Obama revokes Bush EO 13233
According to the National Coalition for History:
The President today signed two Executive Orders and three Presidential Memoranda. These five documents represent a bold first step to fulfill his campaign promises to make government more responsible and accountable, to launch sweeping ethics reform, and to begin a new era of transparent and open government.
. . .
Finally, the Executive Order on Presidential Records brings those principles to presidential records by giving the American people greater access to these historic documents. This order ends the practice of having others besides the President assert executive privilege for records after an administration ends. Now, only the President will have that power, limiting its potential for abuse. And the order also requires the Attorney General and the White House Counsel to review claims of executive privilege about covered records to make sure those claims are fully warranted by the Constitution.
Also of interest to archivists and historians, was the Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government and the Presidential Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act. In these:
the President instructs all members of his administration to operate under principles of openness, transparency and of engaging citizens with their government. To implement these principles and make them concrete, the Memorandum on Transparency instructs three senior officials to produce an Open Government Directive within 120 days directing specific actions to implement the principles in the Memorandum. And the Memorandum on FOIA instructs the Attorney General to in that same time period issue new guidelines to the government implementing those same principles of openness and transparency in the FOIA context.
Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard to lobby for these kinds of reforms!
Advocacy, Government information, National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) | Kate T. | 
January 21, 2009 2:40 pm
3 Comments
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Akten(-vernichtung) für Gerichte oder Geschichte? — January 31, 2009 @ 8:58 am
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By Gina Strack, January 22, 2009 @ 10:49 am
This is great news about the E.O., thank for sharing (long time reader, first comment). I researched and wrote about the recent changes to the Presidential Records Act in a paper for a school class after seeing discussion about on the Archives & Archivists listserv (http://students.washington.edu/ladygina/526/article.htm). It was a fascinating subject that I still like follow almost 2 years later.
By Richard Allen, January 22, 2009 @ 4:29 pm
It is an important administrative step towards openness in government in the US, but an important message to the world in general because without proper recordkeeping governments cannot be held properly to account as has been shown up in the notorious Heiner affair case in Australia.
Well done.