This July 4th marked the 40th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Open government advocates marked the occasion by releasing two reports that simultaneously underscored the importance of FOIA 40 years later and the need for improved agency procedures. Forty years ago FOIA established the public's right to access government information, however, as OpenTheGovernment.org notes, "from its inception the implementation and usability of the Freedom of Information Act have been matters of concern." In response to increasing pressure to relieve agency backlogs and improve FOIA procedures, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13392 on Dec. 14, 2005. The order required, among other things, that agencies develop a plan to improve FOIA procedures, reduce backlogs, and increase public access to highly sought-after government information. In its review of the recently released FOIA improvement plans, OpenTheGovernment.org found that "many of the improvement areas were either not addressed or rated as poorly addressed." The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Management and Budget plans received the worst ratings and, of the 27 identified improvement areas, failed to address 24 and 22, respectively. Generally, reviewed agencies and offices produced reports focused on a narrow set of problems and only explored short-term solutions with little effort to consider larger issues or longer term improvements. The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that although FOIA requests were down in 2005, the backlog of unanswered requests rose from 20 percent of total requests made in 2004 to 31 percent in 2005. In addition to the increase in unanswered requests, requesters had to wait longer for replies. The worst median response time for complex FOIA requests was within the Department of Agriculture which had an average response time of 1,277 working days. The median response time of the Securities and Exchange Commission doubled from the previous year to 410 working days. The increasingly dire state of FOIA procedures and backlogs across government agencies and the inadequacy of improvement plans may inspire Congress to resume consideration of FOIA improvement legislation. In February 2005, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in Our National (OPEN) Government Act of 2005 (S. 394), aimed at strengthening FOIA. "This bipartisan legislation will help to ensure an open and deliberate process in Congress, by providing that any future legislation to establish a new exemption to the federal Freedom of Information Act must be stated explicitly within the text of the bill," Cornyn stated at the time the legislation was introduced. Then in March 2005, another bill sponsored by Cornyn and Leahy, the Faster FOIA Act of 2005, was reported favorably out of committee that would appoint a commission to study backlog problems and possible improvements of agency procedures. These new reports may provide ammunition to critics of Bush's FOIA executive order, many of whom believe it to be window dressing to a serious problem that may have killed momentum for the Cornyn-Leahy legislation. Critics have also argued that the executive order cannot significantly improve FOIA, because no new resources were given to the agencies to help them speed up FOIA processing. The two reports appear to validate the critics' contention that, without additional resources, attempts to make government more transparent will be next to impossible.