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Comment by firesteelrain | Hacker News Reader

Claims of an EPA “publication freeze” look overstated. Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it, and no memo has surfaced. Most likely it is a clearance bottleneck tied to the reorg that killed ORD. To staff it feels like censorship, to leadership it is process. Until documents leak I treat this as local slowdown, not agency-wide gag. The bigger story is the reorg itself which centralizes control and raises interference risk.

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Culling staff and organisations in ways that lead to bottlenecks or institutional disorder is a classic suppression and censorship tactic. It's naive to think otherwise, especially given the current leadership.

This administration does not seem to work via memos or anything with a paper trail.

> HQ flatly denies it

"HQ" believes climate change is a hoax, and this admin lies about anything and everything, we cannot take anything they say at face value

It sounds like more "flooding the zone". Which parts are burying science and which parts are merely organizational incompetence? There's no way to sort it out because there are new incidents every day.

> Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it

Presenting these two pieces of evidence in juxtaposition, as if they are equally trustworthy, is a bit misleading:

I think we're all well aware that pretty much any given career scientist, particularly one who has chosen to dedicate their lives to public service, is more trustworthy than the current administration, which is on record with tens of thousands of lies, most so lazily told as to convey contempt for the listener: They either think you're stupid enough to believe them, or don't care whether you do.

To take just one characteristic example out of the tens of thousands: the person ruling over the administration infamously hand-edited a weather map with a marker, to lie to the public about the path of a hurricane, then lied to the public about the markup itself to conceal the previous lie. Notably, they never even acknowledged either lie, much less apologized, meaning they still think it was a good idea, and still think that sort of blatant, shameless lying is ok.

That's to say nothing of the disdain the administration has for government and science in general: the long, strong track record there belies any claims of good faith, and indicates that actions they take which worsen one or both, do so with that as the primary motivation.

Probably less a grand gag order and more a clearance choke point from the reorg, but in a hostile political climate even routine slowdowns look like censorship.

More likely, based on the evidence, is more lies by the administration on the pile of tens of thousands, and another example of actual censorship by the administration historically most famous for it.

For an administration which claims that their primary goal is removing bureaucracy and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.

Could be, but whistleblower reports without documents are still thin evidence. Bureaucratic reshuffles often cause real slowdowns even without explicit orders. If a memo surfaces that shows politicals blocking publications, then it’s censorship. Until then it looks more like dysfunction weaponized by the broader political context.

Maybe, but whistleblower reports are solid evidence on their own, multiple corroborating witness statements even moreso. That's even if they aren't going up against the administration most infamous for lying and censorship, which obviously strengthens the whistleblowers' cases.

For an administration which claims that their primary goals are removing dysfunction and bureaucracy, and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.

Unless we get evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation is that the administration most infamous for censoring and lying is censoring and lying.

Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. Personally I’d want to see documents or journal confirmations before calling it outright censorship, but I agree the political track record makes it hard to dismiss the reports.

Indeed, totally losing the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of censorship and lying, is one consequences of being the administration historically most infamous for censorship and lying. Normally that is motivation enough for people to choose not to become infamous for censorship and lying.

If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.

The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders.

So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.

It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.

https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...

One of the worst instances of this was when the government lawyers essentially replied "We thought only the written orders count" when asked why they didn't comply. I'm not a lawyer, but from the reactions of actual lawyers this is not how it works in court, at all.

Cato - one of the few actually principled right-leaning think tanks have written extensively about this (and other instances of Trump administration contempt). It’s just as bad as you’ve described and infuriating for anyone who actually values the rule of law.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/carousel-contempt

Courts rarely punish agencies for contempt and trust erodes, but shame no longer works and two cases aren’t proof of a systemic collapse.

Those ‘two cases’ were from the first months of this term - needless to say there have been many further cases since then. And more to the ‘systemic collapse’ point, Appeals Courts staffed by Trump-appointed flunkies are gutting the contempt proceedings and the Supreme Court is refusing to step in..

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna223873

Fair, but linking more cases doesn’t automatically prove systemic collapse either. Appeals and the Supreme Court setting boundaries is still part of how separation of powers works, even if you dislike the outcomes. The deeper question is whether courts still have effective levers to enforce compliance, and right now contempt looks more symbolic than binding.

Well, potato potatoe.

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