Employees at several government departments and agencies, including the Environmental Protection Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have been ordered not to make any statements or provide any documents to the public, whether via social media or by providing comments and/or documents — including press releases — to journalists or media outlets.
It’s not clear how long these gag orders will remain in place, or whether they are simply designed to freeze activity until Trump’s hand-picked staff can issue new regulations on social media or public interaction at those agencies. The EPA has also been ordered to freeze all grants, contracts and other agreements until further notice.
A memo sent to EPA staff said that there should be no press releases sent to “external audiences” and that “no social media will be going out.” The memo also says that a digital strategist will be coming in to oversee the agency’s social-media policies, and that “existing, individually controlled social-media accounts may become more centrally controlled.”
The memo also ordered that no new posts be made to any agency blogs, that staff send a list of any external speaking arrangements, that no new documents be uploaded to any externally-facing website and that “incoming media requests will be carefully screened.”
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Staff at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service also got a memo on Monday telling them not to provide any public documents, including press releases and social-media content, according to BuzzFeed News. The email told employees — including about 2,000 scientists — that “starting immediately and until further notice,” they were not to release any documents or post anything to social media.
Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services were also told not to publish any new documents or correspondence in any public forum, including the Federal Register, and not to discuss any documents or rules with public officials “until the Administration has had an opportunity to review them,” the Huffington Post reported.
The Interior Department was recently ordered to shut down its Twitter accounts temporarily, after the National Parks Service retweeted a number of posts that pointed out how much smaller the crowds were for the Trump inauguration on the weekend when compared to President Obama’s.
A letter sent to all staff said that all Interior bureaus were to “immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice,” and ordered that all scheduled posts be deleted, and that staff sever any automated connections between platforms or accounts. The Parks service reinstated its account on Saturday with an apology.
In a briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer was asked by reporters about whether a social-media gag order had been placed on the Interior Department. He said his understanding was that the department “inappropriately violated their own social-media polices, and so some guidance came out with respect to that.”
Spicer added that he wasn’t aware of any changes to media policies affecting either the EPA or the USDA but that he and his staff were looking into it.