Government secrecy

Trump Promised Transparency. His Administration Keeps Finding New Ways to Hide Records.

"The most transparent president in history" keeps chipping away at laws like FOIA meant to keep the government honest.

Matthew Petti | 8.15.2026 8:00 AM

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President Donald Trump claimed in 2019 that he was "the most transparent president in history." Throughout his second term, Trump's spokespeople have used that phrase over and over again. The administration has made a big show of opening the archives on old mysteries: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the existence of UFOs, and the case of well-connected sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. While the JFK files included some genuinely shocking revelations, the UFO files were thin on substance.

And the Epstein files turned into an infamous boondoggle. The administration handed a group of influencers binders labeled "Phase 1," which turned out to hold heavily redacted copies of already-public documents, then never followed up. After it was leaked to the press that the actual FBI file on Epstein included a sexually suggestive letter from Trump himself, Congress dragged the files out of an embarrassed and defensive administration.

But the Trump administration has also fouled up the everyday mechanisms for Americans to see what their leaders are up to and how their tax dollars are being spent. Officials have tried to hide documents from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or outright exempt government activities from FOIA. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government granted a little under 50 percent of FOIA requests, a record low since 2010, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The Department of Justice fought in court to overturn the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve its files for posterity. In between his two terms, Trump infamously hid papers in his bathroom.

Trump had ironically ridden to power on the back of an earlier outrage about transparency. Much of the 2016 election focused on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's emails. Back when she was secretary of state, Clinton  had secretly moved her emails to a private, nongovernment server, both exposing them to hackers and concealing them from public FOIA requests. Trump said on the campaign trail that Clinton was trying to "cover up her crimes." In the decade since then, the Trump administration has done a lot more to cover up its own activities.

Beyond the political irony, the Trump administration's attack on transparency highlights how the struggle to keep politicians honest works. American journalists, lawyers, and crusading gadflies have won the right to inspect a wide variety of government records. The FOIA regime is a model for the rest of the free world—and the unsung source of a lot of politically relevant scoops, including at Reason. The political operators undermining transparency know what they're doing.

A Quick History of Modern Presidents Trying To Shield, or Release, Records

"One of the contradictory things about the United States is that an incredible amount of the government is dedicated to doing things in secret," geographer Trevor Paglen writes in Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. "At the same time, it's one of the world's most open governments."

That openness was a hard-won right. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 had left federal officials with wide discretion in what information to release to the public, and they became increasingly tightfisted with Cold War paranoia. The original FOIA was passed in 1966 as a "product of years of slow campaigning by a network of journalists, scientists, and politicians seeking to make the government more transparent," according to State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime by historian Sam Lebovic. The Watergate scandal a few years later turbocharged those demands for transparency.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon grew paranoid about internal leaks after the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's secret internal history of the (then-ongoing) Vietnam War. He fretted to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that his sabotage of Vietnamese peace talks or his undeclared war in Cambodia might be revealed. Nixon assembled the "Plumbers," a team of intelligence operatives, to "destroy" Pentagon Papers........

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