Ah, the old bureaucratic merry-go-round: where FOIA requests go to die, accountability gets lost in a stack of red tape, and the truth—well, the truth just gets “routed” to someone else’s inbox.
Welcome to the Biden administration’s version of transparency, where government agencies are playing hot potato with public records like they’re hiding the nuclear codes, not emails from a pandemic advisor who just so happens to be the sister of a former press secretary.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about some obscure policy memo or coffee-stained meeting notes. This is about how the United States government responded to one of the most catastrophic public health crises in modern history. Americans were told to stay home, mask up, shutter their businesses, jab their arms, and keep their kids out of classrooms—for the good of “the science,” of course.
But years later, when someone dares ask, “Hey, can we see what you were basing all this on?” the answer is… crickets. Or worse, “Check with another department.” And when you do? “Oops, nope, back where you started.”
This is Keystone Cops meets Kafka, and it’s all happening under the administration that promised to “restore norms” and “follow the science.” But evidently, the only science they’re following is political science—specifically, the chapter on “How to Avoid Scrutiny While Pretending You’re Transparent.”
Let’s talk about Stephanie Psaki for a second. Yes, that Psaki. Sister to Jen, the same Jen who stood behind the White House podium spinning the kind of narratives that make a Hollywood scriptwriter blush. Stephanie didn’t just appear out of nowhere—she was already knee-deep in policy shaping at HHS before gliding over to the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
That’s the office that’s supposed to offer “scientific and technological analysis and judgment” to the President. Sounds important, right? Sounds like the kind of place where you’d maybe want to know what the staff was discussing while the rest of the country was locked down, dosed up, and scared out of its collective mind.
But instead of answers, we get a bureaucratic scavenger hunt. OSTP says the records are with NARA. NARA says they’re not. OSTP says, “Actually, we already transferred them.” NARA replies, “Well, we don’t have legal custody.” Translation? Nobody wants to be the one holding the bag when the emails start flying and we find out just how “scientific” those decisions really were. Spoiler alert: it probably has more to do with politics than epidemiology.
Meanwhile, the media yawns. Imagine if this kind of dodgeball had happened under Trump. CNN would have a countdown clock, Rachel Maddow would be mid-monologue, and The Washington Post would have trotted out another 5,000-word piece on “threats to democracy.” But since this involves Democrats, the coverage is conveniently muted, like a car alarm going off in a bad neighborhood—annoying, but no one’s actually calling the cops.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the American people deserve answers. They deserve to know how decisions were made during the darkest days of the pandemic. They deserve to understand whether their government was leaning on sound science—or just soundbites. But as long as the Biden administration keeps playing keep-away with these records, that truth stays buried under layers of plausible deniability and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.
And in the end, that might be the most revealing data point of all.
