What the Trump administration meant for freedom of information requests
By Philip Eil , Columbia Journalism Rev., Feb. 15, 2021
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Trump came into office with the FOIA bar already low. The Obama administration, despite lofty campaign rhetoric about transparency and a first-day-in-office memo urging agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure,” set records for FOIA non-compliance and was caught at one point—by a FOIA lawsuit, naturally—contradicting its public posture by lobbying against FOIA reform behind closed doors. Thus, as MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy put it, comparing Obama and Trump’s transparency records is a case study in “setting high expectations and then failing to meet them in some really critical ways versus setting some really low expectations and delivering what folks expected.”
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