If there’s one thing the White House website can be counted on to do, it should be posting the accurate versions of things Trump signs, right? After all, it’s the White House website, they can just ask for the Word doc, copy, paste, post, done. Right? Well, something must be going wrong in the process.
USA Today is reporting that the White House website is posting inaccurate copies of Trump’s executive orders. The good news is that the real, correct versions of the orders are with the people who need them, namely the Federal Register. The bad news is that this appears to be the first drafts of these orders, and they contain errors like citing a law that requires people stopped by Trump’s travel ban to be given a medical examination instead of being interviewed, or in one case a law that doesn’t even exist:
An executive order on ethical standards for administration appointees, as it appears on the White House website, refers to”section 207 of title 28″ of the U.S. Code…that section does not exist. The Federal Register correctly cited section 207 of title 18, which does exist.
Thankfully, most of the errors are just first draft stuff, like grammatical issues, missing words, and all the other stuff you find on your average interoffice memo or email about that thing you got sent yesterday. The problem, of course, is that when you’re President, you need to be a little more accurate. The Federal Register painstakingly types every word of each executive order, so they have a slow turnaround. In the meantime, government employees check the White House website for the orders they need to comply with. Hopefully the White House can take a little more time in the future, or at the very least, hire a copyeditor.
(via USA Today)