Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-freedom-from-information-act-a-look-back
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 03:51:17+00:00

Document:
FOIA was signed into law on July 4, 1966 and went into effect on July 4, 1967. Nader reported out his research in August 1969. Now, fifty years after the statute’s enactment, Nader’s critique is worth revisiting. It is a fascinating FOIA artifact, a look at how FOIA worked before thousands of court decisions shaped its contours. As things have turned out, the problems Nader highlighted were not just inevitable issues that any new system encounters initially. They are, instead, practices that have persisted through time. Moreover, five decades of litigation, which agencies have regularly won, have legitimized these practices as proper and legal, and constricted FOIA’s scope and efficacy. Congress at various times has stepped in to fine-tune the statute in the face of agency recalcitrance and the court decisions that enabled it, but in the end the legislative fixes have fixed very little. That result reflects both the modest goals of the remedial legislation and the powerful hand of the courts in shaping FOIA.
But none of this progress takes away from the central point of Nader’s earlier article: FOIA itself is deeply flawed—so deeply flawed, in fact, that its terms have allowed agencies to defeat the very purpose of the act. From the beginning, FOIA contained broadly worded exemptions that gave the agencies wide latitude to shield records of internal deliberations, declare investigative files confidential, and withhold the identities of citizens, even when these citizens had voluntarily sought governmental favors or otherwise inserted themselves into public controversies. FOIA should have been fertile ground for restorative judicial intervention, with courts giving meaning to the statute’s core purpose despite its flawed drafting. Quite the opposite has happened. While paying lip service to happy FOIA platitudes about the presumption of openness and the narrowness of FOIA exceptions, the courts have crafted a line of precedents that exacerbate the precise concerns flagged by Nader in 1979.
Nader’s 1979 article chastised agencies for resorting to “primitive responses”—losing documents, lying about the existence of records, showing favoritism to corporate requesters—but his main focus was on the agencies’ misuse of the law.8 Some fifty years later, what is striking is that a vigilant judiciary has not rooted out the misuse; instead the courts have effectively institutionalized it as legal and proper. The bad agency behavior identified by Nader has become the law.
Lost in that decision is the idea that Congress may have meant what it said when it imposed tight deadlines or that Congress might have an obligation to provide agencies with the resources needed to make sure citizens’ FOIA rights are vindicated. Bizarrely, in the battle of equities between citizens eager to learn what their government was up to and the entrenched federal bureaucrat being “deluged” by the American public, the latter managed to capture the sympathies of the courts. It may well be that one of the great democratic strengths of FOIA—anyone can make a request at any time to any agency for any reason and is entitled to the same consideration as every other requester—strikes judges as giving birth to an inherently unworkable system, and they choose not to further burden the system by insisting on meaningful deadlines.
Under current law, most requests are to be processed within twenty business days.14 Last year, the government reported that “simple” FOIA requests were processed in an average time of twenty-three days.15 But that statistic is misleading. A different experience awaits those who make meaningful FOIA requests aimed at documents for use in investigative journalism or in-depth research. A request deemed “complex” took, on average, more than 120 days.16 The backlog of requests still exceeds 100,000 across the federal government.17 And responses stretching into the years remain a staple of FOIA. In a 2004 case, the New York Times was told by the Department of Labor that it would need 30,290 hours—15 work years—to respond to The Times’s request for data on workplace injuries and death.18 None of the averages provided by the government takes into account what happens when the request ends in a denial—and 78% of requests were denied in full or in part in 2015.19 At that point, the requester faces the further delay of administrative appeals and litigation, which itself will often take years.
The D.C. Circuit has been even blunter: “Exemption 5 of FOIA does not contain a time limit. We must adhere to the text of FOIA and cannot judicially invent a new time limit for Exemption 5.”28At issue in the case was a request seeking a forty-year-old internal CIA history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. It is hard to imagine a case where the concern for a chilling effect on future deliberations was more attenuated. Do bureaucrats really worry about what will be said about them four decades from now? Would disclosure of a single historian’s study of a unique historic event really chill routine agency deliberations going forward?
The answer, according to the court, was apparently “yes”: “[P]rivileges that are intended to facilitate candid communication, such as the deliberative process privilege, generally do not have an expiration date.”29 Curiously enough, this year, Congress begged to differ. In its latest amendments to FOIA, Congress decided an expiration date was needed. Exemption 5 is now limited to 25 years.30 Congress found that a time limit allowed adequate protection of governmental deliberations while recognizing the “public benefits derived from access to historical records.”31 That response from Congress was typical of much of the remedial FOIA litigation: well-intentioned but exceedingly modest. Nader, like most contemporary requesters, thought the secrecy should end at the time an agency decision was made, not two and half decades later, when the news value is gone and the public interest in a particular topic has waned.
Much the same story can be told about the exemption for law enforcement records.
