Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency
The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia. Art by Shelby Criswell.
For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, has kicked off each semester by filing their first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
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The Foilies expose a troubling pattern of institutional resistance to transparency, where agencies weaponize bureaucracy, legal loopholes, and even outright sabotage to evade accountability. At its strongest, this narrative highlights systemic failures: from DHS's willful disregard for records retention laws to Richmond's self-serving FOIA library, the examples reveal a deliberate erosion of public trust. The most egregious cases—like the Akhter brothers' database deletions or DOGE's dismantling...