Cristian Farias:
Welcome to the Bully's Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment. I'm your host, Legal Journalist, Cristian Farias. Here's where we keep track of the president's systematic and coordinated assault on the many freedoms of the First Amendment and how people and communities are fighting back. Among the first actions the Trump administration took earlier this year was the purging of public information, research, health, and climate-related data across a range of government websites. We don't tend to think about this erasure as a First Amendment problem, but it is, especially when this information, which belongs to all of us, prevents the public from acting on it to order their lives, provide for their families, and protect their communities.
Wes Gillingham:
It's protecting the whole community, so taking information that enables a farmer to manage property because you have your own personal agenda is insane.
Cristian Farias:
But before I speak with this week's guests, let's recap some of the First Amendment stories we're following. This week was graduation week at Columbia University. Over the Trump administration's objections, Mohsen Mahdawi, prominent pro-Palestinian advocate ICE unlawfully imprisoned was allowed to travel to New York City for graduation. He crossed the stage here at Columbia to a standing ovation. The not so great news is that Mahmoud Khalil is still in prison in Louisiana and could not do the same. That didn't keep his supporters, including his wife, from holding an honorary graduation for him. Take a listen.
Mahmoud Khalil:
Thank you for holding me in your hearts today. It has been two months since I was taken from my family and from you, detained simply for speaking the truth about Palestine.
Cristian Farias:
On the legal front, Khalil is expected to appear in immigration court as he and his lawyers continue to contest the government's attempts to deport him. Like kind of a sick twist, ICE tried to prevent Khalil's wife from visiting him in detention so that he could hold their newborn baby who arrived in April, during this whole ordeal. Late on Wednesday, a federal judge in New Jersey had to get involved and order ICE to let Khalil meet with his wife. And just a few moments ago as we were recording, we learned that after some intense negotiations, Khalil got to hold his baby for the very first time just hours before his immigration hearing.
In another breathtaking escalation in a tour against Harvard, the Trump administration announced it was revoking the university's ability to enroll international students. According to a DHS news release, quote, "This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status," end quote. Of course, this is yet another gross violation of the university's constitutional right to academic freedom, but it's also a devastating blow to students' right to free inquiry and association.
Earlier this week, Margaret Sullivan, a columnist with The Guardian and a longtime advocate for a free press, wrote about an open letter from First Amendment organizations, including the Knight Institute, calling on people and institutions to stand up against attacks on free speech happening at this very moment. As these advocates write in their open letter, "Capitulation to the Trump administration is not an option. Each surrender," they write, "makes the assertion of First Amendment rights more costly and more perilous."
And in its umpteenth emergency petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration asked the justices to block an advocacy group's FOIA requests to reveal the inner workings of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Is DOGE an agency under the law? Is it not? And that's a key question that's related to a theme of the second Trump presidency, lack of transparency and removal of vital information that's essential to the public. With me, to dive into this issue and a case related to it, is Stephanie Krent, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which, alongside Earthjustice, are challenging the US Department of Agriculture's purge of websites with climate-related information and other resources that farmers rely on for their work. Welcome, Stephanie.
Stephanie Krent:
Hey, Cristian, how are you?
Cristian Farias:
I'm doing great. And how about we start with the basics, what do you do at the Knight Institute? And what makes your world go around other than suing the government?
Stephanie Krent:
Well, that is a big part of what makes my world go around, but other than law, I have a toddler, so emotionally, but also physically, I am running around and around after him day in and day out.
Cristian Farias:
The best job in the world. Now, you're one of the lawyers behind the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York versus the US Department of Agriculture. Now, give me the elevator pitch for this case.
Stephanie Krent:
At its core, this case is about ensuring that members of the public have access to public information; information that was created using public funds and information that was designed to benefit the public. Within weeks of president Trump's second inauguration, thousands of government web pages suddenly went dark. And this is across the spectrum of government agency websites, so obviously USDA, but also things like HHS, CDC, NIH. Tons of public health agencies suddenly started disappearing their webpages. This case in particular is challenging those actions from the USDA's perspective. USDA deleted or basically made inaccessible, hid data sets, policies, fact sheets. If it's about climate change, there's a good chance that it disappeared in the first weeks of the second Trump administration, and so we're suing to try to reverse that.
Cristian Farias:
But someone might wonder, well, doesn't the government have a different view of climate change? They have new policies. Doesn't a new government get to set policy around things like this?
