State Dept. Deleting Records: Congress Must Intervene

The State Department is erasing its entire pre-Trump social media presence from public view. Every post made before January 20, 2025 will be deleted from X. Staff were told that anyone wanting to see the historical record will now have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. A State Department employee confirmed this to NPR but asked to remain anonymous “for fear of retaliation.” This is what authoritarian regimes do. They scrub inconvenient history, control information access, and create climates where government workers are afraid to speak. China does this. Russia does this. Now we do it too. The public record of American diplomacy shouldn’t require a lawyer and a six-month wait to access. Congress must act immediately to preserve federal agency communications as public record. Pass legislation requiring that official government social media posts be permanently archived and publicly accessible. Subpoena State Department leadership to explain who ordered this deletion and under what authority. If we can’t see what our government said yesterday, we can’t hold it accountable for what it does tomorrow.