The Cabinet members carrying out President Donald Trump’s orders to shake up the federal government are doing so under an unusual layer of secrecy — often shielding their schedules from public view, keeping their travels under wraps and refusing to identify the people and groups they’re meeting.

A POLITICO review of the practices of 17 Cabinet heads found that at least eight routinely decline to release information on their planned schedules or travels — information that was more widely available during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Four other departments — Agriculture, Labor, Homeland Security and Education — provide the secretaries’ schedules only sporadically or with few details. The Treasury Department began releasing weekly schedules for Secretary Steven Mnuchin only in November.


In addition, at least six Cabinet departments don’t release appointment calendars that would show, after the fact, who their leaders had met with, what they discussed and where they traveled — a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act, which says agencies must make their records “promptly available to any person.” Two departments — Education and the Environmental Protection Agency — have released some of those details after watchdog groups sued them.

This information clampdown is occurring with little oversight by Trump’s White House, which said only that agencies should follow the law when it comes to deciding what information to release.

“The White House does not issue guidance specifically addressing the daily schedules of Cabinet agency heads,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement. On the other hand, he added, “The White House expects federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests.”

Government watchdog groups and activists who closely follow the departments’ policies say the secrecy is more than just a Trumpian swipe at political enemies and a meddlesome news media: It’s an attempt, they say, to conceal the special access that some powerful interests have gotten in shaping policies that directly affect them.

"How officials spend their time is the best window into what their priorities are,” said Austin Evers, a former Obama State Department lawyer who heads the watchdog group American Oversight, which has sued for the calendars of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “When public officials resist public disclosure of what they do, people should be skeptical of what they're trying to hide.”

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Criticisms that some agency heads are concealing meetings with businesses they’re supposed to regulate have been leveled especially often against Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who has made it his explicit mission to ease regulatory burdens on industries including oil, gas, coal, auto manufacturing and agriculture.

Pruitt meets frequently with leaders of these and other industries, based on the three months of detailed calendar records that American Oversight managed to pry out of EPA under a court order. But the agency makes it difficult to track his activities in real time — refusing to provide schedules or advisories of his upcoming meetings, confirm his attendance at specific events, or say what city he plans to be in on a given day.

Recent events that EPA refused to disclose ahead of time include a speech Pruitt delivered at a fuel marketers’ conference in Chicago co-sponsored by BP, whose U.S. oil and gas interests are governed by EPA regulations. Pruitt’s staff wouldn’t even say where he was headed that day, after POLITICO asked about a tip that he was seen sitting in first class on a Delta Air Lines flight.

Earlier this month , EPA wouldn’t disclose information about a dinner discussion that Pruitt was holding with a pro-business think tank in D.C. It gave no advance notice that he was traveling to Morocco on a trip that included a discussion of the country’s interest in importing U.S. natural gas, a fuel source his agency helps regulate. EPA also wouldn’t confirm that Pruitt was scheduled to speak this month in Nashville before the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy organization — even though the printed program listed him as a lunchtime speaker. (ALEC later said Pruitt had canceled his appearance.)





The @ALEC_states conference brochure names @EPAScottPruitt as speaking at its Friday lunch in Nashville, as ALEC members debate a resolution attacking #climate science and another criminalizing pipeline protesters pic.twitter.com/dAN6ULF6EU — Nick Surgey (@NickSurgey) December 5, 2017

Even after the fact, EPA resists releasing the detailed calendars that would make it easier for journalists and watchdogs to track how often Pruitt meets with business leaders before making decisions that benefit their bottom lines.

The records released to date offer some clues, however: In May, for instance, Pruitt met with executives from an automotive company, Fitzgerald Truck Sales, to discuss an Obama-era air pollution rule for refurbished heavy trucks, according to the calendars obtained by American Oversight. Six months later, Pruitt agreed to weaken the rules, as the company had requested.

