Editorial: Public’s right to know

Tuesday, July 4, 2006 | 7:25 a.m.

As the Freedom of Information Act turns 40 today, a new study shows that the federal government is taking longer to respond to requests for information and that when it does respond, more than half of the requests still are being denied.

The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, an organization of nine media outlets, examined the public information requests made of 13 Cabinet departments and nine agencies and discovered that a third of all queries were unprocessed in 2005. The number of requests for information made by citizens, private groups and corporations decreased, the report shows, and 63 percent of all requests made were declined.

The Freedom of Information Act allows people to check what the federal government is doing by requesting access to public documents and data. But results of this recent study illustrate what seems to be a lax attitude toward the importance of timely responses on the part the Bush administration's agencies and departments.

The Associated Press reports that the coalition, of which AP is a member, notes that the number of employees working on information act requests in the 22 agencies studied had dropped from 4,288 before Bush won office in 2000 to 3,315 in 2005. And the response-time delays have grown significantly. There are 261 federal workdays a year, but the median wait for information request responses from some areas of the Agriculture Department was 1,277 workdays - 4.8 federal years.

While it is sometimes thought of as a tool reserved for the news media, the Freedom of Information Act actually is one of the most important privileges that all Americans possess. At minimum, it allows any citizen to track how his tax money is being spent.

Congress, which failed to enact a bipartisan proposal to streamline the act's process, must revisit such a proposal and correct the system. The government must ensure that the public is not being denied access to information to which it is entitled.