Stephanie Krent:
Yeah, of course it does. Of course a new administration might want to spin things differently, might want to invest government funds differently, but what it can't do is violate federal law. And here, the removal of these web pages within a span of really a few weeks after inauguration violated federal laws. The first one is the Administrative Procedure Act, basically a good government statute that has a baseline requirement that essentially the people making decisions about our lives are taking their time, thinking through the pros and cons, and deciding carefully what to do.
There's a separate law governing what agencies can do with information once they make it public, and that is called the Paperwork Reduction Act. The Paperwork Reduction Act says that when there are significant public information resources, here we're talking about in the context of the USDA, these web pages that contain interactive tools, data sets, fact sheets, when there are those significant information products, the government cannot remove them or even substantially alter them without public notice. And the purpose is to give the public time to say, "We really need those resources. We want to advocate for you to do something differently." And that was totally missing here.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, and also, who doesn't hate when you have this favorite page that you go to all the time and you refresh that page because it has information that you like, and then all of a sudden it disappears? It's a dead link. Or they call it link rot, I think. It's the worst thing. And now that it's happening at the government level, which is even worse.
Stephanie Krent:
It's a huge problem when you are relying on a webpage... And there are certain webpages like I go to all the time for cases I'm working on, and when that suddenly goes dark, you have no idea what to do and you need to figure out whether or not-
Cristian Farias:
I hate it.
Stephanie Krent:
... you can get this information elsewhere. But it's horrible.
Cristian Farias:
It's horrible.
Stephanie Krent:
But I think that's only the surface of this problem because what makes this even more pernicious is that for a lot of people, they're interacting with web pages and websites in a different way. They're just going to go to the USDA's website and type in the search bar a query about climate or about clean energy. And so it's also, I think, for more casual users, navigating to pages is a very different process, so I think it's a lot deeper than even the harm for people that know and rely on these web pages because no one is able to find them anew.
Cristian Farias:
But at first blush, it doesn't seem like this is a First Amendment issue. Can you tell us why we should think about these purges of information as a First Amendment problem?
Stephanie Krent:
Yeah, I think it's a great question because we did not bring a First Amendment claim. This is a purely statutory case. But that doesn't mean this isn't a First Amendment problem. A core purpose of the First Amendment is that all of us have the opportunity to listen, to learn, to debate with one another, and then to decide what policies we want to enact, who we want to elect into office. But a precondition for that public discourse is that we actually know what our government is up to. We know the policies and the programs that are in place, and ideally that we all have access to some trustworthy sources of information so that we understand the facts on the ground.
Cristian Farias:
What have you learned about how the government has been taking down some of these pages? Is there any rhyme or reason to their method?
Stephanie Krent:
We've learned a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes as these pages were taken down. We don't have the full picture yet because this case is not yet in discovery, which is the period where both sides of the case exchange information. But we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, which is essentially a motion that says, "We're so likely to win that you should give us interim relief, preliminary relief." And as part of that motion practice, the government filed a declaration from a man who was at the time the acting director of the Office of Communications within USDA. His declaration is the best evidence we have now of what was going on inside USDA.
And from what we can gather, within about a week of President Trump's second inauguration, USDA was already feeling pressure. They were getting communications from the Office of Personnel Management. It seems like there was a meeting between DOGE and the acting USDA secretary. And the message that USDA was receiving was, "Go quickly. You need to align USDA resources including its website with President Trump's priorities now." And we-
Cristian Farias:
Move fast and break things, in other words.
Stephanie Krent:
Yeah, exactly, move fast and break things. And that's exactly what USDA did. A week and a half after inauguration, the then director of digital communications, Peter Rhee sent this email saying to USDA staff, "Immediately take down all landing pages that are focused on climate change." And that in itself I think is practically catastrophic. Landing pages are the source of lots of different links. I'm not like an architect or someone that's very visual, but if you think about webpages as like a hub and spoke model, landing pages are the hub and you have all of these different spokes. If the landing page goes dark, suddenly it's almost impossible to access any of the spokes.
But that's not all, unfortunately. The email went a step further and also said, "Every other webpage you have that's related to climate change, you need to put it on a spreadsheet, send it to the Office of Communications and let us know if you think we should take it down or leave it up." And what we know now is that within about two days of the last of those spreadsheets coming in, the Office of Communications had made all of its decisions. I think it's pretty clear that 48 hours is not really a lot of time to make reasonable and smart decisions about information that the public is relying on. And so what we see is exactly what you said, Cristian, this move fast and break things model all because they got the memo that President Trump does not like things even remotely touching on climate change, and better to take it all down and prompt the ire of members of the public than to leave it up and prompt the ire of DOGE.
