Attacks on Open Government on the Rise in the United States

Early-2012 state-level legislative trends were running in a clear direction: a roughly two-year accumulation of bills, in nearly half the states, narrowing the categories of records subject to public-disclosure requirements. The pattern was visible in Indiana (email correspondence), Hawaii (executive sessions), Florida (911 call recordings), New Jersey (criminal investigative records), Texas (private-prison contracts), Wisconsin (Department of Administration records), and several others. Each individual change was often defensible on its own legislative-staff merit; the cumulative effect was substantial.

The reporting coalitions that tracked this — the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Sunlight Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Freedom of Information Coalition — used the term 'death by a thousand cuts' to describe the dynamic. The federal-level FOIA conversation got most of the press attention, but the state-level baseline was where the practical impact on local-government accountability journalism was being felt.

The pattern continued through the mid-2010s and into the post-2016 period. By 2020 the National Conference of State Legislatures was tracking over a thousand public-records-related bills per year; many never advanced past committee, but the ones that did almost always narrowed access rather than expanded it. The 2012 piece marked the period when the cumulative trajectory first became reportable as a single trend story.