downtrodden billionaires, former President Obama interrupted their month-long visit to French Polynesia for a weekend jaunt on mogul David Geffen’s 454 foot yacht, Jennifer Smith reports for The Daily Mail.
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Life in Facebookistan, indeed: Nitashu Tiku of BuzzFeed takes a long, subtle look at CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing efforts to humanize himself and by extension his company. This line from her report captures some of the weirdness: “People close to Zuckerberg are so deeply invested in Zuckerberg’s appearance of authenticity that you can practically hear them erasing themselves from the picture.”
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Apply: The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is accepting proposals through April 28 for projects that strengthen legal services for immigrants. Two grants of $100,000 each will be awarded.
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Don’t forget, Personal Democracy Forum 2017 is coming up June 8-9. Get your tickets now!
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