but sometimes government officials have to perform official duties that require confidentiality.
If by “sometimes” you mean “they’ll make you sign a NDA to tell you 8 hours before everyone else it’s Taco Tuesday”…
Yeah, that’s pretty close
NDAs aren’t rare at all, and I wish it was surprising no one on Lemmy seems to have actual governmental experience.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
Hey jackass, I had to sign an NDA when I left my government job because I held a security clearance. I know more about it than you do.
Trite quips about taco tuesday aside, government jobs require confidentiality about some things, and transparency about others. There’s no contradiction there, but ideally it should be unambiguous where the boundary is. Those things should be clearly defined.
A good start, albeit still overly simplistic, would be to say confidentiality concerning information belonging to their constituents, and transparency concerning information belonging to corporations and their donors. Unfortunately that still leaves a lot of vaguery and wiggle-room.
But I’m no policy-maker, so even if I were to write a twenty-page document defining everything in minute detail, it still wouldn’t matter.