This seems like a familiar story. A celebrated national park has been crippled by the Bush administration’s budgets.
A federal report says that a shortage of operating funds from the Bush administration is crippling this park, where 3.2 million people last year visited rain forests, alpine trails and one of the nation’s longest wild coastlines.
“Core operations of the park are not funded sufficiently to meet the basic goals and mission of the park as defined by Congress,” says the report, called the Olympic National Park Business Plan. It says the park receives only about half the money it needs.
But that’s not the familiar part. As this administration has done repeatedly, the report detailing the funding problems for the Olympic National Park is being hidden from the public.
[T]he business plan — a detailed enumeration of the kind of chronic budget shortfalls that are forcing cutbacks in national parks across the United States — has not been released to the public. Handsomely printed copies are gathering dust here at park headquarters.
A National Park Service official, who asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation, said the report has not been released because the Bush administration “doesn’t like bad news. They don’t like to see or hear about it or fix it. And they punish the messenger.”
This sure does happen a lot.
That anonymous NPS official is unfortunately right — the administration “doesn’t like bad news” and apparently will go to great lengths to keep unpleasantness from public view. Just a few months ago, for example, we learned that Bush’s HHS hid embarrassing data in a government report about health, race, and poverty. When an annual report showed how and why minorities receive less health care, and less high-quality care, than whites, across a broad range of diseases, administration officials intervened to make the results look less damaging and hide the truth from the public.
This keeps happening. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics was prepared to publish data about factory closings in the U.S., the administration intervened to cancel the report and hide the data. When an administration report was going to show that the feds weren’t doing enough to help states in the midst of fiscal crises, the White House announced the report wouldn’t be published anymore. When an EPA report was going to mention global warming in a report on global environmental problems, the White House stepped in to delete references that were inconsistent with Bush’s political agenda.
Why bother trying to come up with persuasive spin when you can just hide the bad news and pretend it doesn’t exist?
A year ago, when there were even fewer examples of this, the incomparable Molly Ivins explained that the White House may be on to something clever.
“Think of the possibilities presented by this ingenious solution. Let’s edit out AIDS and all problems with drugs both legal and illegal. We could get rid of Libya and Syria this way — take ’em off the maps. We can do away with unemployment, the uninsured, heart disease, obesity and the coming Social Security crunch. We could try editing out death and taxes, but I don’t think we should overreach right away. Just start with something simple, like years of scientific research on global warming, and blue pencil that sucker out of existence. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.”