Bush Hits the Delete Button

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•  In 2004 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stopped providing data demonstrating the level of its job performance. In 2006 a federal judge forced the IRS to provide the information.

•  In early 2001 the Treasury Department stopped producing reports showing how the benefits of tax cuts were distributed by income class.

•  For more than a year, the Interior Department refused to release a 2005 study showing that a government subsidy for oil companies was not effective.

•  The National Council for Research on Women’s Mis­Information Clearinghouse project found that under Bush, the Department of Labor removed from its website “Don’t Work in the Dark—Know Your Rights,” a publication informing women of their workplace rights. The Department of Labor also scrubbed its website of more than a dozen fact sheets on women’s workplace issues such as women in management, earning differences between men and women, child care concerns, and minority women in the workplace. In February 2004 the appointed head of the Office of Special Counsel—created to protect government employees’ rights—ordered removed from a government website information on the rights of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals in the public workplace.

Miscellany

•  In November 2007 a U.S. District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the White House from destroying back-up copies of millions of e-mails deleted (the White House says accidentally) between March 2003 and October 2005.

•  In 2006 the Federal Communications Commission ordered destroyed all copies of an unreleased 2004 draft report concluding that media consolidation hurt local TV news coverage, a position that runs counter to Bush’s pro-consolidation stance.

•  In March 2006 the Department of Health and Human Services took down a six-year-old website devoted to substance abuse and treatment information for gays and lesbians after members of the conservative Family Research Council complained.

•  The White House Office of National Drug Policy paid for a $43 million study that concluded, in 2005, that their anti-drug ad campaigns did not work—but it refused to release those findings for a year and a half.

•  When the Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming in 2004, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools.

Excerpted from TPMmuckraker.com (Nov. 23, 2007). 

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