Bottling Up Information

Often the only way to tell whether government is doing the job that it is supposed to be doing is to examine the information that government produces about itself. But now the Reagan Administration is studying another proposal to limit public access to the information that the federal Establishment collects and disseminates.

The draft directive has been distributed by the Office of Management and Budget to federal agencies to ask for their comments. A decision on implementing the new rule will be made in the fall. It would affect data on labor, health, housing, the economy, trade, the environment and other subjects.

The expressed idea is to save money. Many times in the past, the Administration has mocked the idea of the government’s printing booklets, for instance, that teach people how to raise squash or honey bees. It has suggested that certain weather-forecasting duties and satellite-mapping be turned over to private enterprise. A number of government publications have been killed.

The OMB directive says that agencies must make a case for distribution of its information to the public. In doing so, each agency must consider whether the same information might be collected and published by some business enterprise if it were not available from the government. This is virtually an open-ended invitation to stop the official flow of information, since there will always be a demand for the data that government collects and analyzes. But the government should be doing the collecting and analyzing, not some third party interested primarily in making a profit.

If the decision is made not to publish the information, the OMB noted, the public can always get it by request through individual agency policies, the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. This is a dubious alternative. How does one know what to ask for? And the Administration has repeatedly attempted to limit the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.

The irony of the OMB proposal is that it comes from a conservative Administration that distrusts big government. Yet the only way to keep big government accountable is to make it report thoroughly to the people on the people’s business, and share the information on which decisions are made.

An Administration that talks often about individual freedom and liberty seems to be overlooking an essential ingredient of a free society: a government that does not attempt to keep information from its people.