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(May 19, 2025) – Investigative Reporters and Editors has named its finalists for the 2025 Golden Padlock Award, recognizing the most secretive public agency or official in the U.S.
This year's competition highlights a competitive field of government agencies and public officials who have distinguished themselves in the art of secrecy.
"From surreptitiously shredding public records to masking the impacts of serious government failures to undermining the principles of open courts, these finalists have distinguished themselves in the field of bureaucratic opacity," said Robert Cribb, chair of IRE’s Golden Padlock Committee. "We honor them for the lengths they have gone to ensure the public interest does not threaten personal expediency.”
The finalists for the 2025 Golden Padlock Award are:
The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice under President Trump, for their remarkable and ongoing lack of transparency around using the Alien Enemies Act to ship more than 238 Venezuelans accused of Tren de Aragua affiliation to a notorious El Salvador prison. The lack of transparency extends to the locations, criminal history, alleged gang ties and even the current well-being of the people sent to a prison linked with human rights violations. The administration refused judicial orders, citing vague and unverified national security concerns and fired at least one lawyer who acknowledged government mistakes in court. The government has still not released a public list of those sent to the prison. The men’s families and their legal counsel have mostly relied on a list published by CBS News to learn the fates of the 238.
The City of Columbus and Mayor Andrew Ginther: Hours after news broke that hackers had stolen a massive cache of data from the City of Columbus in 2024, Mayor Andrew Ginther told reporters the information was encrypted and posed no risk to citizens. But the hackers dumped much of the data on the dark web and, with the help of a whistleblower, NBC4 was able to show that this stolen data included social security numbers and driver's license information for hundreds of thousands of people, crime victim information and undercover officer identities. After the news broke, the city sued the whistleblower source, issuing a temporary restraining order to silence him, only dropping it after he agreed to stop sharing the data with the media and help the city with their investigation. City officials have since refused interviews and delayed public records requests. To date, they have still not acknowledged why the mayor told the public their personal data was not at risk. The city is now facing two class actions over the handling of the data.
The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, for fighting to change transparency laws to avoid releasing data about the state’s criminal justice system. Most notably, after the state’s FOIA commission ordered the administration to release the case-level data requested by CT Insider and others, the administration instead hid a new exemption in a 351-page budget bill — avoiding debate. The exemption imperils the public’s access to even more state records, allowing any agency to reject an open record request for records created by other agencies.
The Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk: The mass firings of federal employees and dramatic reshaping of government by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has unfolded with little of the transparency expected of federal agencies. The Trump administration contends DOGE is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The staff has used outside computer servers to conduct its work and an app that features disappearing messages to communicate. A federal judge who ordered DOGE to release public records in March described the agency as operating in "unusual secrecy." The DOGE-led dismantling of USAID included staff being ordered to "shred" documents and place the remains in burn bags labelled "SECRET." And DOGE efforts to downsize government also triggered 10,000 layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services including the entire FOIA office at the Centers for Disease Control. This is happening under the auspices of the Trump Administration, which has scrubbed 150,000 pages of public information and data from government websites, a volume The Internet Archive's director has called "unprecedented" in scope and scale.
Minnesota's Ramsey County Judge Joy Bartscher, for ordering the destruction of public court records and barring journalists from reporting on treatment failures that contributed to a double murder. The record — a sentencing memo — detailed how an outpatient treatment facility repeatedly ignored clear warning signs that a man with a history of violence had relapsed before killing two men. After the memo was briefly posted to the court’s website, Bartscher not only ordered its removal but also blocked KARE 11 reporters from publishing its contents. Under threat of contempt, reporters were forced to withhold information learned from the memo. KARE 11 successfully challenged the gag order before the Minnesota Court of Appeals, which ruled the judge’s actions unconstitutional. Yet to this day, the public still cannot access the memo through the court’s website but can read it only through media coverage.
The winner of the 2025 Golden Padlock Award will be announced during the awards luncheon at the IRE Conference on Saturday, June 21, in New Orleans.
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