The Bush Administration is getting quite good at death by budget, knocking off two federal open government programs in the last couple of weeks. Tony Soprano would be impressed.

Late last month, the administration submitted their 2009 budget, where it was revealed they eliminated the key provision of the Open Government Act of 2007 - the ombudsman whose job it is to oversee all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. They pulled it off by moving the office from the National Archives and Records Administration to the Department of Justice where it is doomed to ineffectual exile. The second hit was on EconomicIndicators.gov, an award-winning web site full of current economic data at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The site will be put in mothballs effective March 1st. The administration said it was a budget cutting decision. The Web site has gotten a lot of attention for how easily it allows citizens to access the daily releases of key economic indicators and to cross reference the data among various bureaus and would send out e-mails to registered users whenever new economic data was released. Sure, Think Progress writes, the data will still be available but much harder - much much harder to access. Most of us wouldn't have the time to go and look at the individual sites and even know where to look for it.

This afternoon, our friends at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) got a major victory for all who care for openness and transparency. 

A federal judge ruled that the logs kept by the Secret Service of visitors to the White House and the Vice President's residence are public records and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The Bush White House had been fighting the release of the documents in an effort to hide evidence and details of visits from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prominent religious conservative leaders. The White House insists that the logs are presidential records and should not be public, and wants the Secret Service to destroy its copies of the logs once they are turned over to the White House. They were wrong.

In sum, according to CREW: "As a result of today's ruling, records of visits to both the White House complex and the residency of the vice president are now publicly available through the FOIA."

With two stories out today, one from the New York Times and the other from the Washington Post, we learn that everything the Justice Department told Congress was factually-impaired. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez claimed that there was nothing political about the firings, except that the President's Counsel Harriet Miers and the President's chief political operative created the list of Attorney's to axe and Justice was in discussions all along. In the beginning the White House wanted to fire all 93 Attorneys only to scale back this plan when it was deemed by Rove to be politically impossible. (For those paying attention that would have included U.S. Attorney for the District of Illinois (Northern) Patrick Fitzgerald, the guy prosecuting a case against the Vice President's right-hand man.)