{"id":2899,"date":"2026-08-21T17:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/?page_id=2899"},"modified":"2026-08-21T17:00:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:00:40","slug":"the-agency-obligation-to-explain-redactions","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print\/volume-24-issue-1-winter-2026\/the-agency-obligation-to-explain-redactions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agency Obligation to Explain Redactions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Agencies routinely offer conclusory and boilerplate reasoning to explain their redaction determinations under the Freedom of Information Act (\u201cFOIA\u201d). This is a major problem. When explaining such determinations to requesters, FOIA officers should provide sufficient reasons to allow a reasonable requester to evaluate the underlying claim of privilege. But agencies likely will not implement that commonsense proposition for two main reasons: the executive branch has generally resisted disclosure requirements for almost a century, and federal courts lack the statutory and practical authority to force agencies to better explain their reasoning at the administrative level. The resulting lack of enforcement mechanisms leads many agencies to implement their disclosure obligations in whack-a-mole fashion, fully complying only when sued. Congress should consider a variety of legislative solutions to reverse the trend.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/23\/2026\/08\/24.1-Foster.pdf\">Continue reading The Agency Obligation to Explain Redactions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agencies routinely offer conclusory and boilerplate reasoning to explain their redaction determinations under the Freedom of Information Act (\u201cFOIA\u201d). This is a major problem. When explaining such determinations to requesters, FOIA officers should provide sufficient reasons to allow a reasonable requester to evaluate the underlying claim of privilege. But agencies likely will not implement that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"parent":2883,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2899","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2900,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2899\/revisions\/2900"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}