I'll take this one.
You need to remember that other scientists, like the ones around the table here, work at universities, and we're “unmuzzleable”, as it were. However, regarding the scientists that work in the government labs, my understanding was that they were told to keep on message. You could see that there was a slight reason that it might have been a good thing, because you don't want randomness out there, but arguably it went too far and it became more about controlling the message.
In my view, transparency is always better. Even if there is a disclosure of something that you might not want to be disclosed, it's probably, in the fullness of time, in the public good to have complete transparency about what scientists do.
It is better now. It wasn't evil before, although you could see what was going on, but in our collective opinion, it went too far, because science advances through transparency and through critique. We think that should be the mainstay of how we support our scientists in the country.