Editorial: Sunshine Week highlights the need to keep defending transparency in government

Access to information about the government, and by the government, is one of the major issues of this second Donald Trump administration. It only highlights the importance of government transparency, which should always be a public priority.

The need for people to have access to information about their government is especially highlighted this coming week. Sunshine Week begins Sunday; it’s a time when news media, defenders of the Constitution and others who value honest and open government focus on, and advocate for, the free flow of information and the rights not only of the media but of all Americans to know what their elected officials are doing and how their tax dollars being spent.

Now more than ever, we need to appreciate freedom of information and defend it against government attacks.

Those attacks have been coming fast and heavy by the new administration, which has long worked to convince Americans that traditional, unbiased reporting is “fake news,” and insisting that people only pay attention to their own self-serving pronouncements.

Such attacks are the reason Sunshine Week was established in 2002. It is held each year to coincide with the March 16 birthday of James Madison, our fourth president and “father of the Constitution.”

The name stems from a famous quote by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” with regard to government corruption.

The need for open government has been proven countless times over our nation’s first quarter millennium, both nationally and locally.

Over the years many officials in the Rio Grande Valley and the state have sought to inhibit open government. The countless cases of corruption that has been uncovered by the media and other members of the public have proven, time and again, the need for open government.

In the past two months the Trump administration has waged a constant war against the media, and the courts, regarding their activities. He’s gone as far as to threaten to jail those who report negatively on the administration, regardless of how accurate that reporting might be.

At the same time, his offices have shone their own light on the contrast between the right of the people to know what their government is doing and the limits on the government’s ability to access private information about the public.

The Department of Government Efficiency alone has faced widespread criticism and several court orders in this matter. Many have questioned the group’s efforts to access all Americans’ Social Security numbers, bank account records and tax returns, while fought its refusal to provide requested information about the identities and qualifications of the people seeking that access and the criteria they used to justify the tens of thousands of government employees they have fired in recent weeks.

A compliant Congress and fawning Supreme Court justices further complicate the issue.

The lessons offered during Sunshine Week are valuable now more than ever, and a reminder that the disinfectant against corruption and tyranny will always be needed.

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