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The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Ten months ago, Roman Jankowski sent dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies. He was one-third of a three-man fishing expedition spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Caller to dig up dirt on civil servants, particularly if they were the type to use phrases like “climate equity” or “voting.” Some of Jankowski’s requests were for emails sent by DHS staffers containing the word “Biden” alongside a range of other key words, including “drugs,” “defecate,” and “poop.” ProPublica quoted a worker as saying, “They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests. We have to search people’s accounts for poop. This isn’t a thing.”
Today, Jankowski oversees FOIA compliance for DHS as its chief FOIA officer. His agency receives more public records requests than any other by a wide margin. And instead of gumming up FOIA administration from the outside, Jankowski now works for an administration that is attacking FOIA by firing many of the federal employees who respond to those requests, precisely what his records requests sought to facilitate.
As a key transparency law, the Freedom of Information Act gives the public insight into government activities, allowing Americans to hold the government to account. It’s been used to reveal stories about conflicts of interest and corporate abuse that otherwise may have never seen the light of day.
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The New York Times attributed the resignation of Trump 1.0 EPA chief Scott Pruitt to a “steady drumbeat” of news about his misuse of government resources, underpinned by information obtained through FOIA. (Perhaps that’s part of the reason Trump 2.0 has a bone to pick with FOIA this time around.)
During the Biden era, FOIA requests unveiled a cozy relationship between U.S. trade officials and Big Tech lobbyists while the former negotiated a major trade agreement, leading Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to ring the alarm on “corporate influence-peddling” within trade policy.
It’s not just about corruption—threats to effective FOIA administration have tangible downstream effects. Reshma Ramachandran, assistant professor of medicine at Yale, recently wrote about the vital role that FOIA requests can play in protecting public health. Per Ramachandran, FOIA requests have “pushed companies to take unsafe drugs off the market, led to reforms that prevent unnecessary delays in communicating public health risks, and prompted policies that lower prices and improve access to taxpayer-funded health technologies.”
Even the president himself knows the value of FOIA requests. Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold, author of the newsletter “FOIA Files,” recently used FOIA to obtain a records request (and the responsive documents) that President Trump made to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Back in 2023, Trump demanded records that his lawyers claimed would “expose NARA’s completely different treatment of President Trump from every other president.” (Leopold concluded that the request “doesn’t appear to have unearthed any smoking guns.”)
It is hard to understand FOIA office layoffs as anything but an intentional effort to obstruct access to public records.
But to an administration that is hell-bent on defying the rule of law, public accountability is anathema. So, unsurprisingly, the DOGE-led attacks on the civil service have—in some cases specifically—decimated FOIA offices, severely weakening a key tool that helps the public understand what the federal government is doing.
At the beginning of April, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), laid off the entire FOIA office staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also cut FOIA staff significantly at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Following public outcry, RFK Jr. said he would be “restoring all FOIA offices” last week, though he failed to provide detail about how or if they plan to recall or replace terminated workers. Call us cynical, but it’s hard to imagine that an administration whose main goal seems to be destruction of the civil service will effectively “restore” even a small segment of that service.
At places like USAID, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where entire agencies have been illegally gutted to the point of nonfunctionality, FOIA offices have apparently not been spared. The Office of Personnel Management has laid off FOIA staff, and Trump fired the top Department of Justice official overseeing FOIA administration. The Times even set up a tip line for federal employees to report cuts to FOIA departments.
It is hard to understand FOIA office layoffs as anything but an intentional effort to obstruct access to public records. Prior to the second Trump administration, FOIA offices already lacked the capacity to consistently process all of the requests they received. A March 2024 analysis of agencies’ chief FOIA officer reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the single most cited contributor to increasing FOIA backlogs in 2023 was “FOIA staffing losses or turnover,” with over half of responding agencies citing it as a factor. And it wasn’t a trivial factor; the GAO also wrote that many agency officials “identified staffing issues as among the biggest contributors to backlogs” (emphasis added).
HHS’s own chief FOIA officer noted in the agency’s annual report that there was an increase in the backlog of requests in 2024 in part because of “a loss of key staff” and “staff turnover.” The report was released on March 10, 2025, just three weeks before Kennedy moved to gut multiple HHS FOIA offices.
And the attacks on public records go beyond illegal layoffs and office closures. The administration has argued that DOGE—the very body that facilitated much of the FOIA office-gutting—is exempt from FOIA requests, even though Elon Musk claimed after the election that DOGE would operate with “maximum transparency.” And Trump himself is threatening to wreck organizations that dare question his actions.
While the administration staunchly refuses to be “maximally transparent,” groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are trying to get answers. CREW is currently suing the Trump administration for refusing to comply with its FOIA requests on DOGE’s activities. To prop up their argument that DOGE and Musk aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the administration has claimed that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE—despite Trump’s personal posts and a basic comprehension of daily news contradicting that idea—and that the roughly 100 operatives under Musk’s direction are not acting independently from the office of the president.
So far, CREW has been successful in their challenge—just this month, a district judge issued an opinion requiring DOGE to respond to CREW’s questions to determine if DOGE is subject to FOIA, including ordering the deposition of DOGE administrator Amy Gleason. CREW is also suing to stop the destruction of the CDC’s FOIA office, while American Oversight is attempting to stop the destruction of government records and other groups are suing the admin for DOGE’s records. But the efforts have also drawn the ire of the president himself: Two days after the judge’s order in the DOGE FOIA case, Trump threatened to (illegally, for the record) strip CREW of its tax-exempt status.
This administration’s attack on FOIA staff and the Freedom of Information Act in general will harm the public in ways that will be difficult to directly appreciate for some time. The critical information that we will fail to learn from destroyed and otherwise inaccessible records is, by definition, unknowable. But if past experience is any indication, the gutting of FOIA offices will probably result in more corruption, more public-health crises, and at least according to some people, more civil servants emailing each other the word “defecate.”
