Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media
The Court ruled that businesses' commercial information counts as 'confidential' and can be withheld from public records requests as long as the business treats it as private and the government promised to keep it secret — no separate showing of competitive harm is required.
The decision throws out a decades-old test that nearly every federal appeals court had used, meaning companies that share sensitive sales data with the government, like retailers in the food-stamp program, can more easily keep that data out of public view.
“At least where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy, the information is “confidential” within the meaning of Exemption 4.”
The Court's core holding on what makes business information 'confidential' under FOIA.
How it got here: A federal trial court ordered disclosure after a bench trial; the Eighth Circuit affirmed; the retailers' trade group asked the Supreme Court to review the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A South Dakota newspaper asked the Department of Agriculture for store-by-store data on how much each retailer redeems through the federal food-stamp program (SNAP). The Agriculture Department released store names but withheld the sales figures, citing a Freedom of Information Act exemption for confidential business information. A trade group representing grocery retailers intervened to keep the data secret after the government declined to appeal a ruling favoring disclosure.
The question before the Court
Can businesses that give sales data to the government keep it secret under the Freedom of Information Act just by showing they treat it as private, without proving disclosure would cause them serious competitive harm?
Why it matters
Businesses that share data with the government — grocery stores, contractors, manufacturers — will find it easier to keep that information confidential, since they no longer need to prove disclosure would substantially hurt them competitively. Journalists, watchdog groups, and researchers who rely on FOIA requests for such data may find agencies withholding more of it going forward.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts, but under the Court's ruling the store-level SNAP data likely remains confidential and shielded from disclosure since the retailers met both conditions the Court identified. This is a final merits ruling that changes how FOIA's Exemption 4 will be applied nationwide, replacing the widely used harm-based test that most circuits had followed for decades.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether some additional showing of harm might still be required in other cases, since it found both of its own conditions clearly met here. It also left open whether information could be confidential even without a government promise of secrecy.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice Breyer
“I would clarify that a private harm need not be “substantial” so long as it is genuine.”Breyer's proposed middle-ground rule requiring some, but not substantial, harm.
Justice Breyer agreed the 'substantial competitive harm' requirement went too far, but argued the majority went too far in the other direction by requiring no harm showing at all. He would have required businesses to show that disclosure would cause some genuine, though not necessarily substantial, harm to their economic or business interests, and would have remanded for that determination.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court read the undefined term 'confidential' in the Freedom of Information Act's Exemption 4 according to its ordinary public meaning at the time Congress passed the law in 1966, rather than importing a judge-made test from later case law.
- Dictionaries from that era suggested information is confidential when it is customarily kept private by the person sharing it, and additionally when the recipient promises to keep it secret; the Court held the first condition must be met, since information freely shared isn't confidential.
- Because the record showed retailers never publicly disclose their store-level sales data and the government had long promised to keep such data private to encourage program participation, both conditions were satisfied here.
- The Court rejected a 1974 appeals-court rule requiring proof that disclosure would cause 'substantial competitive harm,' finding that rule was invented by resorting to unreliable legislative history instead of the statute's actual text and structure.
- The Court also rejected arguments that Congress had implicitly approved the harm requirement by using similar language in later statutes, since Congress never re-enacted Exemption 4 itself, and rejected using policy preferences for narrow exemptions to add requirements not found in the statute's words.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Abrogates National Parks & Conservation Assn. v. Morton (498 F. 2d 765)
Rejects the decades-old rule requiring proof of substantial competitive harm before information could be withheld as confidential.