Editor’s Note: It’s Sunshine Week — the seven days that newspapers across the country focus on transparency in government afforded by Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. This week, we offer this national feature on some egregious examples of how some government agencies have kept public information private. In this week’s editorial on page 8, we also share our own local winner — the Charleston County School District Board of Trustees, whose executive sessions showcase the art of information obfuscation.
We’re taught in school about checks and balances between the various branches of government, but those lessons tend to leave out the role that civilians play in holding officials accountable. We’re not just talking about the ballot box, but the everyday power we all have to demand government agencies make their records and data available to public scrutiny.
At every level of government in the United States, there are laws that empower the public to file requests for public records. They go by various names, but all share the general concept that because the government is of the people, its documents belong to the people. You don’t need to be a lawyer or journalist to file these requests. You just have to care.
It’s easy to feel powerless in these times, as local newsrooms close and elected officials embrace disinformation as a standard political tool. But here’s what you can do: Pick a local agency — it could be a city council, a sheriff’s office or state department of natural resources — and send an email demanding their public record-request log or any other record showing what requests they receive, how long it took them to respond, whether they turned over records and how much they charged the requester for copies. Many agencies even have an online portal that makes it easier, or you can use MuckRock’s records request tool. Your request will send the message to local leaders that they’re on notice. You may even uncover an egregious pattern of an agency ignoring or willfully violating the law.
The Foilies are an attempt to call out these violations each year during Sunshine Week, an annual event (March 10 through 16 this year) when advocacy groups, news organizations and citizen watchdogs combine efforts to highlight the importance of government transparency laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock, in partnership with the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, issue these tongue-in-cheek “awards” across the country for failures by various agencies across the country.
The Poop and Pasta Award
Richlands, Va.
In 2020, Laura Mollo of Richlands, Va., discovered the county 911 center could not dispatch Richlands residents’ emergency calls. While the center dispatched all other county 911 calls, calls from Richlands had to be transferred to the Richlands Police Department to be handled.
After the Richlands Town Council dismissed Mollo’s concerns, she began requesting records under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The records showed Richlands residents faced lengthy delays in connecting with local emergency services. On one call, a woman pleaded for help for her husband, only to be told that county dispatch couldn’t do anything — and her husband died during the delay. Other records Mollo obtained showed Richlands appeared to be misusing its resources.
You would hope that public officials would be grateful that Mollo uncovered the town’s inadequate emergency response system and budget mismanagement. Well, not exactly: Mollo endured a campaign of intimidation and harassment for holding the government accountable. Mollo describes how her mailbox was stuffed with cow manure on one occasion and spaghetti on another (which Mollo understood to be an insult to her husband’s Italian heritage). A town contractor harassed her at her home; police pulled her over; and Richlands officials even had a special prosecutor investigate her.
But this story has a happy ending: In November 2022, Mollo was elected to the Richlands Town Council. The records she uncovered led Richlands to change to the county 911 center, which now dispatches Richlands residents’ calls. And in 2023, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government recognized Mollo by awarding her the Laurence E. Richardson Citizen Award for Open Government.
The Literary Judicial Thrashing of the Year Award
Pennridge, Penn., School District
Sometimes when you’re caught breaking the law, the judge will throw the book at you. In the case of Pennridge School District in Bucks County, Penn., Judge Jordan B. Yeager catapulted an entire shelf of banned books at administrators for violating the state’s Right-to-Know Law.
The case begins with Darren Laustsen, a local parent who was alarmed by a new policy to restrict access to books that deal with “sexualized content,” seemingly in lockstep with book-censorship laws happening around the country. Searching the school library’s catalog, he came across a strange trend: Certain controversial books that appeared on other challenged-book lists had been checked out for a year or more. Since students are only allowed to check out books for a week, he (correctly) suspected that library staff were checking them out themselves to block access.
