How Broken Is FOIA? One Carveout Gives Us a Picture.
As we mark Sunshine Week 2021, it’s a fair question to ask: how broken is the nearly 60 year‐old Freedom of Information Act? Very, in many ways. But for my purposes here, I’m going to focus on just one, recently highlighted in a January 2021 Government Accountability Office report titled In fiscal years 2010 through 2019, federal agencies claimed a total of 256 statutes as the basis for withholding requested information using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions known as (b)(3) exemptions. During this time, 91 agencies reported withholding information using at least one ...
Source: cato.org