A press release on Senator Marco Rubio’s Facebook page announces a “FOIA Fix.” Co-sponsored with Senator Tom Cotton, the proposal will, according to Rubio:

“fix an existing loophole in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that allows foreign individuals, entities, and governments to submit a FOIA request. Prohibiting foreign actors from submitting FOIA requests would put American requests first while preventing government information, including potentially sensitive technology research, from being shared with hostile foreign regimes. In addition to reducing the massive backlog of pending requests, the bill would also decrease the taxpayer dollars spent on processing foreign FOIA requests.

 

“It makes no sense that malign foreign entities can use our laws to access sensitive government information, all while thousands of U.S. citizens continue to wait for their FOIA requests to be answered,” Rubio said. “FOIAs should be used to inform American citizens, not foreign entities. My common-sense bill will correct this glaring loophole.”

Axios breaks it down.

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/foia-ban-foreign-senate-bill

With the exception of the assertion that “malign foreign entities” use FOIA to access “sensitive government information — which is premised on the apparent belief that practitioners of foreign espionage have no problem with leaving a paper trail a mile wide and that federal agencies regularly disclose sensitive government information in response to FOIA requests — the bill is said to be prompted by the same moronic impulses that prompted 2021’s moronic Kentucky Open Records Act residency requirement. 

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/21rs/hb312.html

That law dramatically altered the landscape of the 45 year old open records law by restricting use of the law to Kentucky residents — at the expense of nonresidents with an equally compelling need for records of Kentucky agencies. 

We’re wondering if the Kentucky League of Cities — which promoted the residency requirement on the same lame pretexts as those advanced in support of the Rubio-Cotton “FOIA Fix” — has bothered to ascertain whether the new law substantially (or even marginally) reduced the number of open records request filed statewide. 

From our perspective, it has only increased the number of aggrieved requesters and open records disputes based on misinterpretation and misapplication of the new requirement. 

As Buzzfeed News senior investigative reporter Jason Leopold astutely observed, FOIA is broken, but “it's not because of some fiction that federal agencies are bombarded with requests from non US citizens.”

Like the Kentucky 2021 residency requirement, the Rubio-Cotton “FOIA Fix” is the latest in the expanding compendium of legislative solutions in search of a problem.