Unfortunately, it is not clear that these limitations will stand up to legislative or judicial scrutiny. Thus, OMB's proposed limitations might be illegal. In any case, the whole matter may well end up having to be adjudicated. However, even if OMB's modifications are acceptable to Congress and the courts, they fall short of providing the research community with the protection it needs from overly broad FOIA requests. The problem begins with the lack of definitions.
Some scientists use videotaped interviews with human subjects as their data.
In addition, progress reports on research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies would be considered data. This is particularly worrisome, since progress reports are by definition incomplete and thus subject to possible major revision in future progress reports. Federal AIDS policy, for example, is based on published papers which began to appear in the early 1980s. These papers are based in turn on fundamental work on retroviruses and other aspects of basic biology that began in detail about the same time. Without a temporal limit, a Federal granting agency may be faced with endless wrangling over requests for still more and earlier data.