National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

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Who knows, why should they feel obligated to supply any kind of rationale for their actions? [edit: /s]Here is the sum total of detail they have provided: “ All researchers must apply and present a researcher card, which may be obtained in Room 1000. This ensures that proper identification is on file for all individuals accessing the building to establish a legitimate business purpose. Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities.”

Every aspect of government should provide the public with rationale for its actions unless providing that rationale is an actual threat to national security or an individual's freedoms. And any time they can't provide rationale for those reasons, an independent agency should review them confidentially. You can't have government by the people, for the people, of the people without accountability.

This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense people actually rail against.

You're assuming you'd get something truthful or informative out of that process, when in reality you'll get the opposite due to the inherit (dis)incentives.

Right, I guess we should throw up our hands and let the dictator of the week run things as he sees, with no oversight.

If it meaningfully impacts the public, the public should have input. The input doesn't need to be binding, but it needs to be taken into consideration. Representative government is not a once-every-four-years exercise, nor is it something that should only be accessible to the mega-rich.

There's an entire process for this among many rule-making agencies in every level of government, across the world. It serves as, at minimum, a public record of objections and concerns, and at times that public feedback identifies a problem that the rule-drafters failed to address.

It doesn't, and can't prevent outright malice by a capricious autocrat, who only works to make his backroom friends happy. But it does make a public record of that malice.