The UK government spent at least £937,000 (over $1.1 million) in 2023 defending against lawsuits filed by its citizens in order to avoid providing information it was legally required to release under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), according to a recent investigation.
The UK government answered 57 percent of FOIA requests back in 2010, but by 2023, they had circled the wagons and begun closing the iron curtain—answering only 34 percent of requests.
When answers are refused, those requesting them have only one option: Go to court to sue the government to demand release of the information. Defending against those lawsuits can be an expensive proposition but, apparently, government agencies think it’s worth it if they can keep their precious little secrets.
You have to wonder if British taxpayers think it’s worth it, too.
Many of our politicians and bureaucrats don’t believe the public should have the right to know.
The whole point of FOIA is to make government more transparent and give citizens the tools to find out what their officials are doing in their name.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the current government “has muddied the waters of transparency on the money it spends or the things it does,” and he intends to end “the outrageous way government departments refuse freedom of information requests.”
The government has “wasted taxpayers’ money fighting losing battles against FOI requests,” said Member of Parliament (MP) Phil Brickell. “Transparency is vital for restoring trust in politics and should be embraced rather than resisted.”
MP David Davis agreed. He said that, if the government “intends to impose a duty of candor on public authorities, it must overhaul the entrenched culture of secrecy in Whitehall.”
Good luck with that. On both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve learned the hard way that many of our politicians and bureaucrats don’t believe the public should have the right to know anything about what’s going on in government. When asked for information that is legally available under the FOIAs of both countries, their kneejerk reaction seems to be to throw a thick blanket of secrecy over anything—even what they had for breakfast that morning.
Reflecting on his government’s introduction of FOIA, former Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in his memoir that he felt like a “naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop” for his role in bringing the act about.
“For political leaders, [FOIA is] like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a stick, ‘Hey, try this instead,’ and handing them a mallet,” Blair wrote.
According to newly released National Archives documents, one advisor to Blair even suggested that ministers use a low-tech procedure for communicating: little yellow Post-it notes—assuming that they would be thrown away after serving their purpose and, thus, unavailable for FOIA requests.
Government ministers may, indeed, have much to fear from openness. Since Britain’s FOIA was passed, requests have turned up information that 74 Metropolitan Police had criminal records; that diplomats enjoying diplomatic immunity in the UK were accused of rape, child abuse and murder; that the National Health Service made birth control implants available to girls as young as 13; and that the British government had helped a nuclear weapons program by selling Israel 20 tons of heavy water crucial for making atomic bombs.
Despite the UK government spending such an enormous amount to avoid providing information, its agencies actually lost many of the cases against their citizens and had to provide the requested information anyway.
US bureaucrats and politicians are every bit as devious as their British counterparts when it comes to ducking and dodging their responsibilities under FOIA.
In fact, Americans are older hands at that dodge. This makes sense: US bureaucrats simply have more practice. The US Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1967 and the British act came into full force in 2005, meaning Americans have 38 years more experience coming up with inventive ways to slither around FOIA’s demands.
Dr. David Morens, once a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, got caught last year admitting he had learned how to delete his emails to avoid FOIA requests. Morens became the subject of a congressional investigation.
Morens actually sent an email stating: “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.” (The irony is that, until he wrote that email, they probably were!)
One of the maneuvers American bureaucrats use to avoid providing documents under FOIA is so common it even has its own name: the “Glomar response.” It was created by the CIA, of course, during the US’ attempts to salvage a sunken Russian submarine using a deepwater recovery ship called the Glomar Explorer. When faced with a FOIA request for information on the operation, the CIA replied they “can neither confirm nor deny” that they have the information. This trick stymied information-seekers under FOIA.
The Glomar response became such a popular stonewall that between 2017 and 2021, over 5,000 Glomar responses were used by nearly 300 different federal agencies.
Yet another sneaky evasion of legal requirements under FOIA—which mandates a response to a request within 20 working days—is to slow down response schedules and provide no more than 250 pages of documents per month in reply to requests.
This practice means it can literally take years for a single request to be answered, forcing the requesters to challenge the government in court to expedite release of the information. In 2016, US agencies spent a staggering $36.2 million in taxpayer money to defend against FOIA lawsuits, all because these agencies were refusing to do their jobs.
The Church of Scientology is a fierce advocate of FOIA and of every citizen’s right to know what their government is up to. “Democracy depends exclusively on the informedness of individual citizens,” Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard stated.
So, government workers on both sides of the big Atlantic puddle, here’s a suggestion for you: You make the laws, you enforce the laws—how about you start obeying them, too?
