Ultimately, the loose effort, cobbled haphazardly with little notice to the participants, may amount to little more than a glorified CEO suggestion box. It came in a week when the president was searching for ways to take control of the nation’s plans to reopen the economy, talking up efforts to create different groups that would offer him input. In addition to the business advisory council, which spanned numerous sectors, Trump also unfurled a list of lawmakers expected to comprise a congressional advisory group. But the groups lack a formal structure, consisting of little more than a long list of names with no clear expectations about meetings, discussion topics, or long-term goals.

Still, transparency advocates argue that the business initiative sounds like the kind of panel Congress was trying to regulate when it passed FACA in 1972 to standardize and open up the way the federal government seeks official advice from industry and outside experts.

“I think it’s like a classic federal advisory committee,” said Anne Weismann of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s the classic blue-ribbon panel the government sets up when it wants a stamp of approval for what it wants to do, so it points to an esteemed committee and says, ‘We’re doing what they wanted.’”

The Trump administration has a history of structuring its industry outreach efforts to sidestep FACA.

Back in 2017, officials used a similar approach for two of its high-profile attempts to consult business leaders — a Strategic and Policy Forum and a Manufacturing Jobs Initiative.

In both cases, White House officials insisted that the much-touted assemblages were not actually deliberating or voting on any proposals and therefore did not have to comply with requirements to announce meetings in advance and to conduct them in public. Administration lawyers also insisted on names that seemed to dodge the words “council” or “committee.”

“No consensus advice or recommendations resulting from group deliberations or interaction is expected or will be solicited," according to a White House statement at the time.

How closely the claim hewed to reality was disputed. One member of the manufacturing initiative, Tesla’s Elon Musk, seemed to directly contradict the White House in a tweet: “Will seek advisory council consensus & present to President.”

Both the Strategic and Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative disbanded abruptly in August 2017 after CEOs fled the efforts in protest of Trump’s comments that appeared to equate racist protesters in Charlottesville, Va., with counterprotesters.

A White House spokesman declined to comment for this report about the structure of the new reopening council or its compliance with legal requirements.

Eliminating any effort to draft consensus recommendations risks diminishing the weight of the council’s work. Yet it empowers midlevel White House appointees and agency staff, who are legally permitted to meet privately and sift through outsider proposals.

Some observers doubt the new council will actually work in such a stovepiped fashion, given the haphazard nature of the early outreach efforts. Still, Weismann said, “We’re certainly looking very carefully at this,” avoiding a firm answer on whether her group was considering a lawsuit to demand greater access to the council.

“My guess is the lawyers are experienced enough to set it up in a way that won’t provide opportunities to challenge it in court with much success,” said Tom Fitton of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

The 220-person size of the council does contribute to a degree of informal transparency, making it a bit hard for the White House to prevent members of the groups from sharing accounts of what they told the president, or vice versa. Press reports Wednesday said some business leaders warned Trump against a rapid reopening before widespread testing in place and said moving forward without that safeguard would be reckless.

The Trump administration’s latest move to sidestep the nearly half-century-old transparency law comes amid other signs of resistance to oversight or public scrutiny of actions taken to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, Trump replaced the Pentagon’s acting inspector general , who was set to take over as head of a watchdog panel monitoring the distribution of a multitrillion dollar coronavirus economic relief bill.

And during talks on that legislation, the CARES Act, senators acquiesced to a request from the Federal Reserve Board to relax open meeting law and recordkeeping requirements for discussions about loans authorized under the law.

Past litigation alleging that the Trump administration was thwarting FACA has had mixed results.

During Trump’s first year in office, the White House moved toward launching an infrastructure policy panel that — for a time — appeared likely to follow at least some FACA requirements. Trump formally chartered the committee by executive order in July 2017. The board was set to have up to 15 members and be attached to the Commerce Department.

But the council disintegrated before ever being fully formed or holding an official meeting — another casualty of Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Trump officially revoked his order establishing the board in September 2017.

A nonprofit group, Food & Water Watch, filed a lawsuit a week after Trump’s initial order, contending that the board had been meeting secretly and illegally for months. A judge eventually dismissed the case.

During the litigation, Justice Department lawyers contended that FACA is unenforceable when the president is the official receiving outside advice.

“Applying FACA to any attempt by the President to solicit input and advice from private citizens and government officials on an issue that the President has identified as of utmost importance — infrastructure reform — would unconstitutionally interfere with his right to receive confidential advice in the performance of his duties,” they wrote.

Lawyers at the group Demand Progress, which pursued the case, said the lawsuit still effectively confirmed about a dozen private phone, email or in-person consultations that took place between White House officials and the private-sector infrastructure council leaders before the suit was abandoned.

Another case challenged a committee the administration set up to advise the Interior Department. The panel, gathered to give input on the royalties charged for mining on public lands, held several meetings that complied with some FACA requirements, but drew a suit in 2018 for allegedly trying to hide subcommittee meetings and records, as well as for failing to comply with a requirement in the law that panels’ membership be “fairly balanced.”

The Trump administration let the council’s charter lapse last year, but a judge agreed that the group lacked the legally required balance and he barred the administration from using any of the group’s recommendations.

In recent decades, administrations of both parties have exploited various weaknesses in the law, holding private sessions by claiming they were devoted solely to “preparatory work” or that meetings between advisory groups and the president can be private because no deliberations took place during them.

One of the highest profile FACA fights was over the health care task force Hillary Clinton helmed as first lady. Conservative doctors sued for access, but an appeals court ruled such transparency wasn’t required because Clinton was a “de facto [government] officer or employee,” not an outsider, even though she didn’t draw a salary or have an official federal job.

The Obama White House said it complied with the law by offering live video feeds of meetings of groups like a high-level Jobs Council, but some practices still seemed to undercut transparency. Reports were often privately drafted by subcommittees, only to be briefly debated and voted on by the full body moments before a presidential photo-op welcoming the work.

Some government openness advocates contend the Supreme Court has already gutted FACA’s usefulness, at least where the White House is involved. In a 2004 case, the court ruled 7-2 to block fact-finding in suits seeking records about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force.

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“We tried with the energy task force and the court said, ‘No,’” said Fitton of Judicial Watch, which pressed one of two suits over Cheney’s energy consultations that reached the Supreme Court.

“The standards for triggering FACA are pretty high,” he added. “I would encourage transparency, as always.”

For years, lawmakers have advanced bills aimed at closing perceived loopholes in FACA, like the law’s lack of coverage of subcommittees, as well as practices of using ghost “observers” on some panels and dubiously claiming participants are industry representatives to avoid conflict-of-interest requirements. A slate of reform measures have become noncontroversial in the House, passing several times under Democratic and Republican control in recent years, often without much debate.

In 2017, a FACA reform bill passed the House on a voice vote and was set for action in the Senate before encountering resistance from the Trump administration , which suggested the legislation would gum up the process of reviewing grants issued by the National Institutes of Health. The bill died in the Senate the following year due to objections from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

Another version of the reform measure passed the House on voice vote in March of last year, even winning the vocal support of then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who took over last month as Trump’s chief of staff at the White House.

“The 1972 act does not do enough to ensure transparency and openness to the Federal decision-making process,” Meadows said then. “There are two ways things get done here in Washington, D.C.: slow and never. Let's hope that this is one of those times where it is just slow.”

At the moment, “never” looks like the better bet.

For more than a year, the latest iteration of the bill has been sitting without action at the Senate Homeland Security committee — the same panel that killed it in 2018.