FOIA follies: How the deep state avoids transparency
- September 22, 2025
Michael Chamberlain, Washington Examiner
The deep state isn’t nearly as deep as it would like you to think, nor is it as clever as it thinks — these are, after all, bureaucrats. Many may be partisans intent on quietly thwarting one party’s agenda while greasing the skids for the other, but they’re also the types who ask why you didn’t put the cover sheet on your TPS report.
Read the rest of PPT director Michael Chamberlain’s op-ed
What the deep state does well is to use the bureaucracy’s failings and inefficiencies to cover its tracks. Transparency and accountability can get lost in clerical processes. Ambiguous official terminology can muck up or even prematurely end straightforward information searches.
That is how some agencies subvert the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA was passed by Congress in the 1960s and amended several times since, to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.”
Under it, federal agencies must preserve records and communications, including memos, emails, internal reports calendars, and other documents. Any person, group, or organization may submit requests for information based on subjects, dates, names, keywords, etc., and the agency must search for and produce any responsive records. There are exceptions for individual privacy, classified information, draft and deliberative conversations, and others, and agencies can and do redact information from responsive documents.
But to make FOIA requests with any frequency is to encounter a variety of glitches, delays, misunderstandings, frustrating redactions, and more. Sometimes, these incidents are simple mishaps. Other times, they look like intentional stalls and mistakes to slow the process in the hope that the requester gets discouraged and goes away.
And many do go away because when a federal agency is uncooperative with FOIA requests, the ultimate recourse is to sue. For organizations like mine, Protect the Public’s Trust, that’s part of what we do. We are built to pursue information into court. For most news organizations whose entire legal budget is reserved for libel, plagiarism, and copyright infringement (let alone for private citizens without legal budgets), the legal costs are prohibitive.