Sunshine Week is an annual journalism industry initiative held every March to celebrate freedom of information and open government. It was established in 2005 by the American Society of News Editors. This week, reporters, academics, and transparency advocates will write about the importance of FOIA, attend panels about government accountability, and submit records requests that will sit in agency queues for months.
The gap between the principle Sunshine Week celebrates and the practice it exists to remedy is the story that rarely makes the panel.
What the Law Says
The federal Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966, establishes a legal right of public access to federal agency records. The law sets a twenty-business-day response window for standard requests and shorter windows for expedited processing. Agencies are required to provide responsive records or state specifically why they cannot.
Forty-nine states have their own public records laws with similar requirements. Local government agencies are generally covered by state sunshine laws. The legal framework for government transparency in the United States is reasonably comprehensive.
The legal framework for enforcing that transparency when agencies ignore it is not.
The Backlog as Policy
Federal agencies maintain FOIA backlogs that routinely stretch into years. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the State Department are consistent leaders. DHS has had a multi-year backlog for over a decade. Requesters waiting for records about immigration enforcement, security incidents, or border operations can expect to wait eighteen to thirty-six months for responses to requests that the law says should take four weeks.
Agencies are required to report their backlogs to the Department of Justice annually. The DOJ publishes those reports. The reports document that backlogs exist and are growing. There is no enforcement mechanism tied to the reporting.
A requester who does not receive a timely response can file suit in federal district court. The lawsuit costs money, takes time, and often produces the same documents the agency eventually would have released anyway — just faster, after a settlement, with the government paying the requester’s legal fees. This is a functional deterrent for individual requesters and a manageable cost for well-resourced news organizations and advocacy groups.
It is not a functional deterrent for agencies. The cost of losing FOIA litigation falls on the Justice Department, not on the agency that delayed.
What Gets Withheld, and Why
FOIA exemptions are real and serve legitimate purposes. Classified national security information, ongoing law enforcement investigations, personal privacy, and proprietary business information are reasonable categories for withholding. The law anticipated these cases.
What the law did not anticipate — or at least did not adequately address — is the systematic use of exemptions as first-resort responses to requests agencies find inconvenient. The most commonly cited exemptions are Exemption 5 (inter-agency deliberative process) and Exemption 7 (law enforcement records). Both have broad interpretations that agencies use routinely to withhold records that would be embarrassing rather than sensitive.
The deliberative process exemption exists to protect the candor of internal government deliberations. It has been extended to cover finished documents, post-hoc communications, and records with no meaningful deliberative content. Courts have pushed back periodically. Agencies continue to invoke it broadly.
The Requester Who Isn’t a Reporter
Sunshine Week’s framing centers on journalism and the public’s right to know. This framing is not wrong, but it underrepresents who actually submits FOIA requests. The plurality of federal FOIA requests come from commercial requesters — law firms, businesses, and contractors seeking information for commercial purposes. The second largest category is individuals seeking information about themselves.
Journalists and researchers are a small minority of requesters. They produce the high-profile stories that make Sunshine Week news. The experience of everyone else in the queue — the person trying to get their own immigration file, the small business trying to understand a regulatory decision affecting them, the researcher trying to access data that agencies are required to make public — is less visible.
That majority experience involves the same delays, the same form letters citing blanket exemptions, the same appeals process that takes another year, and the same absence of any practical recourse when agencies simply ignore statutory deadlines.
What Sunshine Week Doesn’t Fix
Sunshine Week produces coverage of transparency problems. It does not produce enforcement. The same agencies that generate the panel discussion topics — for their backlog numbers, for their aggressive exemption claims, for their FOIA litigation posture — return to the same practices after the panels conclude.
The structural problem is that no one in the government has both the authority and the incentive to hold agencies accountable for FOIA compliance. The DOJ’s Office of Information Policy publishes guidance and reports. It does not have enforcement power over agencies that ignore the guidance. Congress holds oversight hearings when convenient and rarely follows up.
Government transparency advocates have proposed solutions: mandatory fee shifting that falls on individual agencies rather than DOJ, automatic disclosure for records overdue beyond a threshold, an independent FOIA ombudsman with actual enforcement power. None of these have passed.
Bottom Line
Freedom of information laws work when agencies choose to comply with them. When agencies choose not to comply, the remedies are slow, expensive, and depend on requesters having enough resources and patience to litigate.
Sunshine Week celebrates a right that exists on paper. The annual coverage of FOIA is good. The gap between the annual coverage and the annual state of FOIA compliance is the story worth following the rest of the year.