The law that makes this entire website possible just turned 60, and it's quietly failing

The News/Media Alliance's 2026 review of FOIA's real performance found that while the legally allowed response window is 20 days, the actual average time requesters wait for a response is roughly 289 days. That response, when it finally arrives, is often not the records themselves but a notice that the search has merely begun. More than 12 percent of all requests are rejected outright. At the Department of Education specifically, the backlog of unresolved requests grew from 2,485 to 4,570 in a single year, an 83 percent increase, and requests marked "simple" took an average of 171 days to resolve, longer than the 128-day average for requests marked "complex."

Ian Head, who manages the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, described the recent period as a sharp acceleration of a much older problem: it has gotten extremely bad in the last year and a half, he said, but this has been going on for decades. The National Security Archive's own 60th anniversary retrospective frames the core tension plainly, that Americans hold a legal right to know, while their practical ability to exercise that right has rarely been more uncertain, pointing to agency backlogs, the dismantling of dedicated FOIA offices, disappearing public datasets, and renewed executive claims over control of government records as compounding, overlapping causes rather than one single culprit.

This establishes that a real, well-documented, and measurable decline in the practical functioning of federal FOIA compliance exists as of 2026, confirmed by the government's own self-reported statistics and independent tracking from press-freedom and transparency organizations, not by any single advocacy group's estimate alone. This is confirmed by the Justice Department's own published FOIA reports alongside independent analysis from the National Security Archive and the News/Media Alliance.

What this does not establish is a single, clean cause. The decline spans multiple administrations and multiple structural factors, chronic underfunding, rising request volume, and disputed claims over what counts as a government record in the first place. Attributing the entire trend to any one political figure or party oversimplifies a genuinely multi-decade, multi-cause problem.