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White House Produces No Evidence It Considered Public Input on Reorganizing Government

Government Executive: “The White House has no records relating to its categorization or analysis of public input on how it should reorganize government, according to the results of a lawsuit filed by a watchdog group. Following President Trump’s 2017 executive order calling on all federal agencies to reform themselves by shedding workers and restructuring their operations, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney personally called on American citizens to submit their ideas for “making the federal government more efficient, effective and accountable to the American people.” OMB subsequently set up a website for the public to submit those ideas, and later said it had received more than 100,000 submissions and distributed them to relevant agencies. It then took the site down, leading Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to submit a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the public feedback. PEER, a frequent critic of the Trump administration, sued OMB after it did not hear back. That in turn led OMB’s FOIA office to inform PEER that it had “conducted a search of its files for documents that are responsive to the request and no responsive records were located…”

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