Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to “The Classifieds.” Read on to see which Freedom of Information Act offices have been gutted this week, which offices might be next, and more of this week’s top secrecy news stories.

“Hello, the FOIA office has been placed on admin leave and is unable to respond to any emails.”

The Trump administration has begun its purge at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by dismissing 10,000 employees, with agency Freedom of Information Act offices being among the casualties.

This comes after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a FOIA requester himself, promised “radical transparency” at the agency.

The entire FOIA office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was placed on administrative leave, and emails sent to CDC’s FOIA office received the response, “Hello, the FOIA office has been placed on admin leave and is unable to respond to any emails.” Most FOIA staff at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health were also let go.

Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold noted that CDC’s FOIA website was briefly taken entirely offline, but was restored after public outcry.

It’s important to note that even if CDC or other agency FOIA office websites are taken offline, requesters can visit FOIA.gov to find contact information for agencies and continue to submit requests. Agencies are still obligated to respond to requests even if their entire FOIA office has been sacked.

To this point, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss recently noted that FOIA “would be rendered meaningless if an agency could avoid these statutory obligations through the simple expedient of dismissing its FOIA staff.”

The purported goal of the dismissals is to establish a central FOIA hub to respond to all requests received by the dozens of agencies under the HHS umbrella. However, most large agencies like HHS have a decentralized FOIA process because it’s more efficient to allow smaller components, like CDC, to respond to requests for their own records rather than a department-wide FOIA office.

In addition to making FOIA less efficient, this abrupt reorganization increases the likelihood of delays processing current requests, and of FOIA requests being lost or inappropriately closed.

What FOIA offices have been shuttered and who is next?

As far as we know, thanks to reporting and court filings, the following FOIA offices have been either closed entirely or had their staff drastically cut:

So far, the impacted FOIA offices have been at agencies the Trump administration has identified for possible elimination. With that in mind, additional agency FOIA offices to keep an eye on for cuts include:

  • Census Bureau
  • Council on Environmental Quality
  • Department of Education
  • Environmental Protection Agency
  • Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
  • Federal Housing Finance Authority
  • Federal Labor Relations Authority
  • Merit Systems Protection Board
  • National Endowment for the Arts
  • National Endowment for the Humanities
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  • Office of Government Ethics
  • U.S. Agency for Global Media

What I’m reading

Trump takes government secrecy seriously. But only when it suits him (The New York Times). Peter Baker recently pointed out the inconsistencies in the Trump administration’s claim that the Signalgate conversation about military operations, including flight times, contained no classified information, while insisting that similar details about planes carrying Venezuelans to El Salvador were protected by the state secrets privilege. It’s the latest in a long line of examples that classification decisions and government secrecy are largely subjective and usually designed to protect the government from embarrassment, rather than furthering national security goals.

Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say (The Washington Post). National Security Council staff, including national security adviser Mike Waltz, reportedly use Gmail to conduct government business. Aside from the security risks of communicating over a commercial email server, it raises fresh concerns that White House personnel are not preserving their records in accordance with record-keeping laws. All federal officials, including those in the White House, who use personal email for work purposes are required to forward those communications to government systems within 20 days for permanent preservation.

Signalgate spurs government interest in chat-archiving services (GovExec). The National Archives and Records Administration issued guidance on how agencies should manage work communications exchanged over third-party messaging platforms like Signal in 2015. Yet the decade-old rules are apparently new information to officials at the departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security, who waited until a recent lawsuit to find ways to ensure Signal records can be preserved in compliance with record-keeping laws and FOIA.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

Transparently yours,

Lauren Harper

Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy
Freedom of the Press Foundation