RSSObama Makes Slight Progress in FOIA Openness, Report Finds
Mar 21
To coincide with national Freedom of Information Day and Sunshine Week, the non-profit open information organization OMB Watch released its analysis of 2010 annual FOIA reports from 25 federal government agencies. The report painted a picture of improving FOIA responsiveness, saying that the Obama administration is slowly rebuilding a culture of government openness in the wake of a Bush administration era of secrecy.
The report found that pending FOIA requests dropped slightly from two years ago, and the percentage of requests granted grew slightly. The use of exemptions to reject FOIA requests also went down. Nonetheless, the percentage of granted requests remains below a peak reached in 1998.
Obama has worked with the Justice Department to encourage the reduction of backlogged requests. The number of requests awaiting response grew markedly between the 1998 and 2006 fiscal years, and then saw sharp declines between 2008 and 2009. The dramatic drop was not repeated this past fiscal year, but continued a steady decline.
On average, Obama’s administration invoked Exemptions 2 and 5 – the most subjective exemptions – less frequently than in 2009, but still more than during Bush and Clinton’s terms. The Supreme Court recently narrowed the scope of exemption 2.
Another statistic: The Obama administration granted 95% of requests in 2010, which compares favorably to Bush’s 93% and Clinton’s 89%. Obama’s agencies, however, partially granted more requests than their predecessors. This begs the less quantifiable question of how the level of useful released information compares to previous years.
The results of the analysis are good news, but illustrate that the federal government still has a lot of room for improvement in its FOIA effectiveness, OMB Watch’s executive director Gary Bass told the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Obama’s emphasis on more active stewardship of FOIA began on his first day in office, when he promised to, “usher in a new era of open government.” The administration honored this year’s Sunshine Week by unveiling a new website, FOIA.gov, which includes data comparing the administration’s progress on key metrics to previous years.
Sunshine Week has prompted a number of analyses of the government’s progress on responsiveness to FOIA requests, including some with more negative outlooks. The Associated Press, which examined 35 agencies, concluded that the government “took action on fewer requests for federal records from citizens, journalists, companies and others last year even as significantly more people asked for information.”
The 2011 Knight Open Government Survey found that Obama is halfway towards his goal towards more open government. The report found that around half of the government’s 90 agencies have complied with the president’s mandate to make concrete changes to improve their FOIA processes, up from 13 agencies the year before.
