https://www.propublica.org/article/video-project-2025-presid...
Consider the video "Staffing an Office" where Jeff Small, a former advisor in the Department of the Interior says “When you work for the federal government everything you put in an email, text, or note is FOIAable and releasable to the American people. At interior, we had a ton of in person meetings which allowed us to speak a little more freely about the topics of the day.”
Or the video "Advancing the President’s Agenda" where former OPM director Donald Devine says "You need to keep your agenda pretty close. You got to be careful who you tell it to because if you run it through a normal process…it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow..."
It's pretty clear that the architects of our current executive branch want to keep their objectives out of the public record and out of the press. So let's go with malice.
You'll find worse quotes from the House interview [1] of Fauci's advisor David Morens. Ever since I watched a recording of his testimony I've been more willing to give incompetence "passes" to bad behavior in Republican admins.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-takes-fa...
Why? Assign malice where there's malice. Don't give someone a pass because someone else might have done something worse.
And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
>And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
Dude, every single government ever in the history of humanity works this way. The appointed administrators of ancient rome were scheming up ways to serve their benefactors without leaving a tablet trail that their benefactors opponents could complain about. When I worked for a podunk state department of a well run solidly blue state 15yr ago we did this. There were meetings with no agenda where they'd verbally go over what the new boss's (appointed positions at top of department, not the governor himself) inclinations were on areas of policy relevant to the department and there would be discussion about how to align to that. And this wasn't people who reported to the boss, these were line level workers and middle managers. This wasn't coming from the top down. This was the bottom simply knowing what was good for it.
And just to be clear, just because it's always like this doesn't mean you shouldn't hate it and hate them for doing it.
This happens all through government now. As soon as any small public body starts getting FOIA requests they stop putting anything off-color into an email and take it to phone calls and private meetings.
And yet they know everything about each one of us (without admitting that they do).
Source: Snowden. It only got worse from there.