The State Department has come under significant scrutiny following revelations last month that Trump urged Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden and his son during a July phone call while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listened in. House Democrats later released text messages in which U.S. diplomats discussed investigations in Ukraine and new details continue emerging as the impeachment story dominates the news cycle.

While State Department press secretary Morgan Ortagus and her team continue to field questions on diplomatic and foreign policy issues, reporters have been directed to put Ukraine-specific requests to Katie Martin, a deputy assistant secretary for media strategy who joined in March from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. But reporters say their questions rarely yield answers, and often go unacknowledged.

"The requests kind of disappear into the ether," said a third reporter. And this lack of clarity from the administration, the reporter said, hampers journalists' ability “to explain what is happening to the American public.”

Shaun Tandon, an AFP reporter who serves as president of the State Department Correspondents’ Association, told POLITICO that they have brought concerns to senior department officials.

“We want them to acknowledge our questions and to have some kind of standard way for us to reach out to them,” he said.

Martin did not respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.

“One of the things that’s quite frustrating with the impeachment inquiry is it involves the State Department very much at this point, with former and current diplomats being called for depositions,” said Tandon. “We hear things on the Hill, the White House is speaking quite a bit, and we have essentially nothing from the State Department."

Earlier this week, reporters were informed that the State Department ordered Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, not to testify before Congress. That information came from Sondland’s personal attorney, not the State Department.

The lapse was unusual because the department -- whose public information office is widely viewed as the most professional in the government, accustomed to dealing with issues of international sensitivity – has been forthcoming on other matters. This week, State Department officials briefed reporters off-camera on changes to the U.S. policy in Syria.

On Wednesday, Pompeo sat down with PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff to make clear that the administration opposes the Turkish assault on northern Syria. Pompeo answered Woodruff’s questions on other topics, including on Ukraine, though at one point suggested the journalist worked for the Democratic National Committee after she suggested “there’s been no proof of any misdoing on the part of Vice President Biden” with respect to his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Past administrations have, at times, separated questions about global policy issues from a fast-moving crisis or controversy, especially if there political implications. Under President Barack Obama, the department assigned certain officials to field questions on hot-button topics like WikiLeaks, the Benghazi attack, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. But the expectation was that the issue-specific spokesperson, or team, would be able to respond more urgently and with the latest information, to reporters’ inquiries. That has not happened under the Trump administration, reporters said.

The concerns about responsiveness on Ukraine and impeachment-related matters come as Ortagus’s on-camera press briefings, which returned in May after a hiatus, remain a rarity. The last on-camera briefing was held on Sept. 12, though officials did brief reporters off-camera last month at United Nations General Assembly in New York.

The White House press secretary hasn’t held a formal, on-camera briefing in more than six months, though Trump regularly takes questions from reporters, while the Pentagon went more than a year without conducting one.