Cristian Farias:
Well, I hope that you guys get even more information and try to make your clients whole. Which by the way, are your clients whole yet? I heard that you got some good news in your case. Tell me about the good news.
Stephanie Krent:
Yeah, we did get some good news, which is always welcome in this time. As I mentioned, we had filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, for preliminary relief, and about a week and a half before we were set to have a hearing on that motion, the government reached out and said, "Listen, we're actually not going to wait for a court order. We're going to start restoring these webpages that were taken down." And that process is underway. A lot has already been restored, which is hugely beneficial to our clients and to members of the public. We need to make sure that going forward USDA isn't just going to turn around and take them back down again and violate federal law again.
Cristian Farias:
Stephanie, thank you so much for all this information. It's been a wonderful conversation. I've learned a lot. And I hope farmers and everyone else who really cares about this information can access it in its entirety one day not very far from today.
Stephanie Krent:
Thanks, Cristian. I do too.
Cristian Farias:
That was Stephanie Krent with the Knight Institute. Now I want to talk to one of the plaintiffs in that case to get a better understanding of how they're affected by the erasure of government data. What does this really mean for someone trying to run a farm and earn a living? To answer that, I sat down with Wes Gillingham, who is a New York state farmer and board president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York.
Wes Gillingham:
What makes my world go round is growing food for people. Right now, I'm working with my daughter to try to build up a community farm working on food access in our community. Here in the Catskills, there's food access issues. Even though we're in a rural area, the local school is forced to buy from the lowest bidder, which a lot of times is food from way off, and I'm trying to skirt the system and get local food into the school.
Cristian Farias:
Tell me a little bit about the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, your role in it and how you became involved with it.
Wes Gillingham:
I was on the board of NOFA 20-something years ago when USDA, when there was a push by consumers and processors to have a standard organic regulation because at that time, well, NOFA was certifying farms, but so was California Organic and different programs around the country. And there was concern that there wasn't consistency, so there was a push by consumers to get a standard regulation across the board. And then that was voted through Congress, and the USDA created the organic certification program where different certifying agencies like NOFA or Oregon Tilth or U become accredited by the USDA and are an accredited certifying agent.
NOFA has been certifying vegetables for many years, even before the USDA program. And I was on the board for a few years then when we were readjusting the organization to allow for that transition. And there's two entities within NOFA. There's the certifying branch, and then there's an education branch. That's important when we start talking about the situation on the federal level, those two separate pieces.
Cristian Farias:
The US Department of Agriculture is very important to the association that you lead and to other farmers. Can you explain a little bit why this agency matters so much for what you do?
Wes Gillingham:
The USDA has allowed a certain amount of funding to go to organizations for education, a certain amount of funding for farmers to increase their capacity and increase their markets. There's a whole series of programs that farmers have come to depend on for better or worse over the years to really make it. And in the last few years, there's been a bunch of funding available for... A good example of that is climate smart commodities. There was a whole education program and NOFA got a grant to work with farmers in terms of how to improve their resilience to climate change and the impacts of climate. And that's really obviously protecting our food system and how our community and our nation get their food and making it safe. That's homeland security in a real sense. That's important for that support to come from the USDA. That's what was so outrageous about what happened in the first 100 days of this administration.
Cristian Farias:
All right, let us talk about that, the first 100 days of the administration. What are some changes, dramatic changes that USDA has imposed that has made life harder for you guys?
Wes Gillingham:
Well, the big thing that's happened, they started right off the bat scrubbing climate information and tools that farmers could use on the website right at the same time that they were cutting funding or freezing funding. Then they started layoffs. And those three things at the same time were really devastating for farmers. Number one, there were farmers that had got grants, they had been awarded grants, and the way government funding through the USDA usually works, you get a grant to improve your production or to do a certain thing, you have to go out and pay for that, and then you bill, "This is what I spent this money on," and then that fits into your grant. There were a bunch of farmers that were left on the hook; all of a sudden, they didn't know whether they were going to get the grant, even though they had already spent the money that they were spending because they were promised a grant. Then the other thing that was happening directly related even to that was the fact if you were one of those farmers and then you called the local USDA office, you didn't get a response because either the local office didn't know and they weren't getting the information from the next office up or they actually weren't there anymore because they were laid off.
Cristian Farias:
That's a lot of changes at a very fast clip. And on the ground, obviously if you can't get a hold of people at USDA, if the funding is frozen and if you can't access this information that was previously publicly available, how does that translate on the ground to your operations? How are you materially affected?
