The Freedom of Information Act or FOIA should be one of the most powerful tools of the public and the press in a free and open society. Instead, it’s largely a pointless, useless shadow of its intended self.

Federal bureaucrats paid tax dollars to act on our behalf routinely break the law with impunity, treating public material as if it’s confidential, secret information to be controlled by a chosen few. They withhold it from us, its rightful owners, while sharing it with select partners such as corporations or other so-called “stakeholders.”

In October, I filed a FOIA request when the CDC was not forthcoming about the epidemic of Enterovirus EV-D68 possibly linked to the deaths of 14 children and 115 paralyzed children.

In December, long past the supposed 20-day response time, I asked about the status. CDC answered incredibly that officials were just too busy with the Ebola crisis to fulfill my FOIA on EV-D68. Even now with the excuse of the Ebola crisis over, I still haven’t been given any EV-D68 information eight months after I asked.

In 2013, the Defense Department finally responded to a FOIA request I’d made in 2003. Too late to be of use for the news story I was working on back then.

Filing a lawsuit against the government takes too much time and money, and the agencies still play the delay game in court. In court, the Justice Department—itself among the worst of FOIA offenders—spends our tax dollars defending the offending federal agencies.

In one lawsuit I filed, the FBI spent months repeatedly claiming it didn’t have information it had previously acknowledged having in writing.

I also filed a lawsuit for HealthCare.gov material I sought in 2012. Apparently the government didn’t bother to start looking for documents I requested back in 2012— only now in 2015 are they doing so under court pressure. Documents provided so far are redacted beyond reason.

In 2014, when the State Department finally sent some documents responsive to a request I made in 2012, most of the content of relevant emails is redacted with the exception of the address line.