The partial meeting records released to date reveal similar meetings Pruitt has held with auto executives affected by his upcoming decision on whether to ease greenhouse gas requirements for cars and trucks; coal mining and power executives opposed to Obama-era regulations on their industries; and developers who received Pruitt’s approval to seek a permit for a proposed gold and mineral mine in Alaska, according to documents previously obtained and analyzed by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt talks to a reporter after speaking at Whayne Supply in Hazard, Ky., on Oct. 9. | Adam Beam/AP Photo

Alarmed that many more such examples must exist, at least three watchdog and environmental groups have filed separate suits seeking detailed copies of Pruitt’s calendars. The Times and reporter Eric Lipton filed a similar suit against EPA this month, arguing in court documents that calendars are “often the only way the public has visibility into who provides Administrator Pruitt with input as he devises policy positions that affect all Americans.”

Pruitt “uses the word transparency a lot,” said Ann Weeks, legal director for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group not involved in the suits. But she added, “To whom is the transparency being offered? Because it’s not the American people because we’re not able even to see who he’s talking to.”

EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman calls the criticism baseless, arguing that the agency is providing more information to the public than past administrations, “despite lawsuits from The New York Times for the sake of scoring political points and making headlines.” As evidence, she cites actions such as listing EPA’s upcoming regulatory actions online — as required by law — as well as a posting a public online calendar for Pruitt that often omits the names of the people he’s meeting with and the topic of discussion.

"The fact is that the current EPA is the most transparent EPA has been in years,” Bowman said.

Pruitt isn’t the only Cabinet member holding unpublicized meetings with businesses or groups who have a stake in his decisions.

While the Interior Department readily provides calendars after the fact for Secretary Ryan Zinke, it doesn’t publish his schedule ahead of time for events such as a September speech to the National Petroleum Council, whose members include companies that drill for oil and gas on federal land. (He made headlines that day by declaring that 30 percent of Interior employees aren’t “loyal” to his and Trump’s agenda.) It also issued no advance notice of political fundraisers he attended in Alaska, Montana and the Caribbean that are now under investigation by government watchdogs.

In August, after Zinke’s wife tweeted photos showing the couple relaxing along the Bosporus, an Interior spokesperson would not say when the secretary had left the U.S., when he was returning or whether the trip to Turkey was a vacation.

Similarly, when then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price went to an Ohio drug manufacturer in April as part of a listening tour about the opioid epidemic, Price tweeted about the trip only after he had already visited. HHS' press office also didn't email national news organizations about the trip until two days later — after he published an op-ed in The Cincinnati Enquirer that mentioned it.

Traveled to OH today to visit Alkermes—a company playing a crucial role in our efforts to fight #opioid addiction. Thank you for hosting me. pic.twitter.com/OxWlEVKQKk — Tom Price, M.D. (@SecPriceMD) April 26, 2017

Since Sept. 29, when Price resigned following POLITICO’s revelation that he had charged taxpayers for at least $1 million in private and military flights, HHS has refused to publish schedules for acting Secretary Eric Hargan. Department employees responding to POLITICO’s request for Price’s calendars have said they’re swamped with FOIA requests they’re working to fulfill.

The departments of Commerce, Energy, Transportation and Veterans Affairs and the office of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer also do not release advance schedules for their leaders.

"These are top public officials who work for the U.S. citizens, and they have a right to know who they're meeting with and what they're doing,” said Sean Moulton, the open government program manager at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.



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Several of the Trump agencies’ policies on releasing schedules and calendars are notably more restrictive than either the Obama or George W. Bush administrations — though they, too, faced criticism for lack of transparency.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney won a court battle to avoid having to disclose details about his energy task force’s meetings with industry executives, rejecting a challenge by the Sierra Club and the conservative group Judicial Watch. Under Obama, The Associated Press sued the State Department for copies of former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s calendars. The department said at the time that it was coping with a load of records requests but “does its best to meet its FOIA responsibilities."

More than 40 journalism and watchdog organizations also objected in 2015 to what they called a growing array of “constraints on information in the federal government" under Obama, including agencies that prohibited rank-and-file staff from talking to reporters.

Hiding information ultimately harms the agencies themselves, said Christine Todd Whitman, who led EPA during Bush’s first term and said she posted her schedule for the entire EPA staff to see and made reporters aware when she was traveling.

“It all leads to an atmosphere of distrust, even if you’re doing absolutely nothing wrong,” Whitman said.

She added that she is wary of Pruitt’s secrecy and has been “startled” by his frequent meetings with industry. “I worry about meeting with people who might have enforcement action coming before the agency, and, on the flip-side, seeming at this point to be locking out the environmentalists, because you’ve got to hear from both sides,” she said.

