Freedom of Information in the USA: Part 1. Read the results. IRE.org (archived)
Here’s why they did the survey.
There are probably no more important reforms to government than the ones that came with the passing of the Federal Freedom of Information (“FOI”) Act. The law recognized in no uncertain terms that if government is to be of the people, by the people and for the people, the decisions and actions of the government must be open for review by the people.
The states, for the most part, followed the federal government in adopting open records laws.
Unfortunately, state FOI laws have proven to be almost uniformly weak and easy to undermine. The weakness and haphazard construction of the state laws has resulted in an information gap that significantly effects the citizenry’s ability to examine even the most fundamental actions of government.
| Better Government Association (BGA) survey of FOI laws |
| Overview |
In the course of numerous investigations, Better Government Association investigators have been refused in our requests to review state contracts and performance measures, denied everything from documentation of ambulance response times to the documents reviewed when making budgeting decisions, and ignored by officials in nearly every major office at one time or another. Our experience told us that the FOI laws simply do not work very well in Illinois.
As a result of our hands-on experience with Illinois’ lack of responsiveness, the BGA decided to find out where we stood in relationship to other states. We found that no one had completed any sort of national analysis of FOI laws, and that Illinois’ relative strengths and weaknesses could not be measured without creating a new instrument to study the problem and without an analysis of each state’s statutory provisions for FOI.
Analysis conducted by the Better Government Association
Staff: Terrance A. Norton, James M. Newcomb & Jay E. Stewart
Interns: Erika Washington and David Hall
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Pennyslvania, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming all got a bit fat F.
See also: BGA Policy. How to File a FOIA Request in Illinois. 5 Dec 2022.
See also: Current website of the Better Government Association (BGA)
The Better Government Association was founded in 1923 and will celebrate its 100th anniversary of serving Illinois residents in 2023. The BGA publishes Illinois Answers Project, an investigative and solutions-focused news outlet launched in 2022, as well as BGA Policy, which advocates for more transparent, accountable and equitable government through public policy reform.
Mission
The Better Government Association is a non-partisan, nonprofit news organization and civic advocate working for transparency, equity and accountability in government in Chicago and across Illinois.
How We Operate
The Illinois Answers Project and BGA Policy teams operate autonomously, with internal policy and practices that ensure the separation of journalism and advocacy. The BGA leadership team maintains oversight over both teams.
Editorial Independence Policy
We subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News:
Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services or opinions.
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See also: Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll. Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With Thousands of Information Requests. 1 Oct 2024. ProPublica.
The conservative think tank’s requests are clogging the pipeline at federal agencies in an apparent attempt to find employees a potential Trump administration would want to purge.
Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.
The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.
All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.
An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.
Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world…”
Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll. Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With Thousands of Information Requests. 1 Oct 2024. ProPublica.
See: FERC: For Citizens: Get Involved
See: Reporter’s Notebook: Hydraulic Fracturing
See: Frack Fluid Spill in Dimock Contaminates Stream, Killing Fish – ProPublica
See: Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) Members’ Blogs and Websites
