On Friday, the White House announced that it will no longer make visitor logs public and shut down open.gov, an Obama-era website that made government data, including the aforementioned visitor logs, available and easily searchable by the public. As The New York Times notes, “the decision breaks with past practice and returns a cloak of secrecy over the basic day-to-day workings of the administration.”
Open.gov was a bright spot in the Obama administration’s otherwise abysmal transparency record. It made over six million visitor records public. But Trump is the least transparent president in recent history and the first since Richard Nixon to not release his tax returns when running for president. (His administration is also easily the shadiest since Nixon’s.) The decision to shutter open.gov is a sign that the Trump administration will be even less transparent than the Obama administration, which is bad for everyone—except the Trump administration.