The HHS secretary's 'radical transparency' pledge sits next to more than a year of unanswered FOIA requests, lawsuits over records, and his own on the record acknowledgment that the agency blacklists reporters.
On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed to his 'publicly available' calendar as proof of his commitment to 'radical transparency,' according to STAT News. STAT has a counter-data point. The outlet has been asking HHS for that calendar since February 2025. The department has not produced one.
The gap is not about a single document. It is a documented pattern: FOIA requests spanning more than a year, a lawsuit over HHS records, staffing cuts inside the FOIA office, and Kennedy's own on-the-record acknowledgment that his agency blacklists certain journalists. The 'radical transparency' pledge Kennedy ran on, and that he restated Wednesday, can be measured against that record. So far the measurement runs the wrong way.
STAT's pursuit is not vague. In a February 2025 request, the outlet asked for Kennedy's first two weeks of meetings and schedules, the basic mechanics of an HHS secretary's day: who he met, where he went, what he decided. HHS did not deliver. Months later, STAT filed a second request in June 2025 for the calendars of Stefanie Spear, the senior advisor whose office is attached to Kennedy's and who attends nearly every meeting he holds. Spear is not a peripheral figure. If Kennedy's calendar is the transparency pledge in practice, Spear's calendar is the control test. HHS has not turned over Spear's schedules either.
The agency has also been sued over records — in May 2025, the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against HHS for failing to release Kennedy's public calendars — a civic mechanism that, working as designed, would force the calendar question into a courtroom with a docket number and a judge. Instead the calendar fight has stayed in the press-office inbox, where STAT's emails have gone for more than a year without producing a page. Lawmakers have criticized the department's handling of information requests as well, adding a second branch of oversight to a story that, on Kennedy's telling, requires none.
The staffing picture makes the delay easier to understand and harder to excuse. HHS has thinned FOIA office personnel, according to the STAT report, lengthening response times across the department. A single high-profile request can take a year. A pattern of requests, with names and dates attached, takes longer. Kennedy's Wednesday claim that his calendar is already public sits awkwardly against a system his own department has hollowed out.
Then there is the blacklist. Kennedy has acknowledged, on the record, that HHS restricts access for certain journalists, using language sharper than 'limits engagement.' That admission matters here because it narrows the universe of reporters who can independently verify any 'publicly available' calendar claim. If the secretary's office is picking which outlets get answers, the existence of a public calendar and the existence of public access to it become two different things. STAT, by Kennedy's own framing, is one of the outlets the agency has been willing to leave waiting.
HHS did not respond to STAT's specific questions about the calendar's existence, FOIA staffing levels, response-time comparisons, or which outlets are affected by the blacklist, according to the STAT report. The 'radical transparency' pledge, in other words, was restated against a record of unanswered questions about whether the pledge is being kept.
The testable standard is simple. Kennedy said the calendar is publicly available. A publicly available calendar is a document the public, including reporters, can actually obtain. STAT has asked since February 2025. STAT has waited. STAT has not received. The 'radical transparency' claim is a sentence. The FOIA record is more than a year of inbox. The two are not the same.