Rays-ing the Bar for Sunshine Week 2025

This week marks the start of Sunshine Week, a celebration promoting open government and transparency. EPIC annually takes this time to reflect on our past open government milestones. Coinciding with Freedom of Information Day and James Madison’s birthday, Sunshine Week reminds us that access to government information is not just a legal right but essential to maintaining a healthy democratic system. We are proud to join good government organizations, civic groups, and news outlets in celebrating Sunshine Week because government accountability and access to information is needed now more than ever.

EPIC frequently uses open government laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the E-Government Act of 2002, and state open government laws to enable public oversight of key government activities. EPIC utilizes open government laws to not only release critical information of secretive government activities but also force agencies to comply with their legal obligations. For example, EPIC moved the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly released its joint 2020 and 2021 Data Mining Report, an annually required report on its data mining activities. The report was dated August 2022 and published two months after EPIC’s 2023 FOIA request, suggesting that DHS would not have published the report until EPIC requested it. The agency has yet to release any subsequent reports.

EPIC also utilizes open government requests to inform our reports, policy materials, agency complaints, and lawsuits. For example in January 2024, EPIC filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Thomson Reuters for its fraud detection system. Factual findings in the complaint stemmed from a multi-year research endeavor that relied heavily on open government requests for information about Thomson Reuters. Similarly in October 2024, EPIC and the National Association of Consumer Advocates filed suit against tenant screening company RentGrow for unfair and deceptive practices tied to their automated tenant screening reports. The lawsuit builds on four years of research from open government requests and advocacy on automated screening and scoring technologies.

Additionally, EPIC is active in open government reform efforts, often advocating for greater transparency and accountability. In April 2024, EPIC submitted comments to the White House Office of Management in Budget (OMB) and called attention to flaws that allow federal agencies to skirt their responsibility to conduct meaningful privacy impact assessments (PIA). We urged OMB to update their guidance by closing loopholes to conduct PIAs, ensuring that PIAs are done before systems are rolled out, improving transparency requirements, and paying special attention to AI and commercially available information. We also led a coalition of 27 privacy, government accountability, civil liberties, civil rights, racial justice, and human rights groups to submit separate comments to urge OMB to implement EPIC’s proposed reforms.

EPIC continues to raise the bar for what an open and accountable government looks like. We will use all the tools at our disposal to improve oversight and transparency of government programs. While there is no shortage of issues, EPIC remains focused on releasing critical information like recent data mining reports, government information security violations, government use of facial recognition systems, DHS’s use of AI, and use of surveillance systems in public housing funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.