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 learn more about the status of JFK declassification efforts, the debate around DOGE posting classified budget information, and more of this week’s most important secrecy stories.

Has there been any progress on JFK declassification?

Last month President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring the declassification of all records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — all of whom were assassinated in the 1960s. It required officials to submit a plan to the president “for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” by a Feb. 7 deadline.

That was over two weeks ago, but to date there have been no public updates about the plan to release the remaining 3,500 secret JFK assassination records. It’s possible the plan was submitted and it just hasn’t been made public, but having a secret plan to declassify records would be troubling.

Those familiar with the CIA and FBI’s decades-long refusal to fully comply with 1992’s Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act won’t be surprised by the ongoing secrecy. But if the Trump administration is serious about enforcing its EO, it should regularly update the public on the status of its declassification efforts.

DOGE posted classified intelligence budget information. So?

The Department of Government Efficiency has received a lot of warranted criticism. But complaints over its posting of the National Reconnaissance Office’s headcount and budget information on the grounds that it is classified should be reconsidered. There’s no reason that information should be secret — even former CIA directors have said releasing the agency’s budget wouldn’t harm national security.

Intelligence agencies currently do not have to disclose their individual or program-level budgets. The only public intelligence budget is an aggregate budget for the 18 agencies that comprise the intelligence community — and it totals nearly $100 billion. This gives individual intelligence agencies a blank check without any serious oversight, and it could also make it harder to learn how many CIA employees are currently being targeted by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI layoffs.

There are valid reasons for criticizing DOGE, but we shouldn’t reflexively support the intelligence community’s claims that budget information is classified.

Hostile takeover at the National Archives

The Trump administration pushed out the acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration earlier this week. NARA’s professional leadership is being temporarily replaced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s also acting administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Jim Byron, the CEO of the Nixon Foundation who will serve as a senior adviser to Rubio.

If the upheaval is accompanied by the scale of layoffs that are starting to impact other agencies, it could erode the public’s ability to access records across the government. Here are a few of the most important questions the public should be asking about the Archives:

  1. What steps are being taken to ensure agencies aren’t given a free pass to destroy records?
  2. Would a Trump-appointed archivist try to stop Trump from stealing records at the end of his term and taking them back to Mar-a-Lago (again)?
  3. Will the administration’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion crusade impact NARA-supported projects like the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board?

Read more on our website.

What I’m reading

New email language may shield more USAID communications from public view (FedScoop). New “sensitive but unclassified” language is appearing in USAID emails, and it’s an attempt to intimidate public officials from releasing information. Could this tactic extend to other agencies DOGE is embedded with? Absolutely. The public — and any federal employees left in Freedom of Information Act offices — should know this isn’t a valid reason to withhold information.

Burying the CIA’s Assange secrets (The Dissenter). Judge John Koeltl dismissed a lawsuit brought by four Americans who claimed the CIA spied on them when they visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London, ruling it was subject to the state secrets privilege. But as The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola notes, “Burying secrets so deep and for so long that the public does not find them is typically the CIA’s objective when they invoke the state secrets privilege.”

Good government groups, lawmakers and media decry bill to make it easier for agencies to deny PIA requests (Baltimore Brew). A Maryland bill wants to let the state’s Public Information Act Compliance Board ignore requests from groups it doesn’t like for an unspecified amount of time, among other worrisome provisions. Right on Transparency, a coalition of right-leaning organizations, submitted a letter warning of the dangers of the proposed bill.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

Transparently yours,

Lauren Harper
Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy
Freedom of the Press Foundation