What is the Trump administration hiding?

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed to be “the most transparent” in history, but nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the public’s right to know has never been under greater threat. 

We should know. For decades, CREW has litigated on the frontlines of government transparency, bringing and winning major cases against administrations of both parties to ensure Americans know what their government is up to. And we just got another win last week.

This July, in a case brought by CREW and our co-counsel Public Citizen, a federal district judge ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to restore a website it abruptly took down in March that discloses how the office directs executive branch agencies to spend (or “apportion”) taxpayer funds appropriated by Congress. Weeks later, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously denied the Trump administration’s emergency request to halt that ruling and ordered it to promptly restore the spending database.

Two judges of the court of appeals issued a lengthy statement that spelled out why this case was about much more than a website. “[W]hen it comes to appropriations,” the judges said, “our Constitution has made plain that congressional power is at its zenith.” Allowing  the executive branch to continue flouting spending transparency laws would “effectively cut the Congress’s purse strings” and deprive Americans “of information that the Founding generation—from Franklin to Jefferson to Madison to Mason—all thought vital to our Republic.”

OMB is required to operate the spending website under laws Congress passed in 2022 and 2023 in response to the first Trump administration’s illegal withholding of federal funds. With the website down, those abuses were much harder to detect and prevent. As a coalition of 18 states and the District of Columbia argued in a friend-of-the-court brief in support of our case, the administration’s secrecy around federal spending “hindered the states’ ability to protect their interests and prevent real-world harm” inflicted by its “repeated and unlawful” withholdings of funds Congress designated for American communities.

OMB has restored the federal spending website in response to the court of appeals’ order. That’s an important win for the public’s right to know and Congress’s exclusive power of the purse. But the OMB case is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this administration’s all-out assault on transparency.

Numerous federal websites and databases have been taken down over the last 6 months, depriving the public, experts and government officials  of crucial health and scientific data, criminal case files of individuals who participated in the January 6th insurrection, information about law enforcement misconduct, and resources on teen dating violence, preventing post-partum depression and similar topics, just to name a few. Many of these sites were taken down pursuant to Donald Trump’s executive orders and agency directives targeting content on “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity and inclusion. Others were taken down with little or no explanation.

CREW is not the only group to find success in its legal efforts to restore access to crucial government data. In one case brought by Doctors for America, a federal judge ordered the restoration of hundreds of health care websites and datasets that were pulled down to comply with an executive order directing the removal of media promoting so-called “gender ideology.” That’s another notable win, but litigation may not be feasible or successful in restoring all lost public health data. 

The Trump administration has also launched a war on disclosure, both by fighting Freedom of Information Act requests and by decimating agency FOIA offices. For example, in February, the Office of Personnel Management responded to a CNN FOIA request by emailing, “Good luck with that they just got rid of the entire privacy team.” And in April, FOIA offices at the Department of Health and Human Services were gutted in DOGE-directed firings. The agency purged all FOIA staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, crippling CDC’s ability to respond to FOIA requests amid numerous public health crises, including a burgeoning measles outbreak. This closure is being challenged in court, but while that case plays out, numerous urgent requests from doctors, scientists, nonprofits and public health advocates are going unanswered.

Nowhere has this administration fought disclosure harder than at DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Our organization and many others—including the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, American Oversight, and The Intercept—have spent the past several months suing to pry loose basic details about the secretive new entity. As it skirts transparency laws, DOGE has gained unprecedented access to millions of Americans’ sensitive personal data, gutted the federal workforce and slashed programs Americans depend on.

DOGE was sued to force it to open up its books, and in March, a federal judge ruled that DOGE was likely operating as a de facto “agency” subject to FOIA and later ordered expedited discovery on that question. The Trump administration fought that discovery all the way to the Supreme Court, which narrowed but did not block requests for documents and depositions of DOGE personnel. A modified discovery order has since been approved by the appeals court–but it is on hold pending yet another potential appeal by the government to the Supreme Court.

All this, to shield DOGE from providing basic facts about its structure and operations that other government agencies routinely disclose. This extraordinary level of resistance raises an obvious question: What are they hiding?

The Trump administration has also sought to keep secret critical aspects of its immigration and foreign policy, including the details of its controversial agreement with El Salvador to deport immigrants, regardless of nationality, to El Salvador prisons. Hundreds of people have been deported to El Salvador, with many ending up in the country’s notorious CECOT prison. In May, Democracy Forward sued several agencies to obtain the agreement, after FOIA requests went unanswered. While the case is still ongoing, the State Department recently uploaded a portion of the documents to its website, in a sign that legal pressure is working. But secrecy still pervades much of the administration’s policies. Suing for access in every case is an uphill battle–and one Americans shouldn’t have to wage. 

A fully “informed citizenry,” the Supreme Court has explained, is “vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” The Trump administration’s all-out assault on transparency has imperiled that promise. Litigation to force compliance with open government laws is certainly burdensome and time-consuming, but it’s currently one of our only options for keeping Americans informed about what their government is doing. If the administration does not change its secretive ways and commit to the transparency it touts publicly, then the courts, and the American people, must step up and ensure that we’re not all left in the dark.