Under Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s staff emailed reporters a schedule of his upcoming week of activities, typically on Fridays. DeVos, in contrast, provides a much sparser public schedule that often omits meaningful details about the vast majority of her meetings.

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao attends a forum on the White House campus April 4, 2017. Chao declines to provide advanced schedules to reporters. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Department of Homeland Security also released weekly alerts during the Bush and Obama eras for the news media about the secretary’s events, even if it wasn’t always complete. Under Trump, DHS has yet to issue such schedules on a regular basis, although its staff will confirm information about specific events.

Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx not only provided his weekly schedule in advance but held monthly question-and-answer sessions with reporters. Trump’s DOT chief, Elaine Chao, declines to provide advance schedules, and has yet to hold this type of session in Washington, D.C.

Bush’s environmental agencies also publicized any events where leaders would speak publicly, said Jim Connaughton, who headed the White House Council of Environmental Quality at the time. And under Obama, then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy noted that her office provided a week-ahead guidance about her activities and regularly published her calendars after the fact.

“When we were delayed at all, we would certainly hear from reporters,” McCarthy said.

But the Energy Department didn’t publish then-Secretary Ernest Moniz’s schedules when Obama was in the White House — and doesn’t publish them for Secretary Rick Perry now. In both cases, however, DOE staff have sent advisories to the press for most of the secretaries’ public events.

The Project on Government Oversight has called for years for Cabinet-level secretaries to at least publish their calendars online, calling it “the fundamental floor of what all agencies should be disclosing.”

“It has been hit or miss, even under the Obama administration,” Moulton said. But he said the Trump White House set the tone when it announced in April that it would refuse to publish its visitor logs on the grounds of “national security risks and privacy concerns,” breaking with the Obama administration’s policy. (POLITICO has responded by publishing its own unofficial White House visitor log, based on publicly available information.)

Agency officials offer varying explanations for not releasing this information, including a crush of backlogged FOIA requests, as well as previous statements by EPA and the Education Department that they’re concerned about security. EPA staff says Pruitt has gotten an unusually high number of death threats — several times more than former Obama’s agency chiefs received — while DeVos’ staff notes that her public appearances have drawn protesters, including a crowd that briefly blocked her from entering a D.C. middle school in February.

On the other hand, Cabinet members who have immense security concerns are more open about their plans, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose offices issue daily advisories to the media about their public plans.

Pruitt and DeVos also don’t lack for protection: Each has a round-the-clock security entourage, unusual by the standards of their predecessors. DeVos’ security detail, projected to cost as much as $6.54 million during the current fiscal year, consists of U.S. marshals. Pruitt maintains tight secrecy even when he’s in his headquarters a few blocks from the White House, according to news reports that say he restricts employees’ access to his office area, ordered a $25,000 soundproof communications chamber installed in his office and recently had his office swept for bugs.



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For some of Trump’s Cabinet appointees, who include wealthy business executives with little exposure to the often-harsh scrutiny of public life, secrecy may be less about hiding a policy agenda than about discomfort with the spotlight.

DeVos, the billionaire charter-school activist who never before held public office, puts some of her events on social media but leaves them out of her department’s official communications with the news media.





Education Secretary Betsy DeVos meets with Ahmed M. Al-Eisa, the minister of education for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. | Department of Education via Flickr

People following her online might have known she had met with the Saudi education minister in October — based on a photo she posted on Flickr — but the department never issued any information about it or said what they had discussed. The state-run Saudi Press Agency was more forthcoming, disclosing that the leaders had talked about “the importance of educational cooperation” between their countries’ universities.

In November, DeVos visited Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where she said in a later post on Instagram that she learned about education for the deaf and hard of hearing. The Education Department issued no advisories before or after the event.

DeVos’ public schedule is riddled with so many omissions that U.S. News and World Report lamented in October that “civically engaged citizens” would have had no way of knowing she planned to speak at a Future Farmers of America convention in Indianapolis, attend a roundtable on students with disabilities or make a March visit to a Roman Catholic school in Orlando.

Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs partner turned Treasury secretary, was slow to begin releasing his weekly schedule — in contrast to former Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who put one out every day. In June, when Mnuchin talked regulations and tax reform with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the Brookings Institution, the public’s first clue came when Mnuchin tweeted about it afterward .

