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This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, the landmark government transparency law that has helped reveal and publicize critical information about everything from the Vietnam War to FBI surveillance to CIA torture. For decades, FOIA has played a crucial role in uncovering and rectifying government wrongdoing. Today, however, advocates say that the government’s resistance to fulfilling FOIA requests has grown, forcing applicants to file expensive lawsuits to obtain records, while records that are released often take years to receive and are filled with so many redactions as to render them essentially “a waste of time.”

“It’s gotten extremely bad in this last year and a half under Trump, but this has been going on for decades,” says Ian Head, who manages the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights. These bureaucratic delay and deferral tactics are extremely concerning, he adds, threatening accountability, transparency and democratic processes. “We need to be able to file federal FOIA requests so we can see what this government is doing.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Sixty years ago, on July 4th, 1966, President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, into law. The law was a critical step towards government transparency, even though Johnson decided not to hold a public event for the signing and instead issued a signing statement focused on exemptions for national security. FOIA only got stronger after the Watergate scandal in 1974, when Congress amended the law to make it one of the most powerful tools available for journalists, researchers, advocates and everyday people to hold the government accountable and reveal severe wrongdoing by the U.S. government, both at home and overseas.

Open Records Advocates Alarmed as DHS Abandons Text Archiving Software

Well, now FOIA seems to be in serious trouble. A Washington Post investigation from earlier this year found the massive purge at federal agencies last year has had a significant impact on the number of workers responding to FOIA requests. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on FOIA in April of last........

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