Trickle-Down Retribution

The federal government should not punish people for challenging its policies or standing up to its demands. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump’s administration is doing.

Trump’s Department of Justice escalated its attacks on the legal profession this week as it asked a judge to impose substantial monetary sanctions on Joshua Schroeder, an immigration and intellectual property lawyer who took on a pro bono deportation case. Schroeder had represented an immigrant from Laos and temporarily halted but ultimately was unsuccessful in preventing the man’s deportation.

This seems to be the first example of DOJ targeting an individual attorney following a March presidential memorandum that instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to punish lawyers and law firms who “engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States.” In an interview, Schroeder warned that while Trump has mostly attacked big law firms, his case shows “They’re able to go all the way down to the very bottom … It’s not just this elite struggle.”

This “trickle-down” effect is deliberate. By first picking targets that evoke little public sympathy like big law firms, the administration tested how far it could go in punishing dissent. Now that it successfully blackmailed law firms into committing nearly a billion dollars in pro bono work for the administration and scared them away from representing many pro bono clients, the administration is honing in on communities with less power or visibility.

This strategy isn’t limited to the legal profession. Harvard University has been at the forefront of the administration’s hostile campaign to force higher education institutions to disown diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The school’s refusal to capitulate resulted in the administration pulling billions of dollars of funding and the president directing the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Harvard’s tax nonexempt status.

In May, we sued the IRS, Treasury, and the Education Department for records related to these attacks. This week, we filed our opposition to the IRS’s recent motion to dismiss its portion of this lawsuit.
The IRS claims that all documents — phone logs, calendar invites, etc. — would reveal confidential tax return information if released. This ridiculous assertion would set a dangerous precedent if accepted.

As some elite schools like Columbia University have given in to Trump’s demands, the administration has widened its net to go after less prominent schools like Virginia’s George Mason University. Last month, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights informed GMU that it was being investigated after an antisemitism complaint (the administration has exploited allegations of antisemitism to go after DEI initiatives). This war on DEI policies is also hurting community colleges that serve nearly 40 percent of undergraduate students.

Harvard and big law firms were test cases that weaponized government agencies to punish the president’s perceived enemies and silence dissent. Now that those agencies have become the president’s attack dogs, the administration is targeting a wider range of entities for smaller and smaller acts of defiance — even just doing pro bono work in a deportation case. As civil society groups are steamrolled into compliance and those who stand up to Trump are punished, it will only become more difficult to stop Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

FOIA and Deteriorating Transparency Infrastructure

In an article for Just Security, we explained how the ability to fight back against Trump’s agenda is also threatened by the administration’s “dismantling of public transparency infrastructure, which weakens the ability of journalists, watchdogs, and the public to know how those actions are happening and who is carrying them out.”

The decimation of FOIA offices has slowed responses to a halt. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services shuttered several FOIA offices in the spring. As of early July, we have submitted 15 requests to the CDC, but have received acknowledgment of only one of the seven requests that were submitted after the reported closure on April 1, in contrast with communications and even some final responses for all eight sent before that date.
Fee waiver denials have seemingly increased, making it more costly to obtain records. Under FOIA, agencies may waive processing fees if the requested information serves the public interest. After we noticed a higher rate of fee waiver denials, we reviewed 858 of our FOIA requests sent during the first five months of 2025 and found that, of the 315 no longer “under review,” roughly 10 percent had been denied fee waivers and nearly 20 percent were marked as “conditional.”
Accidental or arbitrary closures of FOIA requests seem to have increased even when the submitter has complied with all known requirements, frustrating even the most experienced requesters.
The restructuring of government agencies as well as office closures have resulted in technical failures, nonfunctional email addresses, and conflicting instructions that have left many requesters without clear channels for communication with agencies.
“Preventing the further erosion of transparency and democratic trust requires vigilance,” we wrote in Just Security. Documenting even seemingly minor issues obtaining records is important to helping transparency advocates push for improvements.

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