Epstein Files Transparency Act
2025 legislation in the United States
The Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) is a law passed by the 119th United States Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on November 19, 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 November 12, the discharge petition received the minimum-required 218 signatures needed, from 4 Republican and 214 Democratic Party representatives, forcing a House vote on the bill. The House of Representatives voted 427–1 to pass the act on November 18, 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.
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