Wes Gillingham:
In various ways. I went to the National Family Farm Coalition meeting in DC earlier this winter, and there were examples of people who went out and got a loan to buy a refrigerated delivery truck to take their vegetables. They got that loan because they were getting a grant that they could then use for part of their loan. They went out and bought the truck. They had an $80,000 truck and they weren't getting the $20,000 or $30,000 to help pay for that truck. And it was part of a market expansion program that they applied for, and they were awarded a grant and they were expecting it. They were wondering were they going to have that truck repossessed? Or where they were going to find the money to pay for that.
My daughter put in for this Beginning Farmer program where you work with an experienced farmer. And she got a small grant that she was planning on using for fencing around a section of the field that she was going to use specifically for growing food for the local school, and all of a sudden that got froze and they thought it was getting cut. The Cornell Cooperative Extension sent notices out to everybody. They just found out just in the last week or so that that program may get started up again, but they don't know how long it's going to last, so it just leaves people not knowing where the footing is.
We're already dealing with weather. Right now, it's wetter than it's been. It's too wet to plow. We can't plant things on time now because the ground is so wet. That happens from one year to the next. You deal with that stuff all the time, but then to throw on both a financial unknown, an educational unknown, and then also a whole agency, whether it's the Natural Resources Conservation Service or the AEM program or all these programs that are encouraging best management practices for farms, it's really devastating.
Cristian Farias:
Indeed. And one of those strands in that litany of things that have come your way and affected farmers is this purge of websites and webpages and research and climate change-related information that is very important to what you do. As a result of that, Earthjustice and the Knight Institute represent NOFA in this big lawsuit against the administration. Can you tell me a little bit about this case and why it matters so much to you guys?
Wes Gillingham:
Again, because of that triple whammy that was happening to all the farms, and then just the reality that the administration was making a decision to remove well-documented, scientific information and a whole bunch of research that the USDA and other entities had done over the number of years to put things up on the website to help farmers deal with this existential crisis of climate change. And you had an administration that was calling it a hoax in the past. That's trying to control information, how people think. And it's not just information about climate change, it's trying to wipe it off of the website so nobody can get the information that's needed to survive climate change. And that's downright evil. Sorry for calling it that, but to me it's thought control.
Cristian Farias:
Wes, how does not having this vital information available to you and other farmers, how does that harm you?
Wes Gillingham:
One of the things that was available on the USDA website was information about forest fires and areas. It mapped out places where forest fires were happening. It also had information that you could go to look for what kinds of practices would help with resilience against different kinds of climate change like flooding.
And then the other thing is that they took away webpages that helped you find how you could get support after a climate disaster. How crazy is that? Farmers generally are not available for FEMA funds because of USDA funding and other programs and crop insurance or whatever. But there are a lot of farmers that don't have crop insurance, but when they have a flood... That personally happened to me. We had a 500-year flood. It wiped out our whole vegetable operation on the river bottom, and I was able to go to the USDA office and talk to them and realize that we could get help and some funding to do emergency ditching, which didn't just help our farm, it helped everybody that lived downstream from us because they weren't getting parts of our farm washed up on their property.
The things about farmers as stewards of the land, it's not just about their bottom line or just about their farm, farms are a really important part of the entire ecosystem, and if you're managing the land properly and doing a good job with it, you're helping your entire community, not just yourself. Taking information that enables a farmer, enables them to manage property, it's protecting the whole community. To just scrub that because you have your own personal agenda is insane.
Cristian Farias:
That's a theme that we've seen with this new administration, the purging and erasure of data, research, even history, knowledge, sometimes even cultural information that groups find valuable. In your case, it may be climate change-related information. But it's just spreading across so many different areas. And I'm curious, you said the words thought control, what do you make of this broader pattern of purging and erasing information?
Wes Gillingham:
I see it as an attempt to control the population in general. It's horrible. And the way that they went about this in terms of what they targeted and what got scrubbed, using whatever computer logarithms or whatever they came up with, there are some pretty hilarious stories. Any farmer, conventional, big agribusiness, they understand a diverse farm is important. If you have diverse crops, then if you're a vegetable farmer, if you're just growing one kind of vegetable and that year there's a particular pest that can wipe out your profit margin or there's one vegetable can't handle floods very well, but if you're a diverse farm, the year that your zucchini isn't bringing in any money, your winter squash might or your broccoli or your cabbage. There were things that were cut because they had included the term increasing diversity. It was DEI, we got to get rid of that. And I would make the argument that diversity is important for our cultural integrity as well, but diversity is really important for a farm.
