This Sunshine Week, Let’s Remember How Important FOIA is to Journalism

Since its inception almost fifty years ago, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the most formidable tool that journalists and the public can use in order to shine a light on our democracy and hold our governments accountable. This week we celebrate those accomplishments as part of Sunshine Week.

Despite the successes of our public records law, FOIA is in trouble.

A government report from 2017 found a FOIA backlog of 111,000 requests — a number that has likely only grown since then. While the law states that the government has 20 days to respond, requests are rarely processed within a year. A recent report found that the federal government has set a new record for censoring and withholding government documents.

Still, there’s reason to be optimistic.

FOIA is still a crucial tool in exposing corruption and malfeasance at the federal level. For example: The Washington Post’s illuminating report exposing years of multiple administrations’ mishandling of the Afghanistan War; Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Scott Pruitt famously resigned in disgrace because of a series of FOIA suits from the Sierra Club and the string of subsequent investigations from various news outlets that exposed a number of ethics violations; and most recently the Office of Budget Management released a trove of documents detailing the Trump’s administration’s coordinated effort to illegally withhold military to Ukraine.

State and local public records laws are just as important as their federal counterpart.

A patchwork of laws empowers ordinary citizens and local reporters to hold officials and those in power accountable.

At States Newsroom our 15 affiliates and partners use every tool at their disposal to get to the bottom of stories that affect their communities. Every year, our journalists file hundreds — if not thousands — of FOIA requests. We get tens of thousands of pages of documents that help inform our reporting. Here are a few examples:

- Maryland Matters found that a trio of organizations, businesses and government agencies involved with anti-hunger initiatives paid their workers so little that they had to depend on food stamps.

- The Arizona Mirror exposed the Department of Public Safety’s attempts to quietly replace handguns used by Arizona police which had a deadly malfunction of being discharge when hit.

- The Florida Phoenix reported that the Trump administration gave the go-ahead on spraying antibiotic pesticides on Florida’s citrus fields despite opposition from researchers at the Center for Disease Control.

- NC Policy Watch won an award from the Sierra Club for its reporting on how a notorious violator of North Carolina’s state environmental regulations illegally accepted waste from various sources including the Department of Transportation on his property near a supply of drinking water.

- Maine Beacon found how Maine’s premier public university became one of the state’s biggest violators of labor protections.

- The Iowa Capital Dispatch discovered that the assessor of Polk County, the most densely populated county in the state, held a secret list of property owners who were able to hide their property tax records.

- The Wisconsin Examiner told the story of how a regular citizen exposed that an overwhelming majority of constituents opposed measures that stripped the incoming governor of power.

These are just a few of the stories our newsrooms were able to tell, in part, because of access to public records.

Our teams were able to get these records in spite of numerous challenges. In 2015, an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found transparency and accountability simply lacking in state government. Their study found that only 3 states scored a rating above a “D+.” That’s no way to run a democracy.

We, as a country, need to do better. When the government withholds information or refuses to comply with the law it hurts us all. This Sunshine Week let’s reflect on the wins we’ve achieved and look ahead to how we can improve this system to shine a light onto our democracy and hold those we elect accountable.