The FBI tells Congress that it's so swamped with Freedom of Information Act requests that it simply can't keep up. Called before Congress in 1990 to explain increasing delays, Emil Moschella, former head of the bureau's FOIA unit, produced brightly colored charts to back up that excuse.

But FBI figures recently obtained in the course of a lawsuit against the bureau tell another story. For example, while one of Moschella's charts dramatically showed that the FBI has been "closing" a larger number of requests each year since 1985, he gave no hint of a corollary trend: the bureau is closing more and more requests for administrative reasons -- on grounds that the requests are flawed or the records requested aren't available, for example -- without processing and releasing a single page of documents. The FBI closed 78 percent of its 1990 requests in this way.

The internal documents and figures obtained in the suit also show that while the number of new requests sent to the FBI each year has steadily and predictably increased, the bureau just as steadily has dumped the overload into a swelling backlog, which, in turn, is handled by a steadily shrinking staff. Perennial underfunding of the FOIA office, not some avalanche of new requests, accounts for longer and longer delays -- more than ten years in extreme cases. The FBI acknowledges in sworn interrogatories that between 1978 and 1988 -- a period in which funding for the FBI as a whole nearly tripled, to $ 1.4 billion -- the bureau requested "no additional budget funds for FOIA compliance."

Writers also testified at the 1990 Freedom of Information Act hearing. Among them was David Garrow, the City College of New York political science professor whose Pulitzer-Prize-winning book about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Bearing the Cross, was based in part on FBI documents. He told Congress that the FBI's long delays "will inflict serious if not fatal injury" on research and writing.

HOW THE FBI HANDLES FOIA REQUESTS

YEAR   FOIA UNIT | FOIA |NEW     |BACK-   |AVERAGE |TOTAL   |CLOSED BY |CLOSED

      FUNDING   | UNIT |REQUESTS|LOGGED  |RESPONSE|REQUESTS|PROCESSING|WITHOUT

      (MILLIONS)| STAFF|        |REQUESTS|TIME    |CLOSED  |RECORDS   |PROCESSING RECORDS
                    |      |        |        |(DAYS)  |        |          |

1982 $ 8.2 224 N/A 5,021 180 12,804 4,574 8,230

1983 7.8 216 11,738 5,380 200 11,504 4,102 7,402

1984 7.8 210 12,092 4,495 227 11,954 4,382 7,572

1985 8.4 204 11,361 5,116 222 10,854 4,149 6,705

1986 8.3 203 12,982 6,547 232 11,761 4,168 7,593

1987 8.6 198 13,676 7,917 250 12,535 4,134 8,401

1988 9.1 205 16,496 9,619 288 14,795 4,135 10,660

1989 9.6 191 15,593 9,313 326 16,733 4,450 12,283

1990 9.1 193 N/A 9,002 340 18,981 4,084 14,897

New Requests figures are from a graph submitted by the FBI to the House

Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights on March 1, 1990, and are listed by fiscal year. All other figures in the above chart were provided by the FBI to reporter Seth Rosenfeld under discovery in his Freedom of Information Act suit, including FOIA Unit Funding figures, which are listed by fiscal year. All other figures are listed by calendar year. (The FBI declined to comment on the statistics).

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