Will the Supreme Court help hide where food stamp money goes?

With so much of government already shrouded in secrecy — consider the redacted Mueller report released last week — it bears remembering that the ultimate boss in a democracy is the public.

President Abraham Lincoln spoke of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." And, within reasonable limits, the people have every right to know how government spends their hard-earned tax dollars.

That's true whether it's more than $25 million on the Mueller investigation or  $70 billion each year on the nation's food stamp program, which is at the core of a crucial freedom-of-information dispute to be argued Monday before the Supreme Court.

At stake is whether the high court will water down part of the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, the 1967 law pivotal to your right to know. 

The case began with a FOIA request in 2011 by a reporter for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, seeking U.S. Department of Agriculture reimbursements to individual stores that sell food under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.

FOOD MARKETING INSTITUTE:FOIA wasn't meant for private parties

The Argus Leader —  part of the USA TODAY Network  — was looking into potential SNAP-related fraud.

USDA rejected the request, citing one of several FOIA exemptions. In this case, it was the release of financial information that would likely cause substantial competitive harm to a private business.

That argument fell apart during a 2016 nonjury trial, when a judge failed to be convinced that merely releasing SNAP-related sales data would cause competitive harm to the individual stores. It didn't help USDA's case that before trial, the agency surveyed all 321,988 SNAP retailers, and only a few hundred were opposed to releasing the food stamp sales numbers.  

USDA conceded defeat. But a trade and lobbying group, the Food Marketing Institute — sensing a sympathetic, pro-business majority on the Supreme Court — intervened and appealed. The institute hopes a majority of justices will diminish or even reject the "substantial competitive harm" standard that has been used in FOIA cases for decades.

Weakening FOIA with a wide exemption for “confidential” data would be a loss for the public. A decade after the act became law, the Supreme Court defined the objective of FOIA as ensuring "an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed."

The government doesn't need more ways to withhold information from taxpayers who deserve accountability and transparency.

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