Unresponsive Government Response A Task For A New President

In times of old, the American people trusted institutions of journalism to let them know about government activities. The nightly news or the morning newspaper would tell us if something important was going on, we figured.

In more recent times, though, the institutions of journalism have withered, and been replaced with institutions of entertainment. Fewer reporters are writing more about popular culture and less about our government. In such circumstances, interested citizens need to rely more on the ability to get information directly from the government.

If there is any government office that we should be able to count on to provide us with up-to-date information, that office would be the Office of Response and Restoration at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s the office that deals with threats to “coastal and marine resources” – the ecological integrity of sea and shore.

When it comes to giving information about its activities to the American public, however, the Office of Response and Restoration isn’t very responsive. Looking for information about the office’s activities, I searched the page of recent press releases, only to find that the most recent press release there was two years old.

It seems like a little problem when looking for information from one government office. When considered at the scale of the federal government in general, however, we can see national crisis of out-of-date and incomplete information. Search through the many offices of the Executive Branch online, and you’ll see that, more often than not, communication about what our government is doing has fallen by the wayside.

When it comes the work of the President of the United States, the big issues matter, but so does attention to detail. When a new President is inaugurated next January, we’ll hear lofty speeches, and that’s fine, but when the microphone is turned off, the President will need to direct a government-wide project of restoring healthy communication to the public.