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Remember “the most transparent administration in history”? That’s what Donald Trump promised at the beginning of his second term, and it’s been going about as well as the rest of his promises. The ongoing Epstein files debacle is the most glaring example, but contempt for the public’s right to know reaches far deeper in this administration.
Every day, the government creates reams of data, information, emails, and reports that belong to and are paid for by the public. That’s why the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records laws require the government—with some exceptions—to let anyone see these documents whenever we ask.
Before Trump took power again last year, he and many in the MAGA movement were big fans of this principle. Trump filed FOIA requests with the IRS to stymie its audit of him and the National Archives when he got into trouble for retaining classified information. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. FOIA’d information about vaccines and his Secret Service detail and sued the government for not responding quickly enough.
But now, Trump and Kennedy are singing a different tune. Across the government, offices responsible for public information have been gutted by DOGE and subsequent waves of layoffs. How badly gutted? No one knows exactly…because employees who would answer questions like that have been laid off. But we do know that, for example, at Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, multiple public information offices have been closed virtually overnight.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised “radical transparency”: HHS would share so much information, people wouldn’t need to wait for responses to FOIAs anymore. Sure enough, there’s a “Radical Transparency” page on the HHS website, but it has information on only five topics, all administration pet causes such as alleged conflicts of interest among vaccine advisers, “wasteful spending,” and “ending anti-semitism on college campuses.” Have a FOIA request for HHS? You now need to file it with the central government platform FOIA.gov, which, according to the latest report, had a backlog of more than 267,000 requests. By law, the government must respond to a FOIA request within 20 business days; at HHS right now, the average turnaround time is 490 days. For faster service, seal your request in a bottle and toss it into the ocean.
What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.”
Some examples from our own reporting: More than a year and a half ago, Julia Métraux, who covers disability issues at Mother Jones, filed a request seeking information about a school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks on children with disabilities. Last May, Madison Pauly, who covers LGBTQ issues, requested documents used to create a widely criticized report on gender dysphoria. The same month, Julia Lurie, who covers child welfare, sought information about “wellness farms” (which RFK Jr. has said can be used to “reparent” those taking antidepressants) and the psychedelic drug ibogaine, which the secretary wants to use to treat trauma-related disorders. Number of documents we’ve received so far: zero.
We’re not alone. Hundreds of organizations and individuals have requests pending with HHS, on everything from Medicare fraud investigations to the origins of Covid. What we’re seeing is not the occasional delay or foot-dragging; it’s what the law calls a “pattern and practice.” HHS seems to have essentially stopped responding to FOIA requests altogether.
So in November, Mother Jones and our parent organization, the Center for Investigative Reporting, filed a lawsuit against HHS, asking it to provide the records the public is due. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit along with other lawyers, including CIR’s general counsel, Victoria Baranetsky, and our legal fellow, Brooke Henderson. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”
Kennedy has upended the way our government approaches vaccines, drug trials, water fluoridation, and much more. He’s turned the department’s autism programs into anti-vax propaganda. He has authority over who loses and who keeps Medicaid coverage. He has targeted abortion medication. The public deserves to know how those decisions came to be, and the records that can show us—emails, text messages, drafts of reports, and much more—are public by law. We look forward to seeing RFK Jr. in court.
