Florida reflects national trend of blocking the public’s access to information | Opinion
By all measures, the ability to see what the government is up to in the United States has plummeted to new depths since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
For National Sunshine Week in 2025, I wrote about secrecy creep, the adoption of federal secrecy protections implemented by state and local authorities. In Florida and throughout the United States, this threatens the public’s right to be informed about its government.
A year later, this creep toward secrecy has become an all-out slide.
As director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, I track the state of government transparency in the U.S. What has changed since January 2025 is unprecedented.
Clouds in the Sunshine State
Florida is a good example of this slide. Once viewed as a leader in transparency, the Sunshine State now charges exorbitant copy fees that discourage average people from requesting public records.
According to the nonprofit MuckRock, 24% of public records requests in Florida come with a copy fee, averaging US$1,623. Only Oregon charges fees more often, at 28% of the time. Fees are intended to help agencies cover the cost of large requests, but they tend to be arbitrary and are often used as a way to get pesky people to go away.
And that’s assuming you even get the information you want. One of my own studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time, placing the state 31st in the nation.
In 2025, MuckRock reported the percentage dipping lower, to 35%. In March 2026, it was at 34%.
In Florida, more government agencies are thwarting the public’s right to know, including attempts to hide the details behind Alligator Alcatraz. The state’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, office has pushed cities to be more transparent while withholding its own records.
Members of the state Legislature are attempting to strengthen the public records law. This would improve transparency in Florida’s state government, but I’d argue it doesn’t go far enough. Other states, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, have implemented stronger laws, including independent enforcement of their sunshine laws, to ensure their governments comply.
It starts at the top
State and local governments appear to be taking their cues from the federal government.
President Donald Trump’s administration heralds itself as the most transparent in history, pointing to the president’s willingness to talk informally to the press or directly to the public through social media.
But the federal government’s willingness to provide documents that show what the government is doing — not just what it says it is doing — has been eviscerated under the second Trump administration.
Examples range from refusing to provide tax returns like every other president in modern history, to removing government websites and databases, to firing and pushing out experienced staffers assigned to handle FOIA — Freedom of Information Act — requests as part of the 2025 U.S. DOGE purges. As a result, some agencies, such as the Department of Energy, began applying unorthodox practices, including closing out pending requests.
The Trump administration has also axed the new Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, which was launched to find ways of improving FOIA.
Typically, the Department of Justice releases annual statistics on FOIA requests every March. When I examined initial reports posted in January 2026, 11 agencies had provided their reports. Backlogs — that is, requests that remain unresolved after a year — had increased 67% from the previous fiscal year, and the time to process simple requests nearly doubled.
Perhaps advances can be made to reverse the secrecy trend and carry out the intentions of the Freedom of Information Act, as expressed by Lyndon B. Johnson upon its adoption nearly 60 years ago: “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.”
David Cuillier is director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project and co-director of the Brechner Center for Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida. This op-ed first appeared in The Conversation.
This story was originally published March 11, 2026 at 4:51 PM.