It turns out that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill, now law, allows him to appoint whomever he wishes to 37 posts handling open records requests -- jobs that used to be plain old civil-service gigs. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel also reports that Mr. Walker now gets to make the top attorney job for state labor law his own political appointment, even though that agency sometimes has to face down the governor.
What's that got to do with repairing the budget? Maybe not much. It would seem to have much more to do with power, namely Mr. Walker's. "I don't think there's any question that a political appointee, their inclination is going to be more toward protecting their boss than complying with an open records request," says Jay Heck of the local Common Cause affiliate.
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