donal brown

A recent study showed that government workers charged with processing Freedom of Information Act requests are inundated by the numbers of requests. The study in the American Review of Public Administration analyzed data from 102 agencies from 2008 and 2016. ICE reported that each analyst dealt with 35 to 50 FOIA requests a week. The Office Of Government Information Services has asked Congress to allocate sufficient funds to meet federal obligations for transparency. Six agencies

President Donald Trump is looking hungrily at the Mueller report finding of no Russian collusion, relishing the opportunity to strike back. Trump’s communications director promptly warned TV producers against giving Democrats air time who had claimed there was evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election. (The Associated Press, March 25, 2019, by Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller with contributions from Hunter Woodall) Conservative columnist Ross Douthat of The New York

The Federal Communications Commission agreed to pay $43,000 for attorney fees and court costs of a New York journalist seeking records on net neutrality proceedings in 2017. The records that reporter Jason Prechtel received under the settlement showed how millions of fake comments were sent to the FCC during the net neutrality rollback. (Gizmodo, March 21, 2019, by Dell Cameron) The New York attorney general’s office is still investigating the case but has already found

The U.S. Army intended to charge an the Environmental Working Group (EWG) nearly  $300,000 to see results of water tests for a contaminant at military installations. A dangerous chemical in firefighting foam was thought to be present in 401 sites, and 24 military drinking water systems around the world tallied unsafe levels of the chemical called perfluoroalkl or PFAS linked to cancer and other health problems. (U.S.News & World Report, March 20, 2019, by Ellen

March 21, 2019 by donal brown The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected HomeAway and Airbnb’s First Amendment argument in upholding Santa Monica’s ordinance that bans home stays unless a resident is present. The ordinance also prohibits rentals of entire homes for less than 30 days. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 2019, by Carolyn Said) The rental companies argued that the town was curtailing  commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. The court ruled that since the conduct