The Supreme Court’s Secret Documents, and an Unusual Order From the C.D.C. Director

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Will Jarvis** (0:32)
From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, September 1st, here's what we're covering.
Every year, the US. Supreme Court issues dozens of opinions, carefully composed and edited documents that lay out the justices' consequential rulings. But The Times has been looking into how their internal working papers can be locked away indefinitely. Those memos and drafts give behind-the-scenes details of how they pressured and persuaded each other to reach their decisions. In contrast with the White House, where federal law requires every last scrap of paper to be saved and eventually made public, working papers for the court are considered the personal property of each justice.

**Jodi Kantor** (1:17)
So in recent memory, for example, one justice had his papers released when he died. One justice is only allowing his papers to be released 50 years after he dies, and then another justice shredded his papers.

**Will Jarvis** (1:32)
Jodi Kantor covers the Supreme Court for the Times. She says that in recent decades, the trend on the court has been to impose much tighter restrictions on what happens to those working papers. For example, some details of the decision-making in the Bush v. Gore case from 2000 likely won't become public until 2075 Because of one justice's choice to delay the release of his working papers. And some deliberations from the court's landmark same-sex marriage decision in 2015, won't come out until all justices involved in the case have died. A stipulation put in place by Ruth Bader Ginsburg before her death.
The lack of transparency has fueled criticism of the court, with one legal scholar saying that the justices are simply protecting themselves from being second-guessed, calling it, quote, reputation management.
And Jodi says that dovetails with criticism of the court's growing use of the so-called shadow docket, where crucial emergency rulings come down, often without any immediate details about the justices' reasoning.

**Jodi Kantor** (2:32)
Confidentiality is really important to courts. There's a uniform feeling that judges and justices need privacy to deliberate. It gives them freedom, it gives them independence. The question is why the timeline is so long for release.
A lot of people are calling on this court to be more transparent, but what we can see is that actually they've gone in the other direction between the shadow docket decisions that don't have opinions, and by withholding these papers for a long time to come, the court seems very committed to secrecy.

**Will Jarvis** (3:11)
Jodi says that people she interviewed who are familiar with the court's deliberations worry that some of the court's most revealing deliberations are not being saved at all since they happened over text and email, and her sources were unaware of any consistent process for saving those kinds of electronic records. In response to questions from the Times, a spokeswoman for the court did not offer any explanation of its practices and refused to provide information about its policies around retaining documents.
Now, three quick updates on the Trump administration. First, the Times has learned that the Army secretary, its top civilian leader, met with President Trump yesterday and turned in his resignation. The move was not a surprise. The official, Daniel Driscoll, had clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose purge of experienced generals has left the Army essentially rudderless. According to officials familiar with Driscoll's resignation, he told Trump he was frustrated by those firings, and by Hegseth's apparent refusal to promote officers who worked for generals Hegseth doesn't like. Who will fill Driscoll's position now is up to President Trump, though any nominee will need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that President Trump's White House ballroom project can continue. In its 5-4 decision, the court didn't address whether the $400 million construction project is legal, but it ruled that the preservation group that was suing to stop it didn't have legal standing to do so. The structure of the ballroom is already rising above the White House grounds, and now, with the main legal challenge swept aside, Trump appears to be on course to complete the project.
And, in a remarkable move, the CDC is challenging state health officials in Pennsylvania, pushing back on a report of deaths from measles. The state is in the middle of a rapidly expanding measles outbreak, and last week, officials there said two people who were unvaccinated and tested positive for the virus had died. But the situation quickly became a political firestorm, with Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor accusing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of fueling vaccine hesitancy, and Kennedy hitting back, suggesting that the governor's staff was lying about the deaths being caused by measles. Now, the head of the CDC, who reports to Kennedy, has ordered officials to leave the two deaths in Pennsylvania out of federal measles data in a break from the agency's normal procedures.