In late December, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta issued only an after-the-fact news release when he visited hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Some agencies, including the departments of Justice, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, provide partial guidance about their secretaries’ schedules, either to the public or on background or off-the-record for the media. HUD, for example, usually provides reporters with an emailed heads-up about Secretary Ben Carson’s official events, although it doesn’t publicize all his appearances — his schedule didn’t include his attendance at last month’s opening of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., for instance.

Even the less-forthcoming agencies insist that they’re following the law and keeping the public informed.

“Every official event that is open to the public is posted on the Secretary’s public schedule,” Education Department press secretary Liz Hill wrote in a response to questions. “There isn’t a ‘transparency issue’ simply because members of the media want more of a head’s up.”

Even so, Hill confirmed that security is a factor as the department plans and issues information on DeVos’ public schedule.

Pruitt’s admirers even praise him for stiff-arming reporters’ request for information: A story Dec. 15 in The Weekly Standard — which EPA’s press office distributed by email hours later — lauded Pruitt’s “fearless defiance of his political and media foes.” The story’s first paragraph notes that POLITICO and The New York Times ask EPA for Pruitt’s upcoming schedule every week, and “the press office ignores the emails.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican ally from Pruitt’s home state of Oklahoma, said the EPA chief has “a job to do and he doesn’t want to be distracted on everything.”

“He may be working on something that is the best interest in the United States that would not be doable if the other side were to find out about it,” Inhofe said.



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While the law doesn’t compel agencies to create advance schedules for the news media, the Freedom of Information Act does require them to turn over records such as their leaders’ appointment calendars after the fact. Congress has also directed agencies to automatically make available any records they anticipate would be in high demand — a category some legal experts say includes the calendars of agencies’ top officials.

“People have a right to know what officials are doing day to day,” said Kevin Goldberg, a lawyer focusing on First Amendment and FOIA issues at the Washington firm of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth. He added, “There should be and there is a way to do this proactively. ... It doesn’t seem to make sense that in 2017 we can’t get that right.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke walks through a buggy trail in October in the Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee, Fla. While the Interior Department readily provides calendars after the fact for Zinke, it doesn’t publish his schedule ahead of time. | Alan Diaz/AP

Congress told agencies in a 2016 update to hew to a presumption of openness, but that command has been slow to take hold. Goldberg, whose clients include the American Society of News Editors and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, said it’s too soon to say whether the lag is because of typical bureaucratic inertia or ill intent from the Trump administration.

But Goldberg said the administration has sent some worrying signals. Those include the Justice Department’s lag in carrying out a late-Obama-era proposal to implement a “release to one, release to all” policy for FOIA records. Under that policy, any documents an agency releases under FOIA would be automatically made available to everybody.

Margaret Townsend, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups suing EPA, argued that it’s also illegal for agencies to create two sets of calendars — a bare-bones one for media and public consumption, and a more detailed set for internal use — and then refuse to provide the latter in response to FOIA requests. But EPA appears to be doing just that.

EPA has declined several requests to offer an on-the-record explanation of its refusal to release the calendars. In court documents responding to lawsuits, the agency described American Oversight’s FOIA request as “overbroad” and said EPA staff had conversations about what the Environmental Defense Fund was seeking for several months before the activist group filed suit.

Moulton, of the Project on Government Oversight, called it “troubling” that agencies have forced groups to resort to litigation to obtain records that have long been recognized as subject to FOIA.

"There are simple and complex requests,” he said. “This should be one of those simple requests."

Anthony Adragna, Caitlin Emma, Nick Juliano, Lauren Gardner, Kathryn Wolfe, Ben Lefebvre, Alex Guillén, Darius Dixon, Wesley Morgan, Jacqueline Klimas, Rachana Pradhan, Josh Gerstein, Ted Hesson, Lorraine Woellert, Patrick Temple-West, Doug Palmer, Adam Behsudi, Connor O’Brien, Catherine Boudreau, Helena Bottemiller Evich, Ian Kullgren, Michael Crowley, Victoria Guida, Adam Cancryn, Stephanie Beasley, P.J. Joshi, Eric Wolff and Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.