This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, the landmark government transparency law that has helped reveal and publicize critical information about everything from the Vietnam War to FBI surveillance to CIA torture. For decades, FOIA has played a crucial role in uncovering and rectifying government wrongdoing. Today, however, advocates say that the government’s resistance to fulfilling FOIA requests has grown, forcing applicants to file expensive lawsuits to obtain records, while records that are released often take years to receive and are filled with so many redactions as to render them essentially “a waste of time.”
“It’s gotten extremely bad in this last year and a half under Trump, but this has been going on for decades,” says Ian Head, who manages the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights. These bureaucratic delay and deferral tactics are extremely concerning, he adds, threatening accountability, transparency and democratic processes. “We need to be able to file federal FOIA requests so we can see what this government is doing.”