Hi everyone, here are some updates on some issues I have written about in previous editions of backroomdeals.substack.com
I am getting ready to head out of the country for a few weeks, but will be leaving you some podcasts and other items to chew on in my absence.
Laggard federal agencies still haven’t posted their annual reports on compliance with the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
Federal agencies are required to report every year to the Department of Justice how they are complying with the FOIA. But the Trump administration, which has little fondness for government transparency, has been missing the mark
Here’s what I wrote in a Substack note on April 3:
It’s Friday, April 3, but still no updated reports on federal agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act - very overdue Trump Administration as they were due on Feb.1. Here’s the list of missing reports, and non-compliant agencies, as posted by the Department of Justice, itself not in compliance, according to its own website. Dept of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, USAID (barely exists). See for yourself.
https://www.justice.gov/oip/chief-foia-officer-reports-2026
Update: Here’s the way it looks on Tuesday, Aug. 11:
The Department of Agriculture eventually submitted its report, now listed on the Department of Justice website for the Office of Information Policy (OIP).
The Department of Health and Human Services report is not posted on the OIP website. Difficult to know if the agency has submitted its report. In any case, it is late.
Same with the Department of Homeland Security (ICE and Border Patrol are housed there). No report on the OIP website.
The Department of Justice, as of April 3, had not posted its own report on the OIP website. It is there now and has been there for a while.
(Congratulations, the enforcer of this reporting requirement finally complied).
The Department of Labor and the Department of Veterans Affairs – no reports are posted on the OIP website.
The Office of Special Counsel has no posting on the OIP website; nor does the hobbled Agency for International Development.
You can look at the list here and click on their reports.
Pete Hegseth and his disdain for the news media – of which he was once a card carrying member - but who’s counting?
I wrote this on April 29:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has won at least a short-term victory in his effort to restrict press access to the Pentagon. You may recall that The New York Times in December sued the Pentagon, Hegseth and spokesman Sean Parnell after the Department of Defense imposed new rules that news organizations said restricted access to the point of violating their Constitutional rights to conduct their work. Hegseth et al have lost twice in federal court but on Monday (April 27) a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the Pentagon could continue to insist that reporters have escorts in the building – at least for now.
That decision put on hold two rulings by U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, who found the Pentagon’s policy unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment. When the Pentagon responded to his first ruling, Friedman issued a second one that essentially accused the government of dressing up its restrictive rules with new language that did not amount to compliance, (This even though the government put it forth as a solution to the problem the Times was describing).
Update: This case is still ongoing. More paperwork was due to Friedman from the Department of Justice on Tuesday, Aug. 11. This is expected to be a response to the Times’ request to permanently halt the DoD policy, which the Times’ lawyers said in court papers was aimed at “closing the Pentagon to any journalist or news organization unwilling to report only what Department officials approve.”
The Hegseth effort is the latest in a long series of attempts by the federal government in both Democratic and Republican administrations to try to clamp down on information that a free society needs to understand and act on. But until Hegseth entered the Pentagon, reporters’ access to people in the building, who work in a warren of hundreds of different offices in various rings in the five-sided building, was relatively unfettered. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/us/politics/pentagon-reporters-hegseth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4VA.7Wil.Cw3xfXv9lMEv&smid=url-share
But Hegseth kicked out reporters from a variety of news organizations after more than 40 refused to sign onto a requirement that they report only “official’ news from the Pentagon; required reporters to get access to the building with government escorts; and threatened reporters who broke stories that weren’t officially blessed with possible punishment.
Trump administration scooping up our personal data. Why?
I wrote this on June 3:
The Trump administration is collecting and consolidating reams of personal data, looking to create a big not-so-beautiful database about, at the very least, everyone who is present in the United States. So far, there has been little, if any transparency about how the data are being collected and what the federal government is doing with it.
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation would like to know more. So would many others.
Here’s some background: President Trump issued an executive order calling for data pooling and consolidation among federal agencies more than a year ago - on March 20, 2025 – a few short months after he was sworn into his second term as president. The goal, according to his statement, was “eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.” The effort also gives the federal government unlimited access to databases maintained by the states when federal funds are involved. This includes databases maintained by third-parties, such as private contractors working on state and federally funded programs.
Who could be against marshalling government forces against overpayments and fraud? Seems reasonable.
Harper says the goal is far more nefarious. It is “every authoritarian’s dream.,” she wrote in the Intercept.
Harper maintains that putting personal information into one big database, which she believes is the Trump administration’s goal, goes well beyond the exemptions already allowed in the Privacy Act. Having all the data in one place could make it much easier for the government to spy on any U.S. resident or citizen, she believes, and also makes the data easier to obtain by bad actors and hackers.
Ginger Quintero-McCall, of the Free Information Group law firm, co-founded with Kevin Bell, is representing the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Quintero-McCall told me that getting a clearer understanding of how the new data mining system is set up is crucial. “The basic goal was to dismantle Privacy Act protections,” she said. But the Privacy Act’s key purpose was to create information silos and create safe methods to collect and store information. “That was a feature of the Act, not a bug.”
She put in this way in the lawsuit:
“The elimination of privacy guardrails…would create profound privacy problems for millions of Americans whose data is stored in government databases. Existing privacy laws, regulations and policies set strict standards about who can access what data, why, and what they can do with that data. Eliminating those guardrails would potentially allow unfettered, untracked access by anyone within government.”
Not only that, she wrote, the Privacy Act allows the public a clear understanding of what data are being collected about them and enables people to seek corrections of inaccurate information.
“Experts have noted that elimination of ‘information silos’ could also allow for the creation of increasingly detailed dossiers of Americans, which could then be used for any purpose the Trump Administration proposes,” she noted.
Update: This lawsuit is still pending, but court documents show that the Office of Management and Budget has begun to cough up some of the public records that Harper has been seeking. The next status report to U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras overseeing the case is due on September 25.
Troubled by government secrecy? My book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back” is available directly from my publisher, The New Press. It tells the stories of people who are fighting government secrecy close to home. Use this link and include discount code Backroom30.
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