Dr. Anthony Fauci’s refusal to answer questions during this week’s hearing on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic dominated headlines. But an underappreciated irony of the controversial hearing is that we are only capable of debating Fauci’s accounting for his pandemic performance because he preserved his records in the first place.
This same level of public scrutiny is rapidly becoming impossible across the rest of the federal government. Rather than engaging in genuine transparency, the Trump administration is selectively releasing records that align with its political priorities while actively shredding its own paper trail.
This week’s hearing focused on over a thousand pages of diary entries written by Fauci between 2019 and 2022 — which Fauci argued were personal — that were obtained by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and published online days before the hearing.
While the administration publishes Fauci’s unredacted diaries, it is simultaneously proposing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement to muzzle federal workers from sharing the very kinds of information Paul released.
Fauci condemned the release as an invasion of his privacy, and while it’s true that the government should never release information without proper vetting, the preservation of Fauci’s records on government servers complicates claims that the records were purely personal. It’s also worth noting that some entries were already memorialized in Fauci’s 2024 memoir, or reiterated in media interviews, making them fair game for disclosure and demonstrating genuine public interest in the records.
A far better way to balance privacy rights and public interest in the records would have been through the Freedom of Information Act, where career professionals could redact sensitive personal details while disclosing matters of legitimate public concern.
But while Kennedy was able to marshal agency resources for eight months to search for Fauci’s notes, he has refused to invest in transparency in almost any other area. Instead, he eviscerated the FOIA offices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, contributing to the department’s abysmal FOIA performance, with more delays and withholdings than in previous years.
HHS isn’t alone in failing on FOIA. As a recent New York Times investigation underscored, federal agencies across the board are getting worse at releasing records to the public.
This degradation isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s occurring alongside a government-wide assault on record preservation and accountability.
President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials routinely flout federal record-keeping laws by utilizing disappearing messaging apps, with recent revelations exposing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among officials who continue to use Signal’s auto-delete function — even after the Signalgate fiasco, when Trump administration officials discussed war planes using a private app and apparently unwittingly invited Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg into the chat.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency operated almost entirely without a paper trail, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought told Congress the White House has no plans to publish an after-action report on what the short-lived government agency actually did.
These secrecy tactics extend to law enforcement and national security agencies as well. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which has had 22 people die in its custody this year alone — has refused to mandate its agents wear body cameras. To make matters worse, the FBI will no longer investigate the immigration agency’s confrontations with the public, further diminishing evidence of ICE’s activities. And at the Department of Defense, officials are attempting to hide “controlled unclassified information” from FOIA requests, potentially hiding hundreds of millions of records forever.
Paul is right about one thing: The government withholds far too much information from the public, and Congress can be more active in releasing agency records.
The White House is also embracing ever-higher levels of secrecy. The Justice Department recently issued a damaging legal opinion declaring the law that governs public access to presidential records, the Presidential Records Act, unconstitutional, saying Trump no longer needs to abide by it. This is an unprecedented move that could make all future presidents less transparent. That’s why my organization, Freedom of the Press Foundation, is currently fighting in court to stop it.
To top it off, while the administration publishes Fauci’s unredacted diaries, it is simultaneously proposing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement to muzzle federal workers from sharing the very kinds of information Paul released.
This transparency double-standard creates a toxic information asymmetry. The public will suffer if employees stop memorializing crises altogether, terrified their records will later be weaponized out of context, while their colleagues’ records are unlawfully deleted without repercussion.
Paul is right about one thing: The government withholds far too much information from the public, and Congress can be more active in releasing agency records. But true oversight isn’t about selectively releasing records for political points, and he and his colleagues must ensure every agency official follows the preservation and access laws already on the books.
Otherwise, this will not be the last administration that trades democratic accountability for cherry-picked releases and show trials.
The post Fauci faced a grilling because he preserved his records. The Trump administration doesn’t. appeared first on MS NOW.
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