The Trump administration should follow its own order on free expression

“If we don’t have Free Speech, then we just don’t have a Free Country. It’s as simple as that.” President Donald Trump said in one of his campaign statements where he previewed how his administration would protect free expression. On January 20, the first day of his new term in office, President Trump issued an Executive Order entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” (Free Speech EO). The order largely restates existing law, which prohibits the federal government from engaging in unconstitutional censorship, but as a statement of policy it could theoretically increase protections for legal speech and reduce the number of circumstances in which the federal government seeks the suppression of viewpoints it dislikes. 

But, not long after President Trump signed this order, he and his administration began to violate it. In the few weeks since President Trump took office, the administration has already taken multiple actions to censor or chill speech it dislikes online and off. It has also taken action to undermine tools of free expression even though they align with its stated foreign policy objectives of defeating authoritarianism. 

To wit:

• On January 20, the same day as the Free Speech EO, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” Anodyne though it may sound, it is having a broad and deep impact on free expression globally. As our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out, the United States has long funded programs that support technologies that enhance privacy, fight censorship, and support internet freedom—and this order is directly undermining those programs. Other global free expression advocates, those that track internet shutdowns and attempts by authoritarian governments to suppress the speech of dissidents living abroad, are also impacted. This order undermines free expression globally, as well as the stated goals of the administration. It is a gift to our adversaries, particularly China and Russia. 
• Two days after President Trump issued the Free Speech EO, on January 22, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reinstated complaints against broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC over their coverage of the 2024 election. The complaints alleged that fact-checking of Presidential debates, news interviews with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live before the election, as well as other election-related coverage, were biased and violated the broadcasters’ public interest obligations.
  
  The previous FCC chair had already dismissed the complaints as contrary to the First Amendment, because it is not the FCC’s, nor any government official’s, role to control the speech or editorial decisions of journalists or adjudicate “bias.” That power, in the government’s hands, smacks of authoritarianism.
  
  Unfortunately, the FCC’s actions appear to have been the start of a trend of investigating news organizations. In just the ensuing few weeks, it has opened investigations into NPR and PBS, alleging they are all of a sudden breaking sponsorship rules, and into KCBS in San Francisco for reporting on the location of ICE officers. Even if these investigations are ultimately closed without action, the mere fact of opening them—and the implicit threat to the news stations’ license to operate—can have the effect of deterring the press from news coverage that the administration dislikes. 
• On January 27, seven days after the “Free Speech EO,” the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo entitled “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.” The memo purported to order a pause in all federally funded programs pending a review of those programs for their alignment with the Trump administration’s priorities, including ensuring that no funding goes toward advancing “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” This order is a blatant attempt to force government grantees to cease engaging in speech that the current administration dislikes, including speech about the benefits of diversity in education or in employee pools, speech about climate change, and speech related to LGBTQ issues. The First Amendment does not permit the government to discriminate against grantees because it does not like some of the viewpoints they espouse. Indeed, those groups that are challenging the constitutionality of the order argued as much in their complaint, and have won an injunction blocking its implementation. 
• The administration has also issued multiple executive orders seeking to enforce its position that there are only two genders and that diversity and equity goals are unlawful to implement in schools. Among other things, these orders prohibit people from having gender markers that differ from the sex they were assigned at birth on their federal identification documents, including passports. They also seek to excise teaching about historical discrimination, including about slavery, from K-12 curricula.
• Under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism, President Trump has threatened to remove non-citizen college students who protested Israel’s war in Gaza. In a Fact Sheet that accompanied an Executive Order issued on January 29, Trump said, ominously, “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.” Removing non-citizens on account of their speech or their sympathies cannot be squared with a commitment to free speech or with the First Amendment.
• The administration is also circulating lists of banned words for staff of government agencies—prohibiting basic free expression of the many American citizens who work as researchers or government employees—and directly censoring the display of pictures of women and people of color and disfavored words including “diversity” and “integrity”. In response the NSA is deleting websites and internal network content containing any of the banned words and the NSF is scouring research grants for any reference or use of the words. The Defense Department is also reportedly restricting access to books on topics from immigration to psychology and more in its school system that serves military families. If banning words and books aren’t a speech restriction, it’s unclear what would be.

In each case, administration officials are moving in ways that directly contradict President Trump’s own executive order and their own stated goals of upholding a Free Speech agenda, attempting to use government power not just to promote their own views but to actively punish (and silence) those who disagree.

These are just a few examples of the censorship efforts the new Trump administration has embarked on. There are likely many more examples in the growing pile of actions the administration has taken and more in those they will soon implement, including an announced plan to dismantle the Department of Education, the federal agency responsible for ensuring all students in this country have access to education. 

The fact is that candidate-Trump was right. If we don’t have free speech, we don’t have a free country.  An administration truly committed to the First Amendment would stand up and defend everyone’s speech rights, especially those of the people who express disagreement with it. But that time-honored principle is utterly incompatible with this administration’s actions undermining constitutionally protected freedoms here in the United States and around the world.  This administration, while it might tout its devotion to free expression with empty words, is doing profound damage to free expression with its actions. 

This story originally appeared on the Center for Democracy and Technology’s website and is republished here with permission.

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