Government Efficiency Starts with Rejuvenating FOIA

By Marc Joffe, Cato Inst., Dec. 11, 2024

The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a promising adjunct to the second Trump administration that proposes to identify and root out billions or even trillions of dollars of federal waste, fraud, and abuse. To properly manage the problem of government inefficiency, it is best to measure it with big data on federal spending. But as those of us who have been studying wasteful federal programs know, getting the necessary data has become more and more difficult.

The primary tool available to outside analysts is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a 1966 law that allows members of the public to obtain government documents. Sadly, the heydays of executive branch compliance with FOIA are long behind us. Today, departments and agencies rarely respond to complex requests within the twenty working days specified by the law and often have to be taken to court to disclose anything at all. FOIA includes a variety of exceptions that bureaucrats interpret liberally, claiming the right to heavily redact documents or withhold them.

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