随着民主党在中期选举中取得决定性胜利，即将上任的委员会主席们承诺将发起一轮调查攻势。调查目标包括移民与海关执法局可能滥用职权，以及现代美国历史上前所未有的自我敛财文化。
With Democrats’ decisive midterm election wins, incoming committee chairs are promising a blitz of investigations. Targets include potential abuses of power by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a culture of self-enrichment without precedent in modern American history.
这是对近两年几乎不受制约的行政权力的适当反应。但这些调查的质量取决于机构和白宫保存的记录，以及负责公开这些记录的系统的有效性和独立性。如果立法者要求的记录已被销毁或消失在加密的自毁应用中，或者机构继续将其分类权力武器化，立法者将受阻。这种反问责的混淆视听有望在两个方面上演。
This is an appropriate reaction to two years of nearly unchecked executive power. But these investigations can be only as good as the records that agencies and the White House have preserved, and the effectiveness and independence of the system charged with releasing them. Lawmakers will be stymied if the records they demand have been destroyed or have vanished into encrypted, auto-deleting apps, or if agencies continue to weaponize their classification authority. This anti-accountability obfuscation is poised to play out on two fronts.
在联邦各机构中，几乎没有理由相信那些经常阻挠的政治任命官员会开始配合国会调查。在特朗普第二任期内，保密已成为常态。我们可能会看到各机构拒绝回应委员会的信息请求，忽视有关调查主题的《信息自由法》请求，并继续从政府网站上清除公共信息。这一切因政府系统性清洗职业监察长，并用迄今仍不愿调查浪费、滥用和潜在销毁证据的政治忠诚者取代这些独立专业人士而更加严重。
Across federal agencies, there is little reason to believe political appointees who regularly stonewall will begin complying with congressional inquiries. Secrecy has been the norm in the second Trump administration. We are likely to see agencies refuse to respond to committee requests for information, ignore Freedom of Information Act requests on investigative topics and continue to scrub government websites of public information. All this is compounded by the administration’s systematic purging of career inspectors general and replacement of those independent professionals with political loyalists so far unwilling to investigate waste, abuse and potential destruction of evidence.
在白宫内部，保密策略可能会变得更加肆无忌惮。为了确保从总统唐纳德·特朗普的工作文件到斯蒂芬·米勒等高级任命官员的通讯等关键记录永不见天日，司法部正在加倍坚持其（毫无根据的）理论，即《总统记录法》违宪，且总统可以隐瞒、销毁我们的公共历史，或者将其出售给出价最高者。许多此类记录记录了私人利益与政府政策是如何发生冲突的，因此它们是特朗普及其家人在任期间如何致富的核心所在。
Inside the White House, secrecy tactics could grow even more brazen. To ensure that critical records — from President Donald Trump’s working papers to the communications of high-level appointees, such as Stephen Miller — never see the light of day, the Justice Department is doubling down on its (baseless) theory that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and the president can withhold, destroy or sell our public history to the highest bidder. Many such records document how private interests and government policy have collided, so are at the core of how Trump and his family have enriched themselves while in office.
我的组织——新闻自由基金会，正与“华盛顿责任与道德公民”组织一起在法庭上对这一做法提出挑战。但如果司法部得逞，特朗普在任期结束时将被允许再次毫无后果地将总统文件带到海湖庄园，而不是像现行法律要求的那样将其交还给国家档案和记录管理局以供最终的公众查阅。
My organization, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, is challenging this effort in court alongside Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. But if the DOJ succeeds, Trump will be allowed to once again take presidential papers with him to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his term without consequence, rather than surrendering them to the National Archives and Records Administration for eventual public inspection, as the law currently requires.
简而言之，除非整个透明度基础设施得到加强，否则调查个别丑闻将只是一种徒劳的练习。正因如此，在前总统理查德·尼克松滥用职权之后，国会所做的事情远不止举行听证会和发出传票：议员们构建了为现代监督奠定基础的法定框架。他们将《总统记录法》法典化，强化了《信息自由法》，创建了督察长框架等。
Simply put, investigating individual scandals will be an exercise in futility unless transparency infrastructure as a whole is strengthened. That’s why in the wake of former President Richard Nixon’s abuses, Congress did much more than hold hearings and issue subpoenas: Lawmakers built the statutory framework that laid the groundwork for modern oversight. They codified the Presidential Records Act, strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, created the inspector general framework and more.
下一届国会应当遵循这些先例，并强化透明度法律，使其足以经受住当今威胁的考验。怀疑论者会争辩说，面对准备行使否决权的白宫，全面的透明度改革注定失败，但历史证明事实恰恰相反。透明度是极少数拥有持续的、可推翻总统否决权的跨党派支持记录的领域之一。1974年的《信息自由法》修正案是在国会推翻了前总统杰拉尔德·福特的否决后才成为法律的。更近一些时候，《爱泼斯坦档案透明度法案》在众议院以427票对1票获得通过。
The next Congress should follow those precedents and reinforce transparency laws so they are strong enough to withstand today’s threats. Skeptics will argue that sweeping transparency reforms are a lost cause against a White House poised to exercise its veto power, but history proves the opposite is true. Transparency is one of the few areas with a consistent record of veto-proof bipartisan support. The 1974 FOIA amendments became law only after Congress overrode former President Gerald Ford’s veto. More recently, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427-1.
透明度授权赢得了绝对多数的支持——议员们无需总统批准就能办成此事。
Transparency mandates command supermajorities — and lawmakers don’t need the president to get it done.
