It’s Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of access to public information, coordinated by the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project. To commemorate the power of public information, we’ve asked experts to share their tips for requesting open records and responding when facing roadblocks to access.
We asked Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), about challenges journalists are facing when it comes to public records requests. At RCFP, Singh helps news organizations with records requests and focuses on litigation and policy work related to state and federal freedom of information laws.
What are some of the biggest open access issues you are hearing from journalists in 2025?
Singh: In general, the obstacles to access in 2025 aren’t too dissimilar from those we saw in 2024 and prior. Agencies still take far too long to respond to records requests and often inadequately justify their redactions and withholdings, further delaying the public and the press access to records they are entitled to under FOIA.
Can you briefly describe how the recent firings of FOIA officers are impacting journalists across the country, and what is your advice for pushing back against unresponsive — or unhelpful — agencies?
Singh: FOIA offices have long claimed that they struggle with resource constraints and cite those constraints as the primary basis for failing to meet FOIA’s statutory deadlines. It’s been a distressing state of affairs because the FOIA statute explicitly contains a 20-business-day deadline within which an agency must make a determination on a FOIA request; i.e., that deadline isn’t a mere suggestion — it’s the law.
To further reduce the volume of personnel dedicated to serving the press and the public by way of FOIA compliance poses a huge problem for the public’s right to know. In an effort to navigate these circumstances as skillfully as possible, journalists should always be mindful about the scope of their request; try and ask precisely for what you need given the usual tradeoff between the scope of the request and the timeliness of the response.
How can you narrow a request without losing the scope of what you’re trying to get?
Singh: Subject matter experts within the agency can sometimes offer helpful guidance on how to narrow the scope of a request to keep it manageable for the agency while still getting what you’re most interested in.
Structuring a request broken down by keywords and date ranges is a great way to strike that balance as well. Try and do all the research you can at the outset about relevant personnel and program offices that might be implicated by the request to really hold the FOIA officer’s hand through the process.
Beyond that, consulting FOIA reading rooms to see what’s already been processed and released is a great way to save time and resources by not “reinventing the wheel.”
What advice do you have for keeping FOIA request costs reasonable for journalists?
Singh: Always add a few sentences in your FOIA request about your status as a representative of the news media. If you’re unsure of what kind of showing you ought to make or the relevant statutory provision to cite, refer to our FOIA.Wiki!
At the state level, always ask for an itemized breakdown of costs if you get hit with a hefty bill; it forces the agency to take another pass at the propriety of its fee imposition — oftentimes, the costs magically come down.
Tags: Sunshine Week