Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach — Crossposted from my blog, Skating Under The Ice
The media is all abuzz with claims that the Trump Administration has “gagged” or “muzzled” the EPA. Under the headline
Trump administration seeks to muzzle U.S. agency employees
the news agency Reuters reports:
On Tuesday, a source at the EPA said that staff had been told by members of the Trump administration not to speak to reporters or publish any press releases or blog posts on social media. EPA staff have also been asked not to publicize any talks, conferences, or webinars that had been planned for the next 60 days, the staffer said, asking not to be named.
The part that folks in the media don’t seem to understand is that this is standard business practice. If you run a large business you can’t have every hothead from the shipping department spouting off to the New York Times about how mean the bosses are. As a result, most large businesses have equivalent policies regarding publishing or discussing the internal business of the organization, particularly with the press.
These standard policies of large businesses generally mandate several things.
First, employees can’t talk to the press without prior authorization from the public relations department. They are told to pass all questions on to the PR department.
Next, as far as social media goes, employees are forbidden from doing anything that brings negative publicity on the organization. In particular, they cannot post on social media about what goes on at work.
Finally, it is totally verboten to discuss the future plans of the organization with anyone anywhere anytime. That is the job of the public relations department alone.
These are perfectly commonsense regulations. They are not “gagging” anyone. They are bog-standard business practice for very good reasons, and if the government employees don’t like these regulations they can go to work for Apple …
… oh, wait … Apple has exactly the same kind of policies about contact with the press and disclosures on social media, and for exactly the same reasons …
w.
PS: If you comment, please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS you are referring to, so we can all understand your subject.
An awful lot of discussion about something actually quite simple. |FOIA is a mechanism for transparency for serious inquiry as to what our government is doing. The gag order is a mechanism to speak with one voice and avoid sowing confusion. If someone seriously wanted to avoid transparency they would order a halt to all internal communications and start shredding documents and scrubbing digital media, like Hillary’s email server.
After alternative facts we now also have alternative motives. If the purpose of all this is simply to make sure government employees don’t communicate directly to the public, why is it only applied to EPA and not to all other agencies? Doesn’t make sense. One has to be pretty naive to think that this is all there is to it.
long time EPA officials have said this is normal and it is NOT only the EPA fyi. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/some-agencies-told-to-halt-communications-as-trump-administration-moves-in.html?_r=0
The EPA should be Abolished. All these Federal agencies no longer serve a useful purpose. They were designed for a much different time their usefulness is about as useful as your old heavy picture tube TV in the attic. Most all states have their own version of the EPA and its closer to home. In this age of social media and lightning fast communication government close to home works smarter and faster