So he filed a public records request for all books checked out by non-students. Now, it’s generally important for library patrons to have their privacy protected when it comes to the books they read — but it’s a different story if public employees are checking out books as part of their official duties and effectively enabling censorship. The district withheld the records, provided incomplete information and even went so far as to return books and re-check them out under a student’s account in order to obscure the truth. And so Laustsen sued.
The judge issued a scathing and literarily robust ruling: “In short, the district altered the records that were the subject of the request, thwarted public access to public information, and effectuated a cover-up of faculty, administrators and other non-students’ removal of books from Pennridge High School’s library shelves.” The opinion was peppered with witty quotes from historically banned books, including 1984, Alice in Wonderland, The Art of Racing in the Rain and To Kill a Mockingbird. After enumerating the district’s claims that later proved to be inaccurate, he cited Kurt Vonnegut’s infamous catchphrase from Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.”
The Self-Serving Special Session Award
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders
By design, FOI laws exist to help the people who pay taxes hold the people who spend those taxes accountable. In Arkansas, as in many states, taxpayer money funds most government functions, such as daily office operations, schools, travel, dinners and security. As Arkansas’ governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has flown all over the country, accompanied by members of her family and the Arkansas State Police. For the ASP alone, the people of Arkansas paid $1.4 million in the last half of last year.
Last year, Sanders seemed to tire of the scrutiny being paid to her office and her spending. Sanders cited her family’s safety as she tried to shutter any attempts to see her travel records, taking the unusual step of calling a special session of the state legislature to protect herself from the menace of transparency. Notably, the governor had also recently been implicated in an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act case for these kinds of records.
The attempt to gut the law included a laundry list of carve-outs unrelated to safety, such as walking back the ability of public-records plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees when they win their case. Fortunately, the people of Arkansas came out to support the principle of government transparency, even as their governor decided she shouldn’t need to deal with it anymore. Over a tense few days, dozens of Arkansans lined up to testify in defense of the state FOI Act and the value of holding elected officials, like Sanders, accountable to the people.
By the time the session wound down, the state Legislature had gone through multiple revisions. The sponsors walked back most of the extreme asks and added a requirement for the Arkansas State Police to provide quarterly reports on some of the governor’s travel costs.
Other details became exempt. Sanders managed to twist the whole fiasco into a win, though it would be a great surprise if the legislature didn’t reconvene this year with some fresh attempts to take a bite out of FOIA.
The Doobie-ous Redaction Award
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Drug Enforcement Administration
Bloomberg reporters got a major scoop when they wrote about a U.S. Health and Human Services memo detailing how health officials were considering major changes to the federal restrictions on marijuana, recommending reclassifying it from a Schedule I substance to Schedule III.
Currently, the Schedule I classification for marijuana puts it in the same league as heroin and LSD, while Schedule III classification would indicate lower potential for harm and addiction along with valid medical applications.
Since Bloomberg viewed but didn’t publish the memo itself, reporters from the Cannabis Business Times filed an FOIA request to get the document into the public record. The request was met with limited success: HHS provided a copy of the letter, but redacted virtually the entire document besides the salutation and contact information. When pressed further by CBT reporters, the DEA and HHS would only confirm what the redacted documents had already revealed — virtually nothing.
HHS handed over the full, 250-page review several months later, after a lawsuit filed by an attorney in Texas. The crucial information the agencies had fought so hard to protect: “Based on my review of the evidence and the FDA’s recommendation, it is my recommendation as the Assistant Secretary for Health that marijuana should be placed in Schedule III of the CSA.”
The Foilies were compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Director of Investigations Dave Maass, Senior Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Legal Fellow Brendan Gilligan, Investigative Researcher Beryl Lipton) and MuckRock (Co-Founder Michael Morisy, Data Reporter Dillon Bergin, Engagement Journalist Kelly Kauffman, and Contributor Tom Nash), with further review and editing by Shawn Musgrave. Published in partnership with the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.
Illustrations by Hannah Diaz/EFF.
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