From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Back in the 80s, the Church of Scientology wanted to know what kinds of information the federal government was collecting on it.

And so, the church did what journalists do all the time.

It filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA,

which requires government agencies to provide an initial response within 20 days. That was in

1987. As of this week, the State Department still has not answered the church's request. It's the

oldest outstanding FOIA request, but hardly the only one.

This week, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the Act's implementation, the Watchdog Group National Security Archive,

released a survey of government responsiveness under FOIA. It found that 53 of 57 government agencies have huge backlogs of unfulfilled

FOIA requests. Meredith Fuchs is General Counsel at the National Security Archive, and she joins

us now. Meredith, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me on the show. Is there one federal

agency that's the biggest culprit that's withholding the most material?

Well, the type of requests vary significantly by agency. And so what we've seen typically

is the oldest requests are at the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Department of State,

the ones that do have harder requests to process because they often

might have classified information in them. By and large, of the requests that are being sat on,

can the government make a good claim that they cannot dare divulge the information that's being

requested? I don't think that's the case. While there are some that have sensitive information in them, there's also situations where

agencies simply are not handling these requests.

For example, my organization alone has gotten 40-some-odd letters from the Treasury Department

...