Most of us did not know that March 16 was the Freedom of Information Day, but Sky Barsch of VTDigger was quick to point out in her email that FOIA, the public right to know, has been indispensable to their accountability reporting.
Nor do most people know that the FOI Day falls on the birthday of James Madison, the man who drafted the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, and believed, with a conviction bordering on self-righteousness, that a self-governing people cannot be kept in the dark by the government they created. He would have found the current events deeply troubling.
The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law in 1966, was Madison’s promise kept, imperfectly, albeit. It established a legal right to compel federal agencies to open their files. Journalists use it. Lawyers use it. Activists use it. Over the decades, it produced revelations that were startling in scope; for example, hidden safety failures at nuclear plants, the Pentagon’s own internal reckoning with the Afghanistan war, and federal data exposing patterns of police misconduct.
Without FOIA, such stories won’t get told. Without these stories, nothing changes.
So far, the system has been working. We celebrate it every March 16, hold high a few journalists, present them with some awards, and affirm the principle. Good, but here is where we need to press a little harder, because I think, we owe Madison more than a tribute.
Consider what freedom of information has actually opened up the last few years. We know things now that would have seemed impossible to know a generation ago. Thousands of pages of sealed court documents have been released. Flight logs. Depositions. Financial records. Names, powerful names, familiar names, attached to one of the most documented cases of predatory abuse and institutional protection in modern American history. The information is out there. It has been reported, analyzed, indexed, and archived.
And then what? One conviction. A woman who served as a procurer and enabler sits in prison, comfortably, protected. The network she served, the men who flew, who visited, who knew and said nothing, who wrote checks and attended dinners and had their photographs taken, they are, with rare exception, still in place. Still endowed. Still honored.
This is where the story gets close to home. Not just Wall Street and Washington. Academia. Our great research universities, the institutions entrusted with training the next generation of journalists, lawyers, scientists, and policymakers, accepted money from this world. Some did it knowingly; the 2008 conviction left no room for ignorance. Some let buildings be named. Some created centers. Some invited access, and access bought legitimacy, and legitimacy was exactly what was being purchased.
The research produced may be real. The science may be sound. That is precisely what makes it hard. We want to believe that knowledge exists independently of how it’s funded, that truth is truth regardless of who wrote the check. And in a narrow sense, that’s correct. But institutions don’t just produce knowledge. They produce legitimacy. They confer status. They signal, every time they accept a donation and attach a name to a hall, that this person belongs in the community of serious, respectable people. That signal was being bought. That is not a minor footnote.
What should be done about it? That question has not been seriously asked, let alone answered. A few institutions faced public pressure and issued statements. Some money was quietly redirected. Some names remain on buildings today, right now, as you read this. The logic of institutional self-preservation is powerful and persistent. It waits for the news cycle to move on. It usually doesn’t have to wait long.
Which brings us back to Madison, and to what the Freedom of Information Day is really asking us to reckon with. The law worked. The documents were released. The information is available to anyone with an internet connection and an hour to spare. The problem is not access. The problem is what we do, or don’t do, once we have it. The Freedom of Information Act was built on the assumption that citizens, given the facts, would demand accountability. That prosecutors would prosecute. That boards would act. That the institutions, exposed, would reform.
That assumption has been stress-tested in recent years, and the results are not encouraging. Information, it turns out, is necessary but not sufficient. It requires something more, the will and the courage, that institutions will be willing to hold other institutions to account. But these things are in shorter supply than documents.
Madison believed that an informed citizenry was the foundation of democracy. He wasn’t naive about human nature — no one who designed a system of checks and balances was naive — but he believed that sunlight, relentlessly applied, would eventually do its work.
On this Freedom of Information Day, the documents are open. The names are known. The money has been traced. The question Madison couldn’t answer for us is whether knowing is enough.
Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in Hartford.