TAG / FOIA

Legislators have passed over 1,100 exemptions to Florida’s Sunshine Law. From Dale Earnhardt’s 2001 autopsy to the governor’s travel plans, the public are left in the dark.

Nine thousand dollars for a school bus video? That’s the price of government transparency in Virginia. Legislators killed a bill that would have brought costs in line.

Auto-deleting messages have violated the California Public Records Act for over a decade, but it took the threat of a lawsuit to compel compliance from the City of Los Angeles.

The government spent over $1.1 million in 2023 fighting lawsuits filed by citizens for Freedom of Information Act disclosures. They are following the US tradition of secrecy. 

Eagerly adopted across the whole of government, this trick allows bureaucrats to duck FOIA accountability by refusing to even “confirm or deny the existence” of records.

FOIA is intended to assure government transparency, but it seems government doesn’t like that at all—and is endlessly creative in evading disclosures. 

Over 1 million FOIA requests in 2023 have led to unprecedented delays and backlogs in receiving responses to statutory queries. Can AI help, or will it make it worse?

Ironically, a congressional subpoena turned up evidence of a conspiracy between senior staffers to evade freedom of information requirements in order to deny the public access to critical information about the workings of government.

If approved by voters, the measure would create a commission to help citizens request government records and penalize agencies that fail to comply with those requests.