The White House confirmed this week that it will no longer voluntarily release its visitor logs, the running record of who walks through the gates to meet with the president and his staff.
The announcement was delivered with the usual bureaucratic shrug, framed as a matter of privacy and security.
In practice, it means the public's window into who has the ear of power just got boarded shut.
The Obama administration published logs, then got sued and pulled back.
The first Trump administration stopped the practice entirely.
Now the cycle has come around again, and each rotation leaves the door a little more closed than the last.
The norm, it turns out, was never really a norm at all.
It was a courtesy, and courtesies can be revoked.
What does this actually mean for an ordinary American?
It means a pharmaceutical executive, a defense contractor, or a foreign agent can sit down with decision-makers and, absent a leak or a subpoena, you may never learn it happened.
The visitor log was never a complete picture.
It never captured phone calls, dinners, or meetings off-site.
But it was a scrap of accountability, one of the few that didn't require a congressional investigation to obtain.
Trust in government sits near historic lows, and both parties have spent years telling voters that the other side is captured by shadowy interests.
Removing the log doesn't settle that argument.
It hands ammunition to everyone making it.
When you stop publishing the guest list, people assume the worst about the guests.
Defenders of the move point out, correctly, that the logs were never legally required.
Accountability that depends on a lawsuit is accountability for the wealthy and the patient.
The rest of us are left reading tea leaves and press releases.
There is a deeper pattern here that should unsettle people across the political spectrum.
The mechanisms of transparency tend to erode quietly, in the name of security or privacy, under every administration, regardless of party.
Stacked together over two decades, they amount to a government that shows you less and asks you to trust more.
The White House says it remains committed to transparency in other ways.
That is the standard line, and it has been the standard line through every rollback.
Our take: secrecy is a habit, and governments acquire it the way people acquire bad ones, gradually and then completely.
If you can't see who is bending the president's ear, you can't hold anyone accountable for what gets whispered.
Final Thoughts
The least a democracy can do is tell you who came to dinner.