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Lost in all the recent hoopla about how Wall Street used its substantial political muscle this month to water down the laws and regulations intended to keep us safe from its bad behavior as part of the spending plan known as Cromnibus is the sad story of how the Street somehow was also able to kill another bill it did not like: the revised version of what was generally known as the FOIA Improvement Act of 2014.

The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA as it is commonly known, became the law of the land in 1966 in order to make it easier for the American people to get access to documents, notes and other relevant information about how the federal government wields its considerable power. The idea, of course, is that by making it possible for journalists, as well as ordinary citizens, to get their hands on information about investigations or lobbying or secret deals and then shedding light on it, our democracy will continue to be improved.

Not surprising, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates Wall Street, is the focus of an increasing number of annual FOIA requests. In 2008, some 9,500 FOIA requests were sent to the agency. By 2013, the number of requests had increased to 12,275. (By contrast the C.I.A. received about 4,500 FOIA requests in 2013 while the Justice Department received more than 70,000 such requests.)

As I have written about before, the problem with FOIA, in its current form, is that it allows government agencies to delay the release of information to a point where it is no longer timely or useful. The government agencies also find ways, repeatedly, to release only the barest minimum of information that is marginally relevant or to release pages of documents that have been blacked out, making them impossible to read. For instance, in years past, I have made numerous FOIA requests for information about the subjects of my three Wall Street books and only once received information from the S.E.C. timely enough to make it useful to me in the two-year march to the publication of the book, and that was only after I appealed successfully the agency ’s original decision not to release the information to me.

Fortunately, this year, Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, realized the numerous flaws in the existing FOIA law and set about to rectify them. To that end, the two senators set about trying to make it easier for information locked up in government vaults and hard drives to be set free, where it belongs.

Among other things, their bill would have made it harder for government agencies to use the bureaucracy excuse to delay or to obfuscate FOIA requests or otherwise “withhold information…merely because the agency can demonstrate, as a technical matter, that the records fall within the scope of an exemption” or “merely because disclosure of the information may be embarrassing to the agency or because of speculative or abstract concerns.” The Senate bill also required government agencies to release documents and files about events 25 years old or older instead of continuing to block them. The bill would have created an online portal to make it easier for people to make one FOIA request that would go to all relevant agencies, as opposed to making a separate request to each agency, and would have created a “Chief FOIA Officer’s Council” to make sure FOIA was working properly.

The Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent. It then was sent to the House of Representatives, which had already passed its own version of a FOIA reform bill by an overwhelming vote of 410-0. The House version, also drafted in a nonpartisan manner by the unlikely duo of Representatives Darrell Issa, Republican of California, and Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, was a milder version of the Senate bill. Still, there seemed to be consensus that the differences could be resolved quickly, and in any event before Congress adjourned on Dec. 11.

In other words, reforming FOIA appeared to be a legislative slam dunk. And President Obama was virtually certain to sign it into law even if he had not always been as supportive of having light shined into the dark corners of government as many people had hoped when he came to office. Such was the expectation for the new law that The Washington Post proclaimed, “Government watchdogs, rejoice. FOIA bill is on track for passage.”

And yet it was not to be. Amy Bennett, the assistant director of OpenTheGovernment.org and a leading advocate for the passage of the FOIA bill, told The International Business Times that she believed Wall Street lobbyists had gotten their hooks yet again into the legislative process against a bill it did not like.

“The negotiation process for this bill has been going on for six months now,” she said. “But the banks only started raising objections in the last week. Wall Street’s lobbyists are going to their allies on Capitol Hill and are asking them to delay it. But Wall Street just wants to kill the bill.”

In the end, the Republican leadership of the House decided not to bring the bill up for a vote before the legislative session ended, despite its overwhelming bipartisan support. Asked at a news on the morning of Dec. 11 about the prospects for a vote on the bill that day – the final one before the pitiful 113th Congress was put out of its misery — House Speaker John Boehner said, “I have no knowledge of what the plan is for that bill.”

Mr. Boehner closed the session that evening without bringing up the FOIA bill for a vote. “My job tonight is to say thank you, and Merry Christmas,” Mr. Boehner said. Later that night, Mr. Leahy blamed the House speaker. “And Boehner kills #FOIA improvements,” he tweeted to a reporter for The Hill.

When a bill with unanimous support, intended to increase our collective knowledge about the inner workings of our government, can apparently get defeated at the 11th hour by Wall Street lobbyists and a speaker of the House using a technical ploy, then one has to lament the sad direction our democracy has taken.