Advocates of open government are sounding the alarm that local, state and federal officials are too quickly sacrificing public access to the cause of public health during the coronavirus pandemic.
"This is the worst time to be putting up obstacles to access," said Daniel Bevarly, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, a group of state and national organizations promoting access to the meetings and records of government.
Bevarly is referring to a recent flood of emergency legislative changes, courthouse closures, orders from governors and mayors, and legal guidance from attorneys general making it more difficult to watch government in action — and at a time when officials are making sometimes unprecedented economic and public safety decisions in managing the Covid-19 outbreak.
The ability of journalists and citizens to attend and participate in public meetings and obtain public records is a backbone of our democracy. It allows for the informed involvement and input of regular citizens in the decision-making process. In addition, the oversight from the public and the media prevents improper actions before they happen and allows for the exposure of wrongdoing to the cleansing effects of sunshine.
The most common change so far is one that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California made this month by executive order: allowing local and state bodies in the nation's most populous state to meet on the telephone. (Most state public access laws require that the majority of a public body meet together at a location open to the public.)
GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana was a little more aggressive in his executive order last week, suspending the requirement allowing for public participation in meetings. His order also temporarily banned telephone requests for public records and suspended one of the initial deadlines that agencies have to respond to records requests.
Carolina Beach, a town of 6,700 on the North Carolina coast just south of Wilmington, provides a good example of what happens when a public body — in an attempt to deal with an emergency — gets itself sideways with open meeting laws.
The Town Council appears to have violated the law last week when — after an influx of students on spring break and with no interest in social distancing — it went behind closed doors to discuss possibly closing the beaches and declaring a state of emergency.
The law requires a public policy matter of that sort to be discussed in a public meeting. Town officials apparently were also unaware they were required to cite, in public, one of the specific reasons the law allows for closing the meeting.
Another open government group, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is maintaining a running list of changes being made in federal and state access laws in response to coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, Bevarly's group, issued a statement last week signed by 132 state and national open government organizations saying that technology is available to assure public access and involvement in meetings even if they are not held in a state capital, county courthouse or city hall.
"We strongly urge government branches and agencies to recommit to, and not retrench from, their duty to include the public in the policy-making process," they said."Government bodies should not opportunistically take advantage of the public's inability to attend large gatherings to make critical decisions affecting the public's interest if those decisions can reasonably be postponed."
If meetings must be held, the coalition of groups argued, governments should be sure to tell the public when and where they are happening and how they can participate. Widely available technology should be used to conduct the sessions and a record created for quick posting online.
Regarding government records, the statement advises officials to lean toward public disclosure without requiring citizens to go through a request process that could involve long delays.
Another concern, Bevarly said, is that elected and appointed public officials — many of whom are working from home — make sure they use their government phones and email accounts to communicate about official business and that their texts and emails be archived.
So far in Washington, meanwhile, the number of reporters at the White House and in the Capitol has been curtailed because of the relatively cramped conditions.
But a daily briefing by President Trump and senior officials managing the government's coronavirus response has become a fixture on TV. And access to officials has remained largely unchanged during the negotiations on the $2 trillion economic stabilization package, except that most senators have stayed in their offices and most House members have gone back to their districts.
Bevarly said some governments are woefully behind in their use of technology to engage citizens. "This is a golden opportunity to revisit this kind of engagement," he said.
The rush of changes to access rules during the pandemic started, ironically, as access groups and media organizations celebrated Sunshine Week beginning March 15. The annual event is intended to highlight the importance of open access — sunshine, in a sense — to the proper operation of American democracy.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.