More Telling Examples from Our ‘Most Transparent Administration Ever’

This week we discover that the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has deleted e-mails
sought by members of Congress investigating the horrible, broken
launch of Obamacare’s federal exchange. Here’s how
MSNBC describes the situation (and you’ll soon see why I chose
them to quote from):

The Department of Health and Human Services planned on Thursday
to alert Congress and the National Archives and Records
Administration, which is charged with enforcing federal record
keeping laws, about the problem, according to
a copy of a letter being sent to Archives.

There is no evidence that Marilyn Tavenner, an Obama appointee
who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services,
intentionally hid information or deleted records; rather, the gaps
appear to be the result of sloppy record keeping. But Republicans
have attempted to turn missing emails into a political scandal
before, as they did with Lois Lerner, a former IRS official at the
center of a separate controversy over alleged targeting of
conservative nonprofit groups.

My teleprompter is telling me to wait for the laughter to
subside. The defense is that Tavenner’s office receives up to
12,000 e-mails per month and has to regularly delete her e-mails in
order to stay under Microsoft Exchange’s email limit. No, really.
So she forwards e-mails for retention and then deletes them. Except
sometimes she didn’t forward them. It’s not that government
officials are deliberately trying to destroy records. It’s just a
helpful side effect of their general incompetence.

They expect to recover “most but not all” of the e-mails.

The latest gap in record-keeping and transparency has prompted
Jillian Kay Melchior at the National Review to
detail the publication’s many problems trying to collect data
about state-level health exchanges. I suppose it’s not entirely
fair to lay these at the feet of the Obama administration, but keep
in mind it’s his pet program their behavior is protecting:

In Nevada, National Review
had to sue the state health exchange before we were able to
obtain records about how many Obamacare navigators had criminal
backgrounds, despite the fact that they were handling consumers’
private information. (As it turned out,
at least eight did.)

We faced similar struggles in California, where the health
exchange employed some
twisted logic to explain why it could not release the full
records regarding navigators’ criminal backgrounds:

“All of these documents are nondisclosable because ‘the public
interest served by not disclosing the record clearly outweighs the
public interest served by disclosure of the record,'” a lawyer for
the insurance exchange wrote, citing California Government Code
§6255. “Disclosing the names and criminal records of individuals
applying to assist in Covered California’s push to enroll vast
numbers in health insurance by March 31, 2014, is likely to
discourage participation in this critical program and thus harm the
people of California.”

In the end, we discovered that at least
43 convicted criminals were working as Obamacare navigators in
California, including individuals who had committed serious
financial crimes.

And even those in the federal government whose job it is to
oversee the behavior of the federal government are lashing out at
the inability to collect information needed for their job. But we
had finally elected the right people in charge, hadn’t we? Why are
they all acting like they’ve got something to hide? Via
Fox News:

Forty-seven of the government’s 73 independent watchdogs known
as inspectors general
voiced their complaints in a letter to congressional leaders
this week. They accused several major agencies — the Justice
Department, the Peace Corps and the chemical safety board — of
imposing “serious limitations on access to records.”

The inspectors general are now appealing to Congress to help
them do their jobs uncovering waste, fraud, and
mismanagement. 

“Agency actions that limit, condition, or delay access thus have
profoundly negative consequences for our work: they make us less
effective, encourage other agencies to take similar actions in the
future, and erode the morale of the dedicated professionals that
make up our staffs,” they wrote. 

The letter to the chairmen and ranking members of relevant
oversight committees in the House and Senate claimed agencies are
withholding information by calling it “privileged.”

You may ask “What the hell would the Peace Corps be classifying
as privileged?” According to the letter, they were suddenly
refusing to allow inspectors general access to Peace Corps’ sexual
assault records, even though they had done so in previous reviews.
Eventually the Department of Justice intervened to get the
inspectors the records. The Environmental Protection Agency has
been using attorney-client privilege to try to withhold records
from the inspectors.