COLUMN-In the US, information gets less free: Ross Kerber

By Ross Kerber

March 26 (Reuters) - This month, my colleague Max Cherney e-mailed one of his government contacts to ask about the status of his overdue request for records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Nothing doing.

From now on, "there will be a significant delay in all our FOIAs," an official from the National Institute of Standards and Technology replied to Cherney via e-mail.

"Unfortunately, an analyst working on the requests along with many others ... have been abruptly separated today. As a result, they will need time to reassign the work and assess next steps," the official said.

Cherney's problem could become more common as mass firings by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump hit the officers and program staff who fulfill citizen requests for government information, say experts who follow the matter, citing a recent CNN report. This has Congressional Democrats concerned.

Watchdog groups traditionally use FOIA as a tool to keep tabs on official actions. The Trump administration has fought in court to keep FOIA from applying to its government-downsizing team.

"It's a bad time for FOIA, no question about it," said Miranda Spivack, author of a forthcoming book about local activists who penetrated government secrets, often with the help of documents they could only obtain with the help of open-records laws.

Spivack said even if federal agencies do not lay off their FOIA experts, the departure of many subject-matter experts will hinder citizens from monitoring government operations.

According to a Justice Department report, only 16% of FOIA requests were granted in full in the 2023 fiscal year, even as FOIA requests hit a record high of nearly 1.2 million.

Neither the Justice Department nor officials at NIST, the agency that put off my colleague, responded to e-mailed questions on Tuesday.

It is easy to think of FOIA's fate as only a matter affecting nosey reporters, and a paper by Ohio State law professor Margaret Kwoka spells out how journalists' concerns were a major driver for FOIA's passage in 1966. But in recent years, government-wide, journalists' requests accounted for only about 3% of total requests, she found.

Meanwhile, corporate usage has grown to dominate the number of requests at some large regulatory agencies including 74% at the Food and Drug Administration; 69% at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and 79% at the Environmental Protection Agency, Kwoka told me, based on her latest research.

Requesters include credit-rating companies, real estate firms and law firms looking to learn the price of various government contracts.

Kwoka has written that the FOIA efforts by corporations and lawyers have crowded out the journalists who were the law's original beneficiaries. The issue, Kwoka told me by phone, is that many companies have no other avenue to get the information.

"They're only using FOIA because they don't have other options. But they are completely overwhelming the FOIA offices," she said.

Still, there is value from companies finding and distributing the information, said David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida.

The wide commercial usage of the government data "greases our economic machine," he said.