In late March 2025, news magazine The Atlantic published two articles (archived, archived) about U.S. national security officials accidentally adding the outlet's editor-in-chief to a group chat on the messaging app Signal where they discussed military strikes in Yemen. Following those reports, a rumor spread online that Project 2025 — a conservative policy blueprint for a Republican presidency — recommended government officials use encrypted chat applications such as Signal to skirt public record-keeping and disclosure laws.
Social media users on X claimed that Project 2025 or, more specifically, "Project 2025 training videos," instruct government officials to use Signal or similar apps to evade U.S. government record-keeping requirements, subpoenas and the Freedom of Information Act, a federal law requiring the disclosure of government documents and information upon request.
One X post claimed that "Project 2025 calls for using public channels of communication (like Signal) instead of secure government channels, to subvert FOIA requests and conceal damning information from the public." The post had amassed more than 2.8 million views as of this writing.
Users on Facebook and Bluesky also quoted the X user's post or made similar claims.
However, Project 2025 does not recommend government officials use Signal or other chat applications. In fact, the "Project 2025 training videos" referenced by some social media users actually show a Project 2025 contributor, who spoke in the footage, explicitly warning future political appointees to be careful not to violate recordkeeping laws if they use encrypted chat platforms with auto-delete functions like Signal. Therefore, we have rated this claim as false.
However, these videos do offer strategies for avoiding public-record request disclosures, including by having conversations in person rather than through a texting chain. The Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
What Project 2025 says about Signal
While the term "Project 2025" is often primarily associated with the roughly 900-page document outlining its proposals for a conservative government, the project itself actually involves four parts, only one of which is the document (see our breakdown of Project 2025 here). One of those four parts is a "new system to train potential political appointees" called the "Presidential Administration Academy," as Snopes previously reported.
A search through the written document shows it makes no mention of Signal or using messaging applications like it to avoid public records requests under FOIA requirements.
However, a private training video from the "Presidential Administration Academy" — obtained by investigative newsrooms ProPublica and Documented, which published numerous videos on Aug. 10, 2024 — does refer to Signal during a conversation about what records are available to the public under FOIA.
At the 20:06 mark of the video below, Mike Howell and Michael Ding, both of whom are listed as contributors to the Project 2025 policy book (see pages xxviii and xxvi), discuss whether Signal chats count as records.
HOWELL: Do Signal chats count as records?
DING: Yeah, so that's where things get really tricky as a political appointee, especially for those who have never worked in federal government before. There's plenty of apps and other messaging platforms out there, whether it's deleting messages, encrypted communications or whatnot. All the agencies under the federal government are governed by certain records-retention policies, so you have to be careful with whatever agency you're working at that you're following those policies.
That's another way that political appointees get into trouble sometimes, is they're using these encrypted chat platforms or self-deleting messages, and they are, in some sense, violating the law by deleting those. If you're conducting official business, whatever communication was transmitted to conduct that federal business, that's a federal record and it needs to be properly retained so that someone can request it under FOIA.
As shown above, Ding advised potential appointees that using Signal could get them in trouble and at no point does he condone the use of the app to avoid public disclosure laws.
What Project 2025 says about public-records requests
While Signal may not be a recommended form of communication by Project 2025, training videos show speakers directing political appointees to avoid putting information in writing that could be requested under FOIA. In another training video published at the same time, Jeff Small, former senior adviser to the interior secretary and then-chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., alluded to preferring in-person meetings to Signal as a way to avoid public-records requests (see 3:12):
On the Hill and in the House of Representatives, the typical preferred communication methods are email, text or even Signal chat — but when you work for the federal government, everything you put in an email, text or note is FOIA-able and releasable to the American people. At Interior, we had a ton of in-person meetings which allowed us to speak a little more freely about the topics of the day.
In the training video with Ding and Howell, Tom Jones, who runs a conservative investigations group called the American Accountability Foundation, explicitly recommended in-person conversations rather than email to avoid making a traceable paper trail through FOIA requests.
Jones' comments begin at 18:44 under the section "Public Accountability" (emphasis and added detail in parentheses ours):
As a political appointee, you really need to be conscious that while there are guardrails on "what is a record," it's a pretty expansive definition. So a lot of things that the federal government is a steward of is arguably a record. So what we can do is we can go and say look, as long as we can reasonably describe the record in a way that a competent professional can find it and that it's not subject to certain exemptions, we can get access to those.
And those exemptions are important; we should probably discuss them. But in this light, as a political appointee, the adage we hear a lot now is, "Wow, this meeting could have been an email." Well, in the federal government, "this email probably should have been a meeting," because what you probably want to do is if you need to resolve something — if you can do it — it's probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, "Hey, what are we going to do here," talk through the decision, work it out. If you reduce it to writing, maybe you can protect it under some of these exemptions, but man that's a lot of a fight.
You're probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that [progressive watchdog group] Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek and you're going to have to explain why — why you're withholding it and you're going to fight in court. It's going to be a lot of expense. It's an email that's better resolved with a meeting.