Some history is needed to answer the question posed in the headline above on what the man most responsible for it — former Rep. John Moss (D-Calif.) — hoped the landmark Freedom of Information Act of 1966 (FOIA) would accomplish.

“Our system of government is based on the participation of the governed, and as our population grows in numbers, it is essential that it also grow in knowledge and understanding,” Moss said as the House of Representatives debated the proposal. “We must remove every barrier to information about and understanding of government activities consistent with our security if the American public is to be adequately equipped to fulfill the ever more demanding role of responsible citizenship.”

The FOIA proposal passed both the House and Senate in June 1966 and was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 4, 1966, the 190th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Senate report on the bill declared it was needed because “a democratic society requires an informed, intelligent electorate, and the intelligence of the electorate varies as the quantity and quality of its information varies.” Similarly, the House report explained that “the purpose of this bill is to establish a general philosophy of full agency disclosure unless information is exempted under clearly delineated statutory language.”

Now, here we are 60 years later, millions of FOIA requests have been filed by private citizens, historians, and other academics, attorneys, and journalists. Federal workers have responded promptly and properly to most of those requests. And federal judges have tried countless cases in which attorneys representing frustrated FOIA requestors have challenged the disclosure decisions of those federal workers.

That the FOIA is a landmark in expanding the transparency and accountability of the federal government is beyond question, but it is also beyond question that the law has been abused, mis-applied, and simply ignored regarding legions of requests that the law clearly required to be answered properly and fully.

A recent illustration of that reality points us to the answer to the question posed in the headline above. As columnist Hans Bader described it in a May 20, 2026, column on Liberty Unyielding: “A federal agency intended to withhold most of the information it could have released under the Freedom of Information Act. But by mistake, it produced in full a document it intended to heavily redact to conceal its content. The text it intended to redact, which is underlined in red, includes even publicly-available information it should not have intended to withhold, such as the publicly-provided email address of an agency official.”

“The agency’s intended redactions also include sentences that should be disclosed, because disclosing them won’t harm the agency, and even documents that are technically privileged are supposed to be released if disclosing them won’t harm the agency (according to the 2016 FOIA Improvement Act). So, the agency shouldn’t have intended to redact these things in the first place,” he continued.

The agency in this case is the Council on the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), which administers the system of Inspectors General (IGs) who investigate and expose waste, fraud and inefficiency in federal departments and independent agencies. These internal watchdogs have exposed hundreds of billions of lost tax dollars since they were created in 1978.

This mistakenly released CIGIE document demonstrates that even in an agency devoted to exposing wrongdoing in the executive branch, some federal worker(s) moved to violate the explicit directions of the FOIA to an extreme degree. Whoever that worker(s) may be, however, they need not worry themselves one little bit about suffering any punishment as a result because of this most basic flaw in the FOIA.

That flaw is that the FOIA applies to agencies, but not to individual federal workers administering that law. Oh, individual federal bureaucrats can and have been prosecuted for other crimes in connection with a FOIA request, such as destroying or altering government property. But no federal worker has ever been indicted, tried, found guilty, and proportionately punished for thumbing their nose at the FOIA’s disclosure requirements.

How serious is this problem? Ask any journalist who has covered the federal government in recent decades and filed FOIA requests, and you will hear a seemingly endless tale of documents so redacted as to make their release pointless, agencies trying to charge outrageous reproduction fees or claiming months and months will be needed to conduct the search needed to identify and provide all documents covered by a request, and requests that sit unanswered literally for years despite the law’s requiring at least an acknowledgement of receipt within 20 days.

To be sure, federal agencies receive millions of FOIA requests every year, and many of which seek far more materials than are required, or the request is too vague to understand what is being requested. An additional problem is that many agencies’ FOIA offices are understaffed. That said, Legal Clarity Team observes:

“At the end of fiscal year 2024, more than 267,000 FOIA requests sat backlogged across the federal government, and even requests classified as ‘simple’ averaged roughly 39 days to process government-wide. The gap between the statutory deadline and the real-world timeline depends on the agency, the complexity of what you’re asking for, and whether you take steps to move things along.”

Since there are no consequences for individual federal employees violating the FOIA, it should come as no surprise that even worse things than delayed responses are a fixture in the public access arena. Here’s an example from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) that demonstrates the existence of a bureaucratic subculture of contempt for the law.

“Newly uncovered documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senior Advisor, Dr. David Morens, consulted with the NIH FOIA office on best practices for deleting official records. Dr. Morens went so far as to write in one email ‘i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear.’ The documents also show that Dr. Morens gave his ‘best friend’ and controversial NIH grant recipient, EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak, preferential treatment by forwarding him potentially damaging FOIA productions prior to public release. Dr. Morens and Dr. Daszak even mention that their emails may suggest they were ‘conspiring’ together in some way,’” reported Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup in a May 2024 statement.

Morens is currently under indictment by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and he has strenuously denied any wrongdoing. The individual referred to as “the foia lady” was identified by congressional investigators but she has also denied wrongdoing. She has not been indicted by DOJ.

Congress and the White House are currently conducting a massive campaign against waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal bureaucracy. Maybe it’s time for somebody at one end or the other of Pennsylvania Avenue to propose amending the FOIA to make it a crime to violate the public’s right to access official documents so they can know the whole truth about what is going on in the nation’s capital?