继承“水门事件”之后的政治遗产，要从重建公众的知情权开始。由于国会从未向《信息自由法》提供充足的资金，这些办公室长期以来一直因人手不足、缺乏资源和政治干预而陷入恶化。特朗普政府对联邦政府进行了激烈的重组，许多《信息自由法》办公室被缩减或撤销，这更加剧了透明度的崩溃。其结果是，尽管公众每年提交的申请越来越多，但人们等待的时间却越来越长，最终收到的却是在诸如美国移民及海关执法局的使用武力情况以及针对伊朗的军事行动等关键问题上不充分的信息。
Carrying the post-Watergate legacy forward begins with rebuilding the public’s right to know. Because Congress has never adequately funded FOIA, these offices have long been degraded by understaffing, lack of resources and political interference. This transparency collapse has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s drastic restructuring of the federal government, with many FOIA offices shrunk or dismantled. The result is that even as the public is filing more requests every year, people are waiting longer, only to receive inadequate information on critical issues such as ICE’s use of force and military action against Iran.
国会必须为《信息自由法》提供有保障的资金。国会还应当强制进行更多的主动公开，对故意阻挠信息发布的官员施加惩罚，并将《信息自由法》的适用范围扩大到私人监狱和拘留设施。
Congress must provide guaranteed funding for FOIA. It should also mandate more proactive public disclosures, impose penalties for officials who willfully obstruct releases and extend FOIA to private prison and detention facilities.
这项工作还将要求关闭滋生腐败的秘密渠道。首先要实现《政府道德法》的现代化，要求行政部门官员及其家属提供实时且可检索的公开申报表格，明确将数字资产和加密货币作为目标。国会还必须解决私人总统基金会与政府运营的总统图书馆之间模糊不清的关系，特朗普曾利用这种关系接受了来自卡塔尔的一架价值4亿美元的豪华客机以及其他可疑捐款。为此，通过参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦的《总统图书馆反腐败法》将确保对这些基金会的捐款不会成为个人且无法追踪的小金库。
This effort will also demand shutting down the secret avenues that feed corruption. Start with modernizing the Ethics in Government Act to require real-time and searchable disclosure forms for executive branch officials and their families, specifically targeting digital assets and cryptocurrency. Congress must also address the murky relationship between private presidential foundations and government-run presidential libraries, which Trump exploited to accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, among other questionable donations. To this end, passage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act would ensure donations to these foundations don’t function as a personal and untraceable slush fund.
赋予国家档案和记录管理局权力也至关重要。该机构无法在停滞数十年的预算中生存的同时执行保存工作，这使得公共档案面临被非法销毁和不受限制的过度保密的风险。国会必须将国家档案和记录管理局的预算翻倍，保护专业档案工作者免受政治清洗，赋予美国国家档案局局长对其他机构档案进行解密的权力，并确保该机构的领导层具备胜任该职位的技术专业知识和独立性。
Empowering our nation’s archives is also paramount. NARA cannot enforce preservation while surviving on a budget that has stagnated for decades, leaving public records exposed to unlawful destruction and unchecked overclassification. Congress must double NARA’s budget, insulate professional archivists from political purges, equip the archivist of the United States with authority to declassify other agencies’ records and ensure the agency’s leadership has the technical expertise and independence for the job.
最后，议员必须废除秘密法律，并保护冒着一切风险向公众通报机构不当行为的政府吹哨人。几十年来，过度保密使重要信息一直处于隐蔽状态——从法律解释到爱泼斯坦档案等备受瞩目的披露。这种保密状态使得政府浪费滋生，并使公职人员免于承担责任。国会目前缺乏直接强制机构解密记录的权力，即便这些记录被不当分类。
Finally, lawmakers must dismantle secret law and protect government whistleblowers who risk everything to inform the public of agency wrongdoing. For decades, overclassification has kept important information hidden — from legal interpretations to high-profile disclosures such as the Epstein files. This secrecy has allowed government waste to fester and insulated public officials from accountability. Congress currently lacks the power to directly compel agencies to declassify records, even when they are improperly classified.
相反，议员通常指示机构审查记录以供公开发布，这根本无法保证解密。一些国会授命发布的记录拖延了数十年之久。议员可以通过以下方式开始缩小这一透明度差距：强制主动披露法律顾问办公室的意见，迫使机构建立严格的保密标准，并将蓄意滥用的惩罚法典化，从而开始控制过度保密。在此类改进的基础上，通过众议员拉希达·特莱布提出的《丹尼尔·埃尔斯伯格新闻自由与吹哨人保护法》，为那些暴露公众有权了解、而其所属机构又拒绝解密的的信息的人提供保障。
Instead, lawmakers usually direct agencies to review records for release, which does not come close to guaranteeing declassification. Some congressionally mandated releases stall for decades. Lawmakers could begin closing this transparency gap by mandating the proactive disclosure of Office of Legal Counsel opinions, forcing agencies to establish strict classification standards, and codifying penalties for willful abuse to begin reining in overclassification. Build on these fixes by passing Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, guaranteeing protection for those who expose information the public has a right to see that their agencies refuse to declassify.
中期选举的选民踩下了该国向独裁和窃国体制滑落的刹车，但斗争远未结束。如果新国会在我们的透明度基础设施瓦解的同时进行单独调查，那么大门将完全敞开，供下一位潜在的独裁者长驱直入。
Midterm voters put the brakes on the country’s slide toward autocracy and kleptocracy, but the battle is far from over. If the new Congress pursues individual investigations while our transparency infrastructure disintegrates, the door will remain wide open for the next would-be authoritarian to walk through.