Over the years, advocacy groups like the ACLU, the National Security Archive, and Nader’s own Public Citizen have filled the void by bringing important public-interest FOIA litigation.49 Though they have had some notable successes, it is hard not to conclude that the courts have failed FOIA and, indeed, have been a bigger disappointment than the agencies themselves. People accept that bureaucracies will be bureaucracies, and their capacity for reform, creativity, and courage is always institutionally constrained. Not so for the courts. Courts could have advanced a revolution of openness by construing FOIA’s reach broadly, bringing its flawed provisions in line with its purpose, reining in unwarranted expansion of the exemptions, and combating the culture of agency delay. They largely chose another course, and fifty years later the public continues to await FOIA’s promise.
David E. McCraw is Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at The New York Times Company. Tali Leinwand and Ian McDougall, First Amendment Fellows at The Times, provided valuable editing and research assistance.
Preferred Citation: David E. McCraw, The “Freedom From Information” Act: A Look Back at Nader, FOIA, and What Went Wrong, 126 Yale L.J. F. 232 (2016), www.yalelawjournal.com/forum/the-freedom-from-information-act-a-look-back.
Nader, supra note 1, at 10, Part II.
5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(6)(A)(i) (2012).
2015 DOJ FOIA Report, supra note 15, at 6.
5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1) (2012).
5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(9) (2012).
5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) (2012).
Nat’l Sec. Archive v. CIA, 752 F.3d 460, 462 (D.C. Cir. 2014).
Nader, supra note 1, at 7.
Shinnecock Indian Nation v. Kempthorne, 652 F. Supp. 2d 345 (E.D.N.Y. 2009).
Id. at 359-60 (internal quotation and citation omitted).
Nat’l Sec. Archive, 752 F.3d at 464.
S. Rep. No. 114-4, at 4 (2015).
2015 DOJ FOIA Report, supra note 15, at 7.
U.S. Dep’t of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, 773 (1989).
Associated Press v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 549 F.3d 62 (2d Cir. 2008).
Associated Press v. U.S. Dep’t of Def., 554 F.3d 274 (2d Cir. 2009).
5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7) (2012).
John Doe Agency v. John Doe Corp., 493 U.S. 146, 154-55 (1989).
Nader, supra note 1, at 13.
Ralph Nader, Freedom from Information: The Act and the Agencies, 5 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1 (1970).
Ralph Nader, Fighting for FOIA, Facebook (June 14, 2011, 1:15 PM) http://www.facebook.com/notes/the-sound-strike/fighting-for-foia-by-ralph-nader‌/173837906009101 [http://perma.cc/M5JT-R93R].
Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency 1945-1975, at 28-63 (2015).
See James T. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism 153-60 (2016).
The FOIA timetable was initially ten business days for a response and twenty days for determination of an appeal. Open Am. v. Watergate Special Prosecution Force, 547 F.2d 605, 609 (D.C. Cir. 1974).
Off. of Info. Pol’y, Summary of Annual FOIA Reports for Fiscal Year 2015, Dep’t of Justice 13 (2015), http://www.justice.gov‌/oip/reports‌/fy_2015_annual_foia_report‌_summary/download [http://perma.cc/ER5Q-Q6QT] [hereinafter 2015 DOJ FOIA Report].
N.Y. Times Co. v. Dep’t of Labor, 340 F. Supp. 2d. 394, 399 (S.D.N.Y. 2004). The court ruled for The Times, and the requested data was produced without further delay after the court’s decision.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, FOIA Reform Passes Congress in Time for 50th Anniversary, Gov’t Secrets, http://www.governmentsecrets.com/foia-reform-passes-congress-time -50th-anniversary [http://perma.cc/6VL8-N2CJ].
Lauren Harper, Exemption 5 Would Not Have Chilling Effect on Agency Deliberations, MDR Fees Should Be Comparable to FOIA Fees, and More: FRINFORMSUM 4/28/2016 (Apr. 28, 2016), http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2016/04/28/exemption-5-foia-reform-would-not-have -chilling-effect-on-agency-deliberations-mdr-fees-should-be-comparable-to-foia-fees-and -more-frinformsum-4282016/ [http://perma.cc/48XY-FGSW].
The tale then took a particularly pernicious turn. Nader found out that CAB was disclosing the complaints—with names included—to the airlines.
New York Times Co. v. U.S. Dep’t of the Treasury, No. 09 Civ. 10437 (FM), 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 109933 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 13, 2010).
FOIA initially provided an exemption for “investigatory files compiled for law enforcement purposes except to the extent available by law to a private party other than an agency.” See Nader, supra note 1, at 6. Congress later sought to limit the amount of withholding, and, in its current iteration, Exemption 7 applies to “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information (A) could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings, (B) would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication, (C) could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, [or] (D) could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source . . . .” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7) (2012).
U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Exemption 7, Guide to the Freedom of Information Act (2014), http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/oip/legacy/2014/07/23/exemption7.pdf [http://‌perma.cc/MWX5-URF8].
See, e.g., ACLU v. CIA, 710 F.3d 422 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (challenging government secrecy about drone strikes); Public Citizen, Inc. v. Office of Mgmt. and Budget, 598 F.3d 865 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (challenging the agency’s withholding of a legal memo that had become the “working law” of the agency); Nat’l Sec. Archive v. U.S. Dep’t. of the Air Force, No. 05-CV-571 (RMC), 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21037 (D.D.C. Apr. 19, 2006) (challenging a “pattern and practice” of agency delay).

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