The new case on the Supreme Court docket, Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, is focused on FOIA’s Exemption 4, trade secrets and commercial information. The exemption protects “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and that is privileged or confidential.”

Want to know how a federal contractor is making use of your tax dollars? Interested in the activities of a federally regulated financial entity? You’re in Exemption 4 territory.

Our FOIA friends at MuckRock note that the upcoming case could “either cement the public’s right to know or severely restrict the ability to track the flow of tax dollars into private companies.”

The case began in 2011 when the Sioux Falls Argus Leader decided to take a look at where food stamp money is spent. The newspaper filed a FOIA request with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, these days referred to as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Argus Leader asked the USDA for the name, address, store type and annual SNAP sales figures for every participating store from 2005 to 2010.

The public has “a right to know how much taxpayer money grocers, gas stations, big box retailers and others get by participating in the federal food stamp program,” the newspaper has written.

“SNAP is a humongous program,” the newspaper noted in a supporting document filed later in the case. It provides more than 40 million Americans with average monthly food assistance of about $125, a $70 billion annual total. SNAP recipients use an official SNAP debit card for purchases.

The taxpayer stake in SNAP is clear. “Under SNAP,” the Argus Leader noted, “the money flows from the taxpayer to the government to the eligible SNAP households to the SNAP retailers from whom the food is purchased. The crux of the government program is that the government–with taxpayer dollars–buys groceries for low-income families from stores that wish to do business under the program.”

Enter Exemption 4. Responding to the Argus Leader FOIA, the Agriculture Department released names, store type and addresses, but declined to produce the yearly sales figures. The department argued the sales figures were exempt from disclosure because they constituted confidential business information.

The newspaper appealed the decision, the USDA ignored the appeal–typical FOIA behavior from the feds, alas–and the Argus Leader sued.

You can read the sad timeline of the case here. After a district court judge sided with the newspaper’s argument that disclosure of the sales figures would not cause substantial competitive harm to retailers, the USDA threw in the towel, agreeing to disclose the numbers.

That’s when food industry lobbyists stepped in. The Food Marketing Institute filed an emergency motion with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene. An Eighth Circuit panel heard the case and it too ruled in favor of the newspaper.

The wheels of FOIA turn slow. Seven years had passed since the Argus Leader’s original FOIA request. You can see the game here: run out the clock, grind down the requester.

But the lawyers were not done. After failing to get the entire Eighth Circuit to take up the matter, FMI filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, asking it to review the case.

The High Court accepted the case. It’s on the docket for April.

Scotusblog notes that the Supremes are likely looking to “resolve at least five circuit [court] splits over Exemption 4’s “confidentiality” term and whether the “substantial-competitive-harm” claim test is satisfied.

MuckRock warns that if the lower-court decisions “are overturned, lack of access to this data will continue to hold back public spending accountability and nutrition research around the country–and provide corporations a powerful tool to keep public data proprietary in other cases.”

In a disturbing example, the agency approved a 71-year-old American citizen’s visa request for a 17-year-old spouse from Guatemala. In another, the agency granted a 14-year-old U.S. citizen’s petition for a 48-year-old spouse from Jamaica. USCIS also rubber-stamped 149 applications involving a minor with an adult spouse or fiancé over the age of 40. Nearly 5,000 minors in the United States on spousal or fiancé visas received green cards to become lawful permanent residents, federal figures show. “U.S. law and U.S. Department of State policy aim to prevent and reduce the risks of child marriages occurring around the world, yet major loopholes in U.S. law have allowed thousands of minors to be subjected to child marriages,” the senate report states. “Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), a U.S. child may petition for a visa for a spouse or fiancé living in another country, and a U.S. adult may petition for a visa for a minor spouse or fiancé living abroad.”

Two government agencies—USCIS and the State Department—must approve spouse or fiancé visas. The request is initially made to USCIS, which does not require parental or judicial consent for minors. Once the agency approves the application, the State Department usually issues the visa. “The State Department returns or rejects few spousal or fiancé immigrant visa petitions after they are approved by USCIS,” the report states. Senate investigators spoke with a “child marriage victim” who was forced to marry her older cousin during a family vacation to Pakistan. USCIS approved her spousal immigration benefit when she was just 13 years old and throughout the forced marriage, she suffered physical and sexual abuse. “She is just one of the thousands of U.S. women and girls forced into a child marriage involving the U.S. immigration system,” the report says.

Ironically, the U.S. government launched an aggressive global campaign years ago to slash an epidemic of child marriages, rampant in third-world countries. India tops the list for child marriage (15.5 million), according to a global nonprofit committed to ending it and enabling girls to fulfill their potential. Two Latin American countries—Brazil (3 million) and Mexico (1.4 million)—also appear in the top ten. As part of the U.S. campaign to reduce child marriage abroad, Congress passed a measure in 2013 requiring the secretary of state to establish and implement a multiyear strategy to “prevent child marriages” and “to promote the empowerment of girls at risk of child marriage in developing countries.” A few years later the State Department launched a Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls to, among other things, “reduce the risk of child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM).” In its lengthy strategy handbook, the agency revealed that there are nearly 700 million women alive today who were married as children and 15 million more are married each year. The State Department also writes that “forced marriage is a human rights abuse and, in the case of minors, a form of child abuse.” It also creates gender inequality, contributes to economic hardship and leads to “under-investment in girls’ educational and healthcare needs.” Why would the same agency approve thousands of visas for children—mostly girls—to enter forced marriages in the U.S.?