The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Agriculture have been placed under de facto gag orders by the administration of US President Donald Trump, according to documents obtained by news organizations.
Trump has banned EPA employees from “providing updates on social media or to reporters,” according to interagency e-mails first obtained by the Associated Press, and barred them from awarding new contracts or grants as well.
Trump is reportedly planning cuts and rollbacks for the agency.
Photo: AFP
This follows similar guidance to Agriculture Department employees, who were instructed in an internal memo obtained by Buzzfeed not to release “any public-facing documents” including “news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds and social media content” until further notice.
Specifically the request was made to employees of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), its primary research wing, which is heavily involved in research regarding climate change.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Agriculture Department called the e-mail sent to staff “flawed” and said the proposed policy would be replaced.
“This internal e-mail was released without departmental direction, and prior to departmental guidance being issued,” the statement read. “ARS values and is committed to maintaining the free flow of information between our scientists and the American public.”
The two blackouts bring to at least five the number of federal agencies that have been ordered silent by Trump in as many days.
In Tuesday’s briefing, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer said he needed to look further into the matter before making any comment.
Over the weekend, the US Department of the Interior’s social media privileges were briefly suspended by the president after the National Park Service published a picture comparing Trump’s inauguration crowd to that of then-US president Barack Obama in 2009.
The tweet has since been deleted, and the park agency’s Twitter account has apologized.
“They had inappropriately violated their own social media policies,” Spicer told reporters on Tuesday. “There was guidance that was put out to the department to act in compliance with the rules that were set forth.”
At about the time of Spicer’s briefing, the social media account for the Badlands National Park seemed to defy whatever guidance had been given it by the Trump administration.
The Badlands account started tweeting dire predictions about global warming, for instance that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”
No one replied to requests for interviews at the South Dakota branch of the parks agency.
As of about 5.30pm on Tuesday, its tweets had apparently been deleted.
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