Epstein Files Transparency Act

The Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) is a law passed by the 119th United States Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on November19, 2025. It requires the U.S. attorney general to "make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format" all files (the "Epstein files") pertaining to the prosecution of the deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (if needed, declassifying them to the extent possible) within 30 days of passage, and then to give the Judiciary Committees in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate an unredacted "list of all government officials and politically exposed persons" named in the files.

In September 2025, Representative Thomas Massie, a member of the Republican Party, filed a discharge petition in support of the bill. On November12, the discharge petition received the minimum-required 218 signatures needed, from 4 Republican and 214Democratic Party representatives, forcing a House vote on the bill. The House of Representatives voted 427–1 to pass the act on November18, 2025, with Republican representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana casting the lone nay vote. The next day, the Senate passed the bill via unanimous consent, and Trump signed the bill into law. The law gave the attorney general 30 days to release the documents.

On December 19, the U.S. Department of Justice released the first batch of Epstein files, violating U.S. law in failing to release all the files by that day. This failure received bipartisan criticism. Many documents contained extensive redactions, with hundreds of pages entirely blacked out. Following a delayed and heavily criticized rollout, the Department of Justice released additional files in waves, with a fifth release on January 30, 2026. Following this, the department claimed that it had fulfilled its legal obligations and released all available files, amounting to over 3.5 million pages. This announcement received pushback, with some reports indicating that the full Epstein files consist of over 6 million pages. A sixth release was published on March 5, 2026. Following this, about 50,000 previously removed files were restored, after review from the DOJ and FBI. In July 2026, Massie introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, in response to the DOJ's actions.

The publication of the Epstein files had widespread political and cultural effects. In the months that followed, President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi and supported a successful primary challenge against Massie. Other effects included the opening of new political investigations, the resignations of over a dozen prominent public figures and politicians, reforms to the House of Lords, the arrests of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and increased backlash against the Starmer ministry which later led to Starmer's resignation. Among the American public, publication of the Epstein files fueled conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation, AI-generated hoaxes, anti-elite sentiment, anti-government sentiment, anti-Israel sentiment, anti-Trump sentiment, and anti-Trump conservatism.