An 11-Year Fight Ends in a Law Signed Without a Ceremony
FOIA did not arrive as a presidential initiative. It began with a junior congressman's decade-long campaign against agency secrecy, passed over the reluctance of the president who signed it, and has been rewritten by Congress five more times since, almost always in response to a specific crisis or a court ruling that exposed a gap in the original text.
Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy, FOIA.gov
- U.S. Department of Justice, Agencies Processed Over One Million FOIA Requests in Fiscal Year 2023
- U.S. Department of Justice, OIP Summary of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016
- U.S. Department of Justice, Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 1996
- National Archives, Office of Government Information Services (OGIS)
- National Archives, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
- National Security Archive (George Washington University), FOIA Legislative History
- National Security Archive, The FOIA and President Gerald Ford
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives: The Freedom of Information Act
- Supreme Court of the United States / Oyez, EPA v. Mink (1973)
- Supreme Court of the United States / Oyez, Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (1989)
- Supreme Court of the United States / Oyez, National Archives and Records Administration v. Favish (2004)
- Supreme Court of the United States / Oyez, Milner v. Department of the Navy (2011)
- Supreme Court of the United States / Oyez, Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media (2019)
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Government Adapts to Loss of "High 2" Exemption
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Holder's FOIA Memo Is a "Refreshing Change"
This page draws on the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy and its annual government-wide FOIA reporting, the National Archives' Office of Government Information Services and FOIA program pages, the National Security Archive's FOIA legislative history project, the U.S. House of Representatives' official history of the Act, and published Supreme Court opinions and Oyez case summaries. Request volume and backlog figures are from the Justice Department's fiscal year 2023 government-wide FOIA reporting, the most recent full-year data available at the time of writing.