The Department of State and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are failing to make international agreements publicly available in violation of the Case-Zablocki Act, leaving Americans in the dark about foreign deals being made on their behalf. Lawfare, a nonpartisan media organization represented by CREW, sued today to compel the Trump administration to comply with the law.  

For decades, the Case-Zablocki Act, also known as the Case Act, has required the Department of State to regularly disclose the text of international agreements to Congress, and a companion statute has required the agency to publicly disclose some of these agreements. In December 2022, Congress strengthened these transparency obligations by amending the Case Act to require the Department to post on its website all international agreements and their underlying legal authorities within 120 days of their effective dates, with very limited exceptions. 

Since President Trump took office, the Department and Secretary of State Rubio have largely disregarded their Case Act obligations by refusing to post the text of, and underlying legal authority for, a range of  international agreements. In particular, they have refused to post detention agreements on the deportation of foreign nationals to Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama. They also failed to post agreements from May 2025 with Saudi Arabia and Qatar for defense sales and investments worth tens of billions of dollars as well as another agreement from that same month with Ukraine to implement a joint reconstruction investment fund on critical minerals. 

The Trump administration has also neglected to post more routine agreements, such as those pertaining to deliveries of Rio Grande water from Mexico, civil nuclear cooperation with Thailand and U.S. commercial space launches in Sweden. Posting these agreements in compliance with the law is critical to ensuring that the public understands our commitment of taxpayer funds and resources to other nations as well as providing transparency about the government’s relationship to certain countries that are paying money to the president’s businesses.

The court should find the Department of State and Secretary of State Rubio in violation of the Case Act for abdicating their legal responsibility to make covered international agreement information publicly available and order the government to post the text of all of its agreements. Unless the Trump administration’s noncompliance with the law is confronted and corrected, Americans will continue to have an opaque understanding of significant and consequential international agreements being made in their name, undermining trust, transparency and accountability in government.

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