In legal circles, a “pattern or practice” refers to routine conduct rather than isolated or accidental incidents. While the Trump administration, enabled by Republican-controlled House and Senate, claims to be the “most transparent in history,” its actions reveal a calculated strategy of obstruction. Consider a few examples of its non-transparent patterns. First, the Epstein files, despite a congressional mandate for their release, have only been made public for half of the files, months past the legal deadline and obscured by unnecessary and unlawful heavy redactions. Second, the Department of Health and Human Services hosts a webpage titled “Radical Transparency,” yet it routinely ignores Freedom of Information Act requests. Hundreds of inquiries from news outlets and public interest groups regarding topics including Medicaid, women’s health care and infectious disease control have gone unanswered for months. Lastly, the Departments of Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development, have unilaterally taken numerous actions despite their statutory duties to seek public comment before implementing new regulations. These actions are not “one-offs” or simple administrative delays. Rather, they constitute a deliberate pattern and practice of obstruction and non-transparency designed to evade accountability and keep the public in the dark. To put it simply, when the “foxes are guarding the hen-house,” oversight vanishes. The solution is clear; we must restore accountability by voting to ensure checks and balances by flipping the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
Timothy Knoster, Lewisburg