Federal agencies’ regular online disclosure and routine management of the Freedom of the Information Act are expected to fade as the government shutdown lingers on.
Reviewing and redacting documents takes staff, many of whom are the first to be furloughed during a funding lapse. And as more federal employees get sent home, government websites grow glitchy and public records requests gather dust, creating an increasing pile of work that civil servants will have to slog through when they’re back on the job.
Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at Ohio State University, believes the spending stop is “potentially a major setback” for the FOIA process, depending how long it carries on.
“I think the government shutdown is taking FOIA processing, which is already strained, and adding an enormous amount of backlogged work when government comes back up into full operations,” said Kwoka, who is an expert on public records laws.
