The first rule in Trump’s Washington: Don’t write anything down – The Washington Post
(Illustration by Lucy Naland/The Washington Post; Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post)The first rule in Trump’s Washington: Don’t write anything down
A new culture of secrecy in government is taking root – among career staffers and new political appointees alike.
June 29, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDTToday at 7:00 a.m. EDT, 11 min
By Hannah Natanson
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, some employees had to sign nondisclosure agreements before reviewing plans for firings and organizational 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 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 cooperates. And communication among colleagues — whether work-related or personal — has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete.
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