Nancy Cook

The White House is pushing Commerce policy director Earl Comstock out of the Trump administration -- the first round of house-cleaning after the 2020 census debacle and clashes over tech policy.

Poisonous political divisions have spawned an encryption arms race across the Trump administration, as both the president’s advisers and career civil servants scramble to cover their digital tracks in a capital nervous about leaks. The surge in the use of scrambled-communication technology — enabled by free smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and Signal — could skirt or violate laws that require government records to be preserved and the public’s business to be conducted in official channels, several ethics experts say. It may even cloud future generations’ knowledge of the full history of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Conservative advocacy groups also denounce the use of encrypted technologies by career employees, comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of State. The House Science Committee has demanded an inquiry into the use of encryption by employees at the Environmental Protection Agency — although it has shown no similar curiosity about use of encryption in the White House.