Across US President Donald Trump’s Administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies. Photo / Doug Mills, the New York Times)
At the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, some employees had to sign nondisclosure agreements before reviewing plans for firings and organisational shake-ups.
At the Administration for Children and Families, career staff were told not to respond in writing to panicky grant recipients whose funding had been shut off to avoid a “paper trail”, one employee said.
And at the Environmental Protection Agency, several months after Elon Musk began requiring federal workers to submit weekly emails detailing five things they’d accomplished, some managers began calling staff to say they no longer had to comply - but refused to put it in writing, according to an employee who received one of the calls.
“What’s particularly weird for me is that, as a regulatory agency, we tend to operate with the idea that ‘if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen,’” said the employee, who has since left the government.
“But we are very much moving away from things being in writing.”
Across US President Donald Trump’s Administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.
No one wants to put anything in writing anymore, federal workers said.
Meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, even on anodyne topics.
Workers prefer to talk outdoors, as long as the weather co-operates.
And communication among colleagues - whether work-related or personal - has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete.
It’s not just career staffers who are clamming up, fearful they will be tagged as rebellious or resistant to Trump’s policies and dismissed amid the Administration’s push to trim the workforce, fulfilling the President’s promise to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse.
Trump’s own political appointees are also resistant to writing things down, worried that their agency’s deliberations will appear in news coverage and inspire a hunt for leakers, federal workers said.
Every administration comes in urging at least some confidentiality, usually to protect presidential priorities or encourage the candid airing of views in decision-making, federal workers noted.
Government employees’ devices have long been monitored, and the law prevents workers from publicly espousing political opinions or taking part in political activity while on duty.
But this shift is different, workers said - more far-reaching, affecting every aspect of external and internal communications.
The overall effect has been to impede honest discussion, slow work, stir confusion, and depress morale.
“I’ve never seen this much secrecy and lack of transparency from any leadership, including in the military,” said a nearly 10-year veteran of the General Services Administration. “We don’t know anything until it happens.”
The clandestine deliberations cut against long-standing norms and legal requirements - especially the Federal Records Act, passed in 1950, which governs the creation, management and disposition of government records.
However, that law has faced few challenges, said Margaret Kwoka, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. While the Trump Administration’s aversion to written records is “problematic”, it is hard to know whether it violates the act, Kwoka said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump Administration views the culture of secrecy pervading the government “as a good thing” because fewer leaks are emerging from the highest ranks.
“The President does not tolerate leaks, especially those that could endanger our national security or our homeland security,” Leavitt said.
“We expect every federal worker, whether they are a political or a career, to respect their jobs and to respect the responsibility they have to the American people to execute on this administration’s policies.”
A senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share more candid thoughts, said the Administration is determined to crack down on those who give out unauthorised information.
The source pointed to recent firings at the Defence Department and the polygraph testing of suspected leakers at the Department of Homeland Security.
Noting that the Administration bombed Iran with no public leaks beforehand, the official quoted Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin, who said on television that she had “never seen such operational security” in her 18 years covering the Pentagon.
“Secrecy led to the success of the operation and allowed our pilots to accomplish this highly sensitive mission,” the official said. “With respect to national security, secrecy is demanded.”
In some cases, the push for secrecy is making it hard for federal workers to do their jobs.
Between Trump’s inauguration and early March, one lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security was asked three or four times to go over political appointees’ intended plans of action to check for compliance with the law.
Each time, the lawyer got a general question and replied with specific queries seeking the facts necessary to render an opinion, he explained. Under previous administrations, such questions quickly led to clarifying answers or a meeting to hash out the details, he said.
Not this time. His emails “went unanswered”, he said. “It seemed like they did not want to share the operative details of what leadership was doing.”
Without further information, the lawyer was unable to give legal opinions. After several months in limbo, he quit. His job had become impossible, he said: “I couldn’t ensure that we were in compliance with the law”.
Similarly, at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a group of lawyers who would normally review all memos, policies and procedural changes has been iced out, according to one of the lawyers.
Since the inauguration, a political appointee has drafted such documents and issued them under the acting director’s name, the lawyer said. But the appointee never consults with the lawyers, he said, and won’t let them see anything written down until it’s already public.
This is not only unprecedented but “insane”, the lawyer said, because “we assess legal risk for the agency”.
Asked to comment, a Homeland Security spokesperson replied by email with a question: “So let me get this straight, 40 people who are speaking ANONYMOUSLY are saying that this Administration is operating in ‘secrecy?’”
Meanwhile, political leaders across agencies seem determined to keep personnel manoeuvres quiet.
