A Trump administration political appointee broke the law with a gag order banning Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff from talking to the media, the Office of Special Counsel concluded. That gag order came from Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary of public affairs for a brief time, but an important one: mid-April through mid-September, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic really gained hold, abated, and surged again. 

During those months, scientists were beginning to understand how the virus worked, how it was transmitted, what ways of controlling its spread might be most effective. But Caputo didn’t want HHS scientists or experts talking to the media without his sign-off. “There are no exceptions,” he wrote. His language omitted a legal requirement that any gag order on federal workers must include a notice that “These provisions are consistent with and do not supersede, conflict with, or otherwise alter the employee obligations, rights, or liabilities created by existing statute or Executive order relating to (1) classified information, (2) communications to Congress, (3) the reporting to an Inspector General of a violation of any law, rule, or regulation, or mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety, or (4) any other whistleblower.”

“Documents reviewed by OSC prove that officials at Health and Human Services clamped down on damaging information about the severity of COVID-19 and limited the free speech of its scientists,” Freddy Martinez, a policy analyst at Open the Government, told Buzzfeed News. “When creating its press policies, HHS officials disregarded its employees’ important whistleblower rights in favor of secrecy.”

While Caputo was only in that role for part of 2020, the Office of Special Counsel previously said that HHS violated federal law on gag rules on three other occasions in 2017 and 2018. And Caputo’s science adviser, Paul Alexander, made a separate effort to censor the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, an important weekly epidemiological digest from the CDC. According to Alexander, “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration and meant at this time to impact school re-openings, and they then send it to the media knowing it is deceiving. I ask it to be stopped now!” 

Keeping scientists and public health experts from speaking about what was going on was a part of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response.

The Biden administration has rolled back Caputo’s gag order, with a media relations policy released in early Jan. 2021, saying, “In keeping with the desire for a culture of openness, HHS employees may, consistent with this policy, speak to members of the press about their work. However, HHS employees are not required to speak to the media.