Nothing to see here! No, literally.
The federal government censored, withheld or said it couldn’t find records sought by citizens, journalists and others more often last year than at any point in the past decade, according to an Associated Press analysis of new data. [...]
People who asked for records under the Freedom of Information Act received censored files or nothing in 78 percent of 823,222 requests, a record over the past decade. When it provided no records, the government said it could find no information related to the request in a little over half those cases.
What is there to even say about this? It seems predictable. Perhaps the efforts are hindered by Team Trump's continued sluggishness in finding appointees; perhaps Trump underlings are quashing more requests, hoping to tamp down on a steady stream of scandals that have included everything from rampant private jet usage by top Trump appointees to tales of expensive office refurbishments. Perhaps it is contempt for the notion of public oversight itself—certainly, elected Republicans throughout the rest of Washington have suddenly lost interest in their Obama-era demands to investigate everything, all the time.
Or it could be, and never rule this one out, incompetence. Perhaps our entire federal government has just gotten a whole lot dumber, in the span of a year, because everyone who knew how to work a computer "search" function headed for the hills as soon as they saw this crew coming.
A disturbing trend continued: In more than one-in-three cases, the government reversed itself when challenged and acknowledged that it had improperly tried to withhold pages. But people filed such appeals only 14,713 times, or about 4.3 percent of cases in which the government said it found records but held back some or all of the material.
Translation: Federal departments tried to break the law by stonewalling public information requests, for which they've been getting regularly reversed, when the applicant has the resources to press the point. It’s that last bit that’s the catch.