When it comes to the public’s ability to pry documents loose from federal agencies, Donald Trump’s supporters accept nothing less than full disclosure and have spent the past few years bombarding federal agencies with requests for records. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that posture will soon change ― right around noon on Jan. 20.
Take Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who is now a key member of the president-elect’s transition team and is widely expected to land another powerful administration post next year.
In a May 2023 episode of the America First Policy Institute’s podcast, “The Tank,” Bernhardt bemoaned that left-wing organizations he’d “never heard of” had “inundated” federal agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during Trump’s first term, “to the point that it created a lot of activity in terms of slowing down the agenda.”
“Frankly, I think they were very effective,” he said. “They’re highly funded by non-disclosed entities, and that’s fine. I was even surprised to find that much of their activity is tax-deductible.”
“I’m not suggesting it’s illegal, but what I am suggesting is that it is incredibly one-sided,” he added. “That one-sided effort meant that their voice was often the only voice in the echo chamber surrounding policies related to the administration.”
Bernhardt’s condemnation of perceived political adversaries using the 1967 law as intended to shine light on the inner functions of government is ironic. As a longtime lobbyist for oil, gas, mining and agricultural interests, Bernhardt entered the Trump administration with so many potential conflicts of interest that he had to carry around a card listing his former clients. Under his watch, the Department of the Interior repeatedly meddled with FOIA, going as far as to withhold information about Bernhardt ahead of his confirmation hearing to take over as secretary after the departure of scandal-plagued Ryan Zinke.
And over the last couple of years, right-wing organizations, including the America First Policy Institute — many of them tax-exempt nonprofits and led by former Trump administration officials — have swamped the Interior Department and other federal agencies with thousands of records requests, many of them targeted at specific employees. (Bernhardt is chair of AFPI’s Center for American Freedom.)
Leading that sleuthing effort is the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing organization that spearheaded Project 2025, the extreme-right policy blueprint that GOP operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. Mike Howell, a former Trump administration official and current executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, told ProPublica last month that the foundation has filed more than 50,000 FOIA requests since 2022. Many of those requests target specific career civil servants and seek communications that mention a variety of “culture war” topics, including climate change action and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Others target internal discussions about Trump.
“Frankly, the number of FOIAs that they’ve submitted, from what I understand, is beyond the scope of a burden,” said Marie Owens Powell, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, a union that represents thousands of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s been crushing to a lot of those folks who’ve been tasked with responding to those FOIA requests.”
One employee in the FOIA office of a government agency told ProPublica that the right-wing effort has jammed up the FOIA queue to the point that it has severely affected the agency’s ability to keep up with requests. And ethics watchdogs expect that the fishing expedition is part of Project 2025’s authoritarian vision of dismantling federal agencies and replacing tens of thousands of career staff — so-called rogue bureaucrats — with Trump loyalists willing to advance right-wing policies.
In response to the unidentified FOIA officer arguing that Heritage is keeping government agencies from fulfilling what they called “legitimate requests,” Howell told ProPublica: “I’m paying them, so they should do their damn job and turn over the documents. Their job is not to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.”
The Trump administration has a record of doing exactly what Howell takes issue with. During Trump’s first year in office, federal agencies set a new record for censoring and withholding government documents requested through FOIA, The Associated Press reported at the time. Trump’s Interior Department changed its FOIA policy to allow for political appointees to review public information requests prior to their release and at one point proposed new regulations to grant the agency the ability to reject “burdensome” records requests and impose monthly limits for individual requesters. In a 2020 report, the Interior Department’s internal watchdog concluded that political appointees blocked the public release of documents related to Bernhardt ahead of his confirmation hearing in March 2019.
Adam Marshall, an attorney for the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, stressed that FOIA is chronically underfunded and continues to get worse over time, both in terms of the information that is ultimately released and the timeliness. The Biden administration has not been an exception. A Government Accountability Office report in March found that the number of backlogged requests in 2022 surpassed 200,000 for the first time, while the number of complex requests processed within the required 20-day timeline plummeted to just 14%. And in an article this week, The Dissenter concluded that “FOIA is just as fragile and in disrepair as it was when Biden was elected in 2020,” noting among other things that in fiscal year 2023, federal agencies “censored, withheld, or claimed that they could not find any records two-thirds of the time.”
“It’s difficult sometimes to disentangle what are the effects of a particular administration and what are long-term, systemic problems within federal agencies regarding their compliance with FOIA,” Marshall said. “I think we saw some of both in the first Trump administration. We saw some things like the Interior FOIA proposed regulations that were clearly contrary to FOIA, and we also saw increased numbers of requests and insufficient resources devoted to answering those requests.”
Marshall noted that the federal hiring freeze early in Trump’s first term put additional strain on government FOIA offices. What FOIA needs more than anything is additional people and resources to tackle the ever-growing backlog of requests, he said.
“I think we know from the first Trump administration and from everything we know about FOIA, if you decrease the number of people working on FOIA, it is going to have a negative effect on transparency,” he said.
Trump and his team are promising to massively shrink the number of federal workers.
“We expect mass reductions,” Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump named to lead his proposed Department of Government Efficiency alongside billionaire Elon Musk, told Fox News this week. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions-in-force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
At the same time that it is demanding the Biden administration fork over millions of pages of documents, the Heritage Foundation has advised would-be Trump administration officials on how to evade such record requests. In a Project 2025 training video on government oversight obtained by ProPublica, Howell and two other longtime Republican operatives discuss the importance of FOIA for government accountability and transparency before offering some guidance on how would-be Trump officials can keep the public in the dark.
“The adage we hear a lot now is like, ‘Wow, this meeting could have been an email,’” Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, says in the video. “Well, in the federal government, this email probably should have been a meeting.”
“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision, work it out,” he says. “You’re probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
With financial support from Heritage, Jones’ organization recently published the names of 60 people at the Department of Homeland Security whom it identified as “subversive, leftist bureaucrats serving in the Federal government who cannot be trusted to enforce our immigration laws under a future administration intent on securing our border.”
“The Constitution is clear: Congress makes laws and the individual chosen by the American people to be their President enforces those laws,” Jones said in a statement announcing the watch list. “Rogue bureaucrats who enforce their own agendas are operating in direct opposition to the Constitution.”
Trump and his allies are pledging, yet again, to dismantle the “deep state” bureaucracy that they claim is conspiring against them. That is likely to include dismantling federal offices they deem not essential to an agency’s core function, including those working on climate change and environmental justice. What they conveniently forget is that the people in government they view as the enemy are, by and large, simply carrying out the Biden administration’s agenda.
“If you didn’t see people talking about climate change, then we wouldn’t be doing our jobs as it is defined, right now today — which may be redefined at the end of January,” Powell said, referring to the right-wing document hunt. “We’re doing the job as defined under the Biden administration, which is to work on climate equity, climate change.”