Harry Litman - Beware of the Administration's "Memory Holes"
In the novel 1984, George Orwell—to my mind the most relevant political philosopher of our current straits—describes a particularly sinister feature of totalitarian government: the “memory hole.” Protagonist Winston Smith and other workers at the Ministry of Truth are given documents that are in tension with the Party’s views. They revise them to conform to the Party’s views and to exalt Big Brother. Then they throw the originals into the “memory hole,” from where they are incinerated. As the Party slogan has it, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
There has been a fair bit of focus on the Trump Administration’s ruthless campaigns to dismiss career employees at federal agencies, particularly disfavored ones such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Administration has bulldozed its way through the extensive system of regulatory protection for federal employees. Several of the 40+ lawsuits against the Administration were filed on behalf of employees or unions whose members were unlawfully fired. It’s likely that the Administration will eventually have to pay out millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to employees whose rights it ignored.
But the Administration may be making war on disfavored agencies—and public accountability—in another way: by permanently deleting public records.
The possibility stems from a lawsuit brought on behalf of CFPB employees to halt a campaign that seemed aimed at taking the Bureau down to its studs. Both Trump and Elon Musk have called for the abolition of the Bureau, and several members of Musk’s DOGE team have been installed at the CFPB.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/beware-of-the-administrations-memory
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