There is a mystery unfolding in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Officials there seem to have removed the United States from a singularly successful anti-corruption effort. This has happened largely in secret, aside from a few public statements in legalese that are nearly impossible to parse. At times, bureaucrats in the department have behaved in ways that—it’s hard to think of another word—seem un-American, literally silencing dissent in open forums and abruptly cutting off contact with the public.

The controversy centers on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a remarkable global project with a very boring name that has become a model for the fight against some of the worst forms of corruption. Countries where economies are built on oil, gas, diamonds, or other natural resources are frequently subject to what is known as the “resource curse.” Those countries are often run by autocrats who use the wealth in the ground to enrich themselves and crush opposition. This is not merely a local concern. There is a well-established link between global terrorism and the regions of the world—the Middle East, Nigeria—most susceptible to extractive-industry corruption. Money from oil-and-gas wealth has flowed into Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, and other nations. Imagine the past few decades if those nations had been well-governed democracies, instead of places that breed resentment, funnel money to bad actors, attack neighbors, and in other ways destabilize their regions and the world.

The first step to ending this age-old problem is fairly simple: a bit more information. Typically, a private company, such as ExxonMobil or BP, will pay a huge and secret amount of money to a government for access to fossil fuels or minerals. Nobody, aside from insiders, will ever know how much money the government received and how that money was spent. The E.I.T.I. changed that.

In 2002, Tony Blair, who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time, and some other world leaders, activists, and scholars called for the creation of the E.I.T.I. This international body is headquartered in Norway, one of the very few oil-rich countries to have avoided the worst ills of a resource-rich economy, and is run by the former Prime Minister of Sweden and a board made up of civil-society advocates, political leaders, and executives of oil, gas, and mining companies. Together, these advocates, politicians, and business people, so often at odds, worked together to come up with a new global standard for transparency. The fifty-one countries that agreed to the standard promised to report all the money they receive from extractive industries and how they spend it. Companies working in those nations would also reveal what they paid, allowing the public to reconcile the government and corporate accounts.

The E.I.T.I. is seen as the cornerstone of reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as a major tool against corruption in Ghana. In other countries, the impact has been less impressive. Nigeria’s adoption all but stalled. Azerbaijan, a notoriously corrupt country, was once seen as the agreement’s single greatest success story, but it was recently kicked out of the initiative because the government had so thoroughly stifled civil society.

The United States, much like the U.K., Canada, Denmark, and Sweden, joined, in large part, to serve as a model for others. The idea was to show that being a wealthy nation is not incompatible with being a transparent one. In 2010, as part of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation reforms, the U.S. Congress passed the Cardin-Lugar Amendment, which makes oil, gas, and mining companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges reveal all the money they give to foreign governments. For the past several years, the Department of the Interior has convened a group of U.S. stakeholders that models the international board’s inclusiveness, with activists from Global Witness, Public Citizen, and Oxfam America, as well as academics, government representatives, and executives from Chevron, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute. Following E.I.T.I. practice, they made all decisions by consensus, and, while it would seem unlikely that oil-and-gas representatives would find much agreement with environmental activists, the group managed to settle on a plan for U.S. oil-and-gas companies to reveal the taxes and fees they pay to the U.S., along with many other data points that would help citizens better understand the impacts—good and bad—that extractive industries have on their communities.

Then came the Trump Administration, and an emboldened Republican majority. In one of its first acts, the new Republican Congress passed a bill eliminating the Cardin-Lugar Amendment, which President Trump quickly signed. This was a slap in the face of the E.I.T.I. process, since it eliminated the legal requirement that oil-and-gas companies have to make public the money they pay to foreign governments in order to exploit their resources. However, there was no reason that, even without the Cardin-Lugar rule, these companies couldn’t voluntarily disclose their tax burdens. At a public gathering of the U.S. E.I.T.I. group, hosted by the Department of the Interior, on March 8th, several members began asking the government officials leading the meeting whether the Trump Administration still supports the E.I.T.I. Danielle Brian, who leads the group of industry and advocacy organizations formally partnering with the Department of the Interior on E.I.T.I., was in the middle of asking a question when an official with the Department of the Interior cut off her microphone, as several people present told me. Soon after, something very strange happened. One of the obligations a government makes when signing on to the E.I.T.I. is to hold regular meetings with advocates and industry groups. The Department of the Interior had scheduled such talks roughly every two weeks for the rest of the year. But, after that March 8th meeting, the nongovernmental members of the group noticed that the Outlook invitations to those meetings had been deleted from their calendars by the department. Members of the E.I.T.I. group, and various reporters, have been trying to find out what the invitation disappearance means. Has the U.S. pulled out of the E.I.T.I.? Is it rethinking the way it will be involved?

Heather Swift, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, told me in an e-mail that “no decision has been made” about participation in E.I.T.I. However, the unilateral cancellation of meetings is already a violation of the norms of the organization. A central tenet is that decisions are made, collectively, by government, activists, and industry. The idea that the U.S. government, alone, can decide the path forward without input from the other stakeholders is, in act if not in word, a departure from the compact.

There is an ongoing debate among the members of the U.S. E.I.T.I.’s now disbanded advisory group. Was this a deliberate plan of the Trump Administration? Danielle Brian doesn’t think so. “The government is always kind of chaotic,” she said. “But now it’s incredibly chaotic.” She sees no reason to think that higher-ups at the White House or elsewhere in the government even know what the E.I.T.I. is. Rather, she says, this was probably the work of career civil servants at the Department of the Interior who had “an understandable freak-out.” They were in a meeting with dozens of outside advocates calling for, among other things, companies to release their tax information in order to identify potential conflicts of interest. They may have assumed that it is the kind of thing that the Trump Administration would be against if it ever learned about it. “There is a dramatic chilling effect on federal employees now that Trump is their boss.”

“The U.S. has not formally left the EITI,” Daniel Kaufmann, a scholar of the economics of corruption, who is on the global E.I.T.I. board, wrote in an e-mail. “Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore the recent lack of initiative on these matters from the superpower.” Unnamed industry sources told Reuters that the U.S. has pulled out “in all but name.” “I think the U.S. oil companies and some in the U.S. administration want it both ways,” Kaufmann said. “They want to say they support EITI but they don’t want to actually support their own transparency.”