Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Executive orders are not posted by the Administration on whitehouse.gov (Or at least Crabgrass search has yet to find them there . . .) However EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE ONLINE.

Biden has issued several executive orders, his latest being referenced in a headline of an item linked to by Crabgrass, here.

If wanting to read the actual text of the latest Biden EO, one may search.

So, what exactly did the Biden item say? That is not an irrelevant question.

Making the story short, Crabgrass offers the following - which you can bookmark:

 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/written-presidential-orders/presidential/executive-orders

Specifically the latest Biden "competition" oriented EO:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-14036-promoting-competition-the-american-economy 

That seems straightforward, and you get to read what was ordered, vs. media commentary about what was ordered (without any link to actual text). 

Trying to hunt down EO text in the Federal Register can be frustrating. They are there, kind of, but the footers on some FR linked page state: 

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification  - stating "This page was last reviewed on November 1, 2019," while linking to another page,"Consult the Executive Orders Disposition Tables:" where that link's footer reads, "This page was last reviewed on April 13, 2021." So there!

The U.Cal Santa Barbara page link given above apparently keeps current, while frustration may arise from trying to ferret out stuff in other ways. Readers might also find help on related questions via that link's parent page

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents

Hope here is that this post may help satisfy reader curiosity.

 _________UPDATE_________

NY Times in its reporting does link to a "fact sheet" on the latest Biden order, but how to find such "fact sheets" by websearch is unclear. NYT's link is to:

 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/07/09/fact-sheet-executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy

Parsing that back one level, it is clear that whitehouse.gov posts "briefing-room" stuff in chrono order, e.g.,

 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/07/09/

which makes sense as a convenience, but is less than helpful without knowing a date to correspond to a hoped-to-find item, even from the recent past. Add to that the fact that briefing-room commentary may be useful, while still being commentary and not actual original source text.

FURTHER: In using script blocking as a web surfing security step, one has to disable blocking, often, to get a page to display. This seems to be so with whitehouse.gov Sometimes, sometimes not? The U.Cal SB site "worked" without having to mess around disabling script blocking, per the Crabgrass workstation configuration. That makes it a well behaved website.

FURTHER: A google of "fact-sheets" specific to the whitehouse.gov site, gives a return list which is not unhelpful, yet review of a return list is needed. ("I feel lucky" not being very lucky without more tuning of Google's advanced search page.)

All for now.

________FURTHER UPDATE________

Actually, the Federal Register website is current, as of end of June. And reliable. Within that time frame. When you look in the right place. Fairness is owed the site's webmasters.