Within the Interior Department, top officials are telling US Geological Survey centre directors not to put the words “reduction in force” or “RIF” - both terms for federal layoffs - in memos or emails, according to an employee there.
At the Education Department, political appointees are scrambling to move staff around to make up for resignations and firings, but refusing to issue reassignments in writing, said a former staffer there.
Asked for comment, Interior’s deputy press secretary, Aubrie Spady, shared a written statement.
“To suggest that there is any so-called ‘secrecy’ within the most transparent Administration in history is a complete fabrication and disregard of President Trump’s commendable openness with the American people,” the statement read.
“It is a disgrace that these supposed unnamed employees are spending their time leaking to the media rather than actually doing their jobs.”
Other agencies, including the Education Department, the General Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Nasa, the Social Security Administration, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, did not respond to requests for comment.
Some career federal workers say they are censoring their speech for fear of violating Trump’s executive orders barring diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and outlawing certain ways of describing gender.
At the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a team planning contracts recently held phone calls and unrecorded video calls with contractors to warn them not to mention “underserved populations”, “blacks”, “Latinos”, “genders”, “diversity”, or “health equity”, said a CDC contractor who received the instructions.
At Veterans Affairs, an all-staff email in early May announced that an “action team” would review “content across VA platforms” - including emails, shared drives, the internet and the intranet - to uncover anything “that may conflict with current presidential policy and orders”, according to a message obtained by the Washington Post.
Afterwards, a VA employee said, healthcare workers held meetings and trainings in person to avoid virtual monitoring and fretted over the consequences of writing up chart notes for transgender and noncitizen patients.
Asked about these and other incidents, including the signing of nondisclosure agreements, a VA spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency is rightfully “phasing out treatment for gender dysphoria”; that its content review “helped to successfully refocus VA on its core mission”; and that “VA is using NDAs to stop leaks of pre-decisional and deliberative information that biased, liberal outlets like the Washington Post and union bosses are exploiting to fearmonger”.
Similar worries have extended to the Library of Congress, which Trump has tried to claim as part of the executive branch, seeking to fire its leaders and install loyalists - and drawing legal challenges.
A few weeks after Trump fired the library’s head, staff sent a cautionary message to social media managers, revising rules for sharing information on agency accounts.
“Please limit your social media and email bulletins to essential updates and mission-critical posts,” read the email, obtained by the Washington Post. “For the time being, avoid nonessential general information or ‘did-you-know’ types of postings (birthday and anniversary posts, collection spotlight, posts, etc.) … in short: If you don’t have to, don’t.” In early June, the library softened these restrictions.
Other shifts towards secrecy are taking place on a more personal level. Many involve Signal, the messaging app that became a household name after Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth used it to accidentally share battle plans with the Atlantic’s editor in chief.
At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, workers in one office no longer use Microsoft Teams but instead talk through Signal to discuss anything personal or that could be read as criticism of the Trump Administration, said a staffer there.
In part of the Justice Department, lawyers who are friends outside of work have shifted all their text message conversations to Signal, said a staffer there.
And at the Social Security Administration, one worker said she deleted her personal Facebook and Instagram accounts and now - except for the most basic communications - only sends disappearing Signal messages, even to her closest friends.
Meanwhile, a new culture is springing up around meetings, facilitated by Trump’s return-to-office requirements.
At one Nasa centre on the West Coast, staff no longer have conversations at their cubicles, an employee said.
Any chats happen inside an office, with the door closed, and most people prefer to talk outside on the lawn, escaping the building entirely.
“Nothing is written down,” the employee said. “Nothing.”
Once meetings end, the paranoia continues.
An employee at the General Services Administration said he mutes his microphone and covers his computer’s camera with a shutter when he isn’t using them.
When staff in one part of the Department of Health and Human Services have to write things down - to send emails or meeting invites to political appointees, for example - they all gather around a single computer to edit the message jointly, one employee said.
“It’s heavily litigated before it’s sent,” the employee said. “Everyone is on their very best behaviour.”
A National Institutes of Health employee recently adopted a new policy.
Whenever he drafts an email, he feeds it into ChatGPT. “Improve email draft,” he writes. “Remove DEI” - for diversity, equity and inclusion, which Trump has outlawed from government - “or other problem phrases”. An NIH spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “remains fully committed to open dialogue, scientific integrity, and a workplace grounded in transparency”.
And when a HUD staffer recently had a routine question about the budget, she caught herself before typing out a Teams message.
Instead, she got up from her desk, walked into her supervisor’s office and asked verbally. Just in case.
- Maxine Joselow and Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.
The accused worked at 20 Melbourne nurseries from 2017 to 2025.