Well, government employees and agencies certainly can—and they use a host of shifty tricks and self-justifying complaints to cover up their intention of hiding information and documents from you, the people, according to FOIA users and experts.
You’re legally entitled to certain documents under the terms of the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, which not only specifies what information you can have, but gives time limits within which government agencies must get back to you.
File a FOIA request and agencies are required to respond within 20 working days, and likely will.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll provide the information in that time.
“Realistically, many agencies do not comply with these time limits,” the Harvard University Digital Media Law Project stated. “Some agencies may have a large backlog of requests, and they are usually permitted to treat requests on a ‘first come, first served’ basis as long as they devote a reasonable amount of staff to responding to the requests.”
And that’s just the beginning. And while there are only nine categories under which FOIA agencies can refuse to provide information, agencies can always find ways around obeying the law.
The Government Slow Roll—the Latest FOIA Evasion Tactic
“Federal agencies and departments are now using a new tactic to discourage or thwart FOIA requests: ludicrously low document production schedules,” wrote Patrick G. Eddington, former CIA analyst and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
“The Departments of Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Archives and Records Administration are refusing to process and release any more than 250 pages per month in FOIA lawsuits.... In the case of Justice components, and specifically the FBI, this represents a 100 percent reduction over their previous monthly document production schedule from just a year ago.”
Many FOIA requests can involve thousands of documents. By refusing to supply more than 250 pages of documents in a month, government agencies have found a way to delay providing the information for years.
Yes, years.
Nice move. Very slick.
Journalists have, understandably, responded with outrage to agencies’ refusal to process more than 250 pages of documents in a month—even for requests requiring many thousands of pages to fulfill.
The Cato Institute has an ongoing FOIA lawsuit related to FBI Situational Information Reports. “Simply stated and for reasons the FBI has never credibly explained, the Bureau intends to take almost five years to review and release critical law enforcement records on events from one of the most volatile and politically and socially consequential years in American history,” Eddington said, “and this is hardly the most outrageous example of FBI record production stonewalling.”
The Orange County Register recently and sarcastically headlined an opinion piece by Eddington: “The feds and FOIA subversion: Delay-until-they’re-dead edition.”
How appropriate.
FOIA Violations Lead to Huge Taxpayer Costs
In addition to impeding government transparency—the very purpose of FOIA—government agencies’ unwillingness to cooperate with FOIA requests is also a significant drain on taxpayers funds, resulting in repeated lawsuits from organizations attempting to receive records. There were 797 such cases filed in 2022 alone, costing millions of dollars in litigation expenses as FOIA agencies attempt to justify their refusal to provide the goods.
In 2016, for example, $36.2 million was spent defending FOIA refusals to furnish information.
In that same year, people asking for FOIA information “received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests,” PBS found.
This, while the same administration claimed it was “the most transparent administration in history.”
Government Claims FOIA Backlogs as Excuse
By way of defense, agencies commonly claim that the increased number of FOIA requests—over a million for the first time last year—has resulted in a huge backlog that they are virtually helpless to address.
The backlog for 2024, for example, has so far reached a shocking 222,328, and the federal government is likely to receive a record number of FOIA requests this year.
It’s a perfect excuse for taking virtually forever to respond properly and promptly to FOIA requests—especially if you’re already in the market for excuses not to give out government information.
At the current rate, if King Tut had filed a FOIA request with the Egyptian Department of Agriculture, he likely would still be moldering away in his bandages and mummy case, unhappily awaiting a response.
“Congress cannot allow the FBI or any other federal agencies to process so few records that they become useless to the journalist trying to break news. Congress also cannot allow the Bureau or other federal entities to have FOIA processing times measured in centuries, much less millennia. These tactics, which appear to have been adopted across the executive branch, must be prohibited in statute,” Eddington said.
A Glimpse of Corruption Behind the FOIA Wall
The feds’ true attitude toward the FOIA was shockingly revealed recently when emails from Dr. David Morens of the National Institutes of Health exposed a conspiracy to hide information from FOIA requesters.
Emails from Morens, a former senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci of COVID fame, displayed an obvious attempt to avoid transparency when he said, “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d, but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.”
He continued, “I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”
Morens has been placed on “administrative leave”—not for deleting the emails, but for getting caught doing it.
The point of all this is that certain government officials do not want to give you the information you are entitled to receive, no matter how unclassified, no matter what the FOIA requires and no matter whether you are legally entitled to have it or not.
To these feds, FOIA requesters are merely annoying pests, irritants, threats to their little kingdoms and disturbing waves rocking their proprietary boat. They want to keep their secrets hidden deep inside their precious bureaucracies, despite FOIA’s website stating: “The basic function of the Freedom of Information Act is to ensure informed citizens, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.”
That’s why the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently suing the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security for failure to provide documents.
“Agencies regularly over-redact and over-withhold information under FOIA,” Brent Max Kaufman, attorney for the ACLU, said. “There’s a culture of keeping things as secret as possible for as long as possible, in part because all of the incentives run in that direction.”
The Church of Scientology has been one of FOIA’s oldest and fiercest advocates. It has a long and proud history of taking government agencies to task who are attempting to withhold information from the public, while forcing the burden of proof onto those agencies to demonstrate why they are refusing to provide allowable information.
The stakes are high. As Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote, “Democracy depends exclusively on the informedness of individual citizens.”
