Federal Government Withholding Employee Pay Information
Tapscott’s 1:21 PM post yesterday scooped the rest of the media by about 4 hours (go to last page at search to see that the first related story was about about 6 PM yesterday).
Here’s whats up:
Washington, D.C. — The federal government is unlawfully withholding information it normally provides the public about some 900,000 of its civilian employees, including those working for such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to a suit filed today in the federal district of Northern New York.
The lawsuit, brought by the co-directors of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), charges that the agency violated settled law by failing to provide requested information. Further, the agency didn’t even explain the grounds under which it is withholding information about employees working in more than 250 federal agencies.
The government first began providing the American people detailed information about all its employees in a register published almost 200 years ago. The first name in the first register, authorized by Congress in 1816, was President James Madison.
It’s clear from the rest of the press release that the government intends to not comply with the information request until it is embarrassed into doing so.
If the Bush Administration has their hands in this, it is really screwing up. An AP report or two are fine, but I suspect nothing will happen until somebody with a high-powered blog tries to get a blogswarm going. This should be a situation where blogs on both sides of the aisle agree — the government owes taxpayers this information.
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Note: This post, which was drafted last night, appeared for a few minutes assuming that the press had not picked up the story because Tapscott had no link (because none existed at the time of his post). Obviously that’s no longer true, and this post’s current content reflects the current situation.
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UPDATE, Dec. 8: Tapscott updates his post to indicate that the likely reason for the withholding is that “The Pentagon was asking OPM to limit release of CPDF data on DOD civilian employees more than a year ago.” Tapscott asks: “….. how does making public the name, salary and title of DOD civilians aid al Qaeda?” I have a very weak answer, but a possible convenient fig leaf: It may make them targets.
