James R. Jacobs,
US Government Information Librarian at Stanford University.
Stress test
Most democracies will claim they have built-in protection from radical politicians acting illegally. But when the bottom line is the law, that safety net depends on the speed and power of the legal system. James says: “Almost all of Trump’s executive orders are illegal on their face because they abrogate the separation of powers set out in the US Constitution.” He pointed out that farmers groups had won a lawsuit to restore climate-related data, but added: “Unfortunately, this adminis- tration is ‘flooding the zone’ and doing its illegal actions very quickly and the US legal system – which has always been slow! – is in the midst of an unprecedented political stress test.”
Even the deletion schedules are opaque: “This administration’s actions are seem- ingly random, but always malicious and capricious and the exact opposite of ‘trans- parent’. We really are living in Orwell’s 1984! Yes, they are working off a list of words that this administration doesn’t like or agree with. But it is causing things like the deletion from the Dept of Defense website of an image of the WWII airplane called Enola Gay because some automated AI web search found the term ‘gay’. Their ineptitude would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging.”
Why is the law failing?
Trumps actions are exacerbating pre-exist- ing problems as well as adding new ones.
Photo © Wayne Vanderkuil.
“Historically, government information has been published in paper format (primarily) and we have long received reports and documents through the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP –
https://fdlp.gov).” But due to the shift online, James says: “My collection development work has shifted online as well. I started the LOCKSS-USDOCS program 16 years ago
(
http://lockss-usdocs.stanford.edu) to provide a collaborative preservation network focused on preserving the digital pub- lications produced by the Government Publishing Office (GPO)… a failsafe for disappearing information and a network of access points to the public.” However, there are big glitches. “There’s a law called Title 44 of the US Code which requires agencies to send their publica- tions to GPO for distribution to the FDLP, but with the advent of the internet, most agencies ignore that law, so you’ll see that
govinfo.gov includes only a small amount of content from the executive branch. If agencies would follow the law, much more content and data would be hosted on Govinfo. gov and preservation would be assured in a distributed and collaborative way to assure free access for the long-term.” James says another project, which he has been working on since 2008, aims to address some of this problem. End of Term Archive (
https://eotarchive.org) takes a broad and deep snapshot of the federal .gov/.mil web domain every four years.
Library role President Donald Trump signs Executive Orders. Photo via Wiki Commons Rewired 2025
In his more detailed answers in a Q&A (
https://tinyurl.com/IndepthQA), James lists a number of other library-led projects that
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