Sunshine Week comes amid darkening clouds for open gov advocates
It's Sunshine Week, but transparency advocates say open government, already in peril, may be reaching a new low under the Trump administration.
By Justin Doubleday, WFED, Mar. 17, 2025
The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) typically marks Sunshine Week, an annual occasion to celebrate open and transparent government, with a public awards ceremony to honor the contributions of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) professionals across government.
This year, however, DoJ OIP appears to have abandoned previous plans to host the annual FOIA awards on March 17. DoJ did not respond to a request for comment.
For open government experts, the cancellation of what was a routine ceremony is just the latest blow in a new assault on government transparency. They point to how the Trump administration has fired FOIA staff, removed public websites and data, terminated 18 inspectors general, and resisted efforts to disclose DOGE records, among other actions.
“I think this is the darkest Sunshine Week within living memory,” Daniel Schuman, chief executive of the American Governance Institute, told me in an interview. “Nothing less than a collapse of open and accountable government is happening all around us.”
Read more here.
[ALB commentary: We’re glad to see our earlier reporting on the growing request backlog and about Sunshine Week echoed here.
Mr. Schuman apparently has a short memory. A mere five years ago in mid-March, the entire country was shut down by COVID-19 and scores of agency FOIA offices were crippled for months—in some cases for all of 2020 and beyond (e.g., the National Archives and Records Administration). Mr. Schuman’s dramatic comment reminds me of a recent observation by Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman about the state of the Democratic Party: “A sad cavalcade of self owns and unhinged petulance . . . We’re becoming the metaphorical car alarms that nobody pays attention to − and it may not be the winning message.”
Further, Professor Cuillier is off base in claiming that the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy “favors secrecy.” No, OIP is dedicated to faithfully applying the statute, which inconveniently for some open government advocates includes exemptions. The FOIA is not, as many like to say, a “records disclosure statute”; it is a partial disclosure statute. The exemptions are as much a part of FOIA’s purpose as is the general purpose of access.