CPR Blogs

The Era of Bigfoot Government Is Over

Bigfoot lives, and he’s not hiding out from the paparazzi somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He drives more than 630,000 vehicles. He is the largest consumer of energy in the United States, costing taxpayers about $14.5 billion. He generates about 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly, approximately 1.4 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gases per year. Who is Bigfoot? He’s Uncle Sam, our very own federal government...

An Executive Order to Restore Transparency to Government

The Bush Administration's penchant for secrecy was one of the most corrosive aspects of the way it ran the government these last eight years. This preference for conducting government business behind closed doors ran the gamut from military and foreign policy, where secrecy is more easily justified, to regulatory policy, where it is much less justified. President-elect Obama has the authority to issue a new Executive Order on government transparency that could address and reverse the secrecy policies of the last eight years concerning regulatory government. CPR proposed a three-part Executive Order for doing the job, in its November 11 white paper, Protecting Public Health and the Environment by the Stroke of a Presidential Pen: Seven Executive Orders for the President's First 100 Days.

Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often called the nation’s premier open-government statute, and for good reason: It mandates that all government documents are available to the public unless the government can justify that a document falls within one of nine exceptions enumerated in the FOIA statute...

Holly Doremus in Slate on the Supreme Court's Ruling on Sonar and Whales

Don't miss CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus's piece in Slate, published November 14, on the Supreme Court's ruling in NRDC's challenge to the Navy's use of harmful-to-whales sonar in anit-submarine training off the California coast...