“NOTHING TO FOIA HERE”

How Signal, Silence, and Schedule F Are Killing Government Transparency

This is how you kill democracy without firing a shot.

Not with riots. Not with tanks. But with disappearing files, encrypted apps, and a bureaucratic paper trail that stops before it even starts. You don’t have to destroy the truth. You just have to make sure no one can prove it ever existed.

Since Donald Trump’s return to power, the country has been fed a steady diet of chaos and distraction: Happy Meals, photo ops, gold-plated cosplay, and incoherent revenge fantasies. Meanwhile, the machinery behind Project 2025—the most dangerous blueprint for authoritarian control in modern American history—is quietly, methodically, turning off the lights.

And at the heart of it? A war on evidence itself.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), long a tool for journalists, watchdogs, and citizens to hold power accountable, is being gutted from the inside. FOIA offices are bleeding staff. CDC requests now sit in limbo for months, sometimes indefinitely. The Department of Justice sends back pages so heavily redacted they look like black velvet paintings. In some cases, nothing comes back at all.

But that’s just the symptom. The disease is deeper.

Project 2025 doesn’t just want to restrict public records—it wants to eliminate the conditions under which they exist. Incoming loyalists are being trained not to communicate like public officials, but like operatives. The directive is simple: don’t write it down. Don’t send it in an email. Don’t log the meeting. Don’t memorialize the truth in any form that could be subpoenaed, FOIA’d, or leaked.

Use Signal.

Encrypted messaging apps like Signal—designed for secure communication—have become the de facto halls of power. Auto-deleting messages. No metadata. No logs. No trace. No trail. No democracy.

It’s not illegal. It’s not even secret. It’s just gone. And that’s the brilliance of it.

You can’t FOIA what never existed.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s policy. It’s not some rogue decision made in the dark—it’s in the training materials. It’s baked into Project 2025’s vision for governance. Schedule F, Trump’s bureaucratic guillotine, was revived to decapitate institutional memory and replace career officials with ideological loyalists who will follow orders and leave no record. They don’t just want to change how government works. They want to change how it remembers.

And the effects are already visible. More than 8,000 federal web pages have vanished since January. Public datasets—on climate, equity, public health—have been deleted. Archives broken. Search bars disabled. It’s not censorship in the traditional sense. It’s unpublishing. It’s the strategic erasure of history.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s design.

If watchdogs are blind, if journalists can’t verify, if citizens can’t audit what’s done in their name, then truth becomes a rumor. Accountability becomes impossible. Power becomes absolute.

And if someone tries to blow the whistle? Good luck proving it. Good luck tracing the call that never happened. Good luck retrieving the memo that was never written. Good luck FOIAing a Signal thread that vanished ten seconds after it was read.

This isn’t just the death of transparency. It’s the birth of a new authoritarianism—quiet, tech-savvy, and terrifyingly efficient. An authoritarianism where power doesn’t need to justify itself, because the evidence will no longer exist to demand justification.

And here's the part no one wants to say out loud: some of the damage is already permanent. Deleted reports. Destroyed datasets. Internal warnings lost forever. Histories that will never be written because the raw material is gone. What’s happening now isn’t a prelude to disaster—it is the disaster. And it’s being carried out in broad daylight by people who have no intention of answering to anyone.

Because when there are no records, there are no questions.

When there are no questions, there are no consequences.

And when there are no consequences, there is no democracy.

So no, the lights aren’t going out all at once.

They’re flickering.

Room by room.

Agency by agency.

Until the last one shuts off—not with a bang, but with a shrug.

And a message: there’s nothing to FOIA here.

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