Cristian Farias:
And to think that now whenever you deal with the government, you need to avoid certain words in order to be able to access these competitive grants, it goes back to what you were saying about thought control, certain words that you can't use with the government.
Wes Gillingham:
Yeah. And honestly, at least speaking for myself, not the rest of the organization that I represent, but for me, that was a big reason why we jumped on this lawsuit the way we did is because at that point when we filed the lawsuit, a lot of people were terrified about retribution and what was going to happen. People were taking things down off of their website. And it was like, we can't just sit here and let this happen without doing something about it because it's basically wrong. And we have the expertise dealing with the USDA and working with farmers, we needed to focus on that and just hope that other organizations would step up within their neighborhood or within their focus to go after some of the things that are happening.
Cristian Farias:
Can you talk about that, the work of just collectively working and deciding to challenge these actions as opposed to you on your own as a farmer, but the fact that there's almost power in numbers?
Wes Gillingham:
Well, absolutely. And that's the point of hope that I see right now because, I don't know, what are we up to in terms of the number of lawsuits that are out there? And the courts are getting jammed with all the challenges to these administrative orders. And when we joined the lawsuit, there was only a handful, and it was a little scary. We chose not to remove things from our website, but we looked at the scenario and stepped up, and I feel like people across the country now are doing the same thing.
It still remains to be seen how the administration is going to respond to court orders. Even in our case, they said they agreed to put all the information back up, but we're going to hold the feet to the fire and make sure that's actually true. Given everything that's been happening and all the different aspects of this administration, I don't necessarily trust that they are going to put it all back up so we've got to monitor that.
The thing about our particular lawsuit, they probably are still going to try to figure out another way of taking climate change information away to do it in a legal way. This was blatantly illegal. Their case, they're going to lose in court, so I think they're just avoiding that. But that's also why it's really important for us to monitor what they put back up and make sure they actually fulfill what they said they're going to do. And the court even recognized that there's another time scheduled to check in on that and find out whether they've actually put this stuff back up. It's not over.
Cristian Farias:
It's not over. You'll keep tabs and you'll keep holding the government's feet to the fire with this case. Now, as you also alluded, yours is not the only case challenging the administration; there are many others. People are building on this courage and they're bringing their own challenges. Now, for people who have yet to challenge the administration, whether that be farmers or regular folks, what would you say to them to move them to action? Because obviously it took some movement on your part to get others to do that. But if there are any people out there who may still be on the fence, what would you say to them to not be on the fence anymore?
Wes Gillingham:
I don't know how appropriate this is for radio, but in the midst of this, there was somebody that said, "We need to follow the herd and not stick our neck out there and worry about that." And I said that to a local farmer by us, and he said, "You know what? The only thing you see when you follow herd is a bunch of buttholes."
Cristian Farias:
Oh, my goodness.
Wes Gillingham:
He didn't use the term buttholes. I was-
Cristian Farias:
Now, Wes, did you ever see yourself becoming this sort of free speech advocate in this day and age before this new government came in?
Wes Gillingham:
Not necessarily, although I have been active politically in the past. As a farmer, we were some of the first folks that got approached by the fracking industry when they wanted to come to New York State and put well pads across all the farms in the southern tier. And that made no sense to me. I was heavily involved working with Catskill Mountainkeeper and stopping the fracking in New York. Politics is not strange to me.
Cristian Farias:
This is a continuation of work that you've done in the past, just cranked to 11 this time.
Wes Gillingham:
Yeah. Yep.
Cristian Farias:
Wes, I'm really thankful for the work that you do, and thank you for coming on the show.
Wes Gillingham:
Thank you.
Cristian Farias:
That was Wes Gillingham, board president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. Like Wes, we'll be watching to see what the government does next in this case. And that's it for today's show. Before you go, I hope you check out an article I wrote about how the First Amendment is under fire from all sides. It's in Vanity Fair, which lets me write about power and abuses of power, and in this case even let me break the fourth wall and mention the Bully's Pulpit and why the show matters at this moment. We'll put a link to the piece in the show notes. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back next week.
The Bully's Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I'm your host, Cristian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Ann Marie Awad and Candace White, our associate producer and fact-checker for this episode is Kushal Dev. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking. Additional production support is provided by Will Coley. Candace White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid Da Silva. Thanks to Stephanie Krent and Wes Gillingham who joined us for this episode.
The Bully's Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We'd love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org. That's Knight with a K. And follow us on social media.