Rep. Abby Major: Shapiro promised transparency. Instead, Pennsylvanians got secrecy.

When Josh Shapiro ran for governor, he made a simple promise, that his administration would be the most transparent in Pennsylvania history. He talked endlessly about restoring trust, opening the doors of government, and making sure citizens always knew what was happening behind those doors. Transparency was central to his pitch for the governor’s mansion.

But two years into his term, that promise has collapsed under the weight of his own actions. We were promised openness. What we’re getting instead is stonewalling, secrecy, and an administration that fights to keep basic information out of public view. The difference between Shapiro’s rhetoric and reality couldn’t be clearer.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the sexual-harassment scandal involving one of Shapiro’s top aides.

In 2023, Mike Vereb, Shapiro’s hand-picked secretary of legislative affairs and one of the most powerful people in the governor’s orbit, resigned after a female employee accused him of sexual harassment. A serious allegation demands serious transparency. Instead, what the public got was silence, a $295,000 taxpayer funded settlement, and a stunning level of document suppression.

We now know the administration deleted the email account of the staffer who accused Vereb, even while preserving email records of other senior officials. That decision alone should raise every eyebrow in Pennsylvania, because deleting the alleged victim’s emails doesn’t protect privacy, it destroys evidence.

When reporters and watchdog groups requested basic documents about what happened, the Shapiro administration fought tooth-and-nail to block their release. Both the Office of Open Records and a Commonwealth Court judge ordered the administration to hand the records over. Shapiro’s team still refused, appealing again and again rather than let the public see what was inside.

Let’s be honest here, you don’t refuse to hand over records if everything is in good standing. You refuse to hand over records when you’re scared of the blowback from that information hitting the public.

It shouldn’t take a small army of lawyers and court orders to get transparency from a governor who promised it. However, under Josh Shapiro, that seems to be the norm.

The Vereb scandal isn’t an isolated incident. Over the past two years, the Shapiro administration has quietly erased or reversed numerous transparency practices that existed under previous governors of both parties.

The public used to have access to the governor’s daily schedule. Not anymore. Shapiro stopped releasing it. The public used to have access to contact information for key state offices. Not anymore. Much of it has been scrubbed. Public reporting on travel, events, and outside-funded perks used to be routine. Not anymore, especially as more and more of those perks are paid for by a nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors.

That nonprofit, the same one funding expensive upgrades to the governor’s mansion, effectively serves as a dark-money piggy bank for activities the Shapiro administration doesn’t want taxpayers to see. Whether it’s renovations, events, or travel, the public deserves to know who is picking up the tab. Instead, the administration hides behind the nonprofit structure and declines to answer questions.

When an administration deletes emails tied to a sexual-harassment complaint, refuses to release documents even after court orders, hides donors who are paying for the governor’s perks, and guts routine public-information practices, public trust is eroded, and fast.

The irony is that Shapiro understands all of this perfectly well. He knows that transparency is essential for accountability. He said it over and over again on the campaign trail. That makes the current pattern even more troubling, because this isn’t ignorance or oversight. It’s intentional.

Even many of Shapiro’s usual defenders have grown uneasy. Editorial boards, open-government advocates, legal analysts, people who normally give Democratic officials the benefit of the doubt, have called the administration’s behavior “deeply concerning,” “unacceptable,” and “a clear step backward.” When a governor manages to unite watchdog groups across the political spectrum in frustration, something is seriously wrong.

But the biggest problem is what this means for the future. Once transparency practices disappear, they rarely come back on their own. Administrations that discover the convenience of secrecy rarely choose openness later. If Shapiro continues down this path, he won’t just be breaking a campaign promise, he’ll be reshaping the culture of state government for years to come.

Pennsylvanians shouldn’t accept that.

It’s time for Governor Shapiro to release the full records related to the Vereb harassment case. We want to see every document, every timeline, every email still in existence. It’s time to restore the basic transparency practices that were standard under previous governors. It’s time to stop hiding behind nonprofits and legal loopholes.

And it’s time for the governor to remember the promise he made to the people who elected him.

Transparency is not a slogan. It’s a responsibility. And right now, Governor Shapiro is failing it.

Rep. Abby Major represents the 60th Legislative District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, representing portions of Armstrong County and Westmoreland County