It's difficult to keep track of each individual scandal and episode of petty cronyism in the Trump White House, but the odds that one or more of Team Trump's "deregulation" teams ends up in a future front-page corruption scandal continue to increase.
To recap, the Trump administration has appointed "deregulation teams" to review existing government regulations in each top-level government agency, with an eye toward culling those regulations that the designated teams find, from Trump's hardline corporatist stance, undesirable. But the workings of those teams are, by and large, being kept secret; most agencies are refusing to even disclose who has been appointed to them. That has led to a ProPublica and New York Times effort to uncover just who the Trump team has placed on these teams.
And to the surprise of exactly nobody, those "deregulation" teams are being stuffed with recent industry lobbyists now tasked with "deregulating" the very industries they represent.
In all, there are now 85 known current and former team members, including 34 with potential conflicts.
That our own government—such as it is, at the moment—is both stuffing federal agencies with industry figures explicitly tasked with removing regulations on their industries and refusing to even tell the public just who, in each agency, is doing it, has raised the ire of Democratic—and, apparently, only Democratic—lawmakers. They've now sent a nastygram to the White House warning them that what they're doing isn't only sleazy, it's possibly illegal:
The lack of transparency has concerned several top Democratic members of Congress who serve on committees that oversee regulatory matters. In a letter to the White House on Monday, they called on the administration to release the names of all regulatory team members as well as documents relating to their potential conflicts of interest.
“It is unacceptable for federal agencies to operate in such a clandestine and unaccountable manner especially when the result could be the undoing of critical public health and safety protections,” Representatives Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia and David Cicilline of Rhode Island wrote in the letter. [...]
In their letter to the White House, the Democratic lawmakers suggested that withholding names could violate the Freedom of Information Act.
They are not currently joined by Republican leaders, who seem uninterested in whether these new teams of secret "czars" working in private to upend federal agencies may or may not be already be breaking the laws themselves. So finding out what these teams are doing may not happen until Democrats next retake Congress, which had better be soon.