With the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill this week to amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), EFF and a coalition of other groups are calling on members of the Senate [.pdf] to pass a law that meaningfully improves government transparency and accountability through access to federal records. It is becoming something of an annual tradition for Congress to introduce FOIA legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. This year’s bill is the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (H.R. 653), and it contains many of the same amendments to FOIA found in recent bills, including narrowing some of the most-abused exemptions in the law. Even though members of both the House and Senate have strongly supported past FOIA bills, Congress has failed to pass a law after agencies subject to the bills’ heightened transparency requirements pushed back. For example, in 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice was instrumental in killing FOIA reform. Despite…
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