"The Department of Energy has taken down its public-facing employee directory, making it far more difficult for journalists and members of the public to locate email addresses and phone numbers for agency personnel.

The move, which was announced to agency contractors on Wednesday and implemented Thursday morning, was confirmed in an internal email shared with Mashable.

Making federal scientists and policy makers harder to contact isn’t a trivial matter. These kinds of moves toward opacity wall off employees from the outside world and make it more likely that they won’t experience public pressure related to their taxpayer-funded work. "

Andrew Freedman reports for Mashable February 16, 2017. [2]