The Obama administration last year improperly denied one out of every three Freedom of Information Act requests that it rejected, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Associated Press.
The moves to deny the release of records were eventually overturned when challenged, but the initially wrong-headed censorship rate was the highest it has been in five years.
The top Senate Democrat who oversees judicial issues, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) reiterated his calls to pass FOIA reform in the wake of the report.
“As the data indicates, some agencies are better than others in making and keeping FOIA compliance a priority, but the standard should always be one of openness,” the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member told The Sentinel. “The bipartisan FOIA Improvement Act would enshrine into law a presumption of openness for all agencies and future administrations to follow.”
The FOIA Improvement Act–a piece of legislation co-sponsored by Leahy’s counterpart, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa) and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas)–passed the Senate by unanimous consent late last year, but was not taken up by the House.
“I would think that members of the House Republican leadership, who have spent so much time on oversight of the Obama administration, would support the goal of making government more accountable and transparent,” Leahy said at the time.
The administration’s reluctance to release information upon first request highlights how the White House has struggled to live up to its stated desire of being “the most transparent administration in history,” and how it has used administrative maneuvers to delay the timely release of information—critical in the context of news-reporting.
The AP noted that the majority of federal agencies “took longer to answer requests last year” than in 2013, and that journalists “and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever.”
The administration, it also said, routinely denies requests for expedition that can, by law, be granted to journalists seeking to inform the public. Since President Obama took office in 2009, the rate of expedition requests granted by federal agencies has fallen to about 12.5 percent, from 50 percent. The CIA has over the past two years declined every request for speedy processing.
“What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years,” AP chief executive Gary Pruitt said this week. “The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.”
The AP found that the number of requests that were unanswered “grew remarkably” to more than 200,000—a year-over-year increase of 55 percent. Accompanying this bottleneck was an increase in the number of filings that doesn’t account for the inaction: in 2014, Americans lodged 714,231 FOIA requests—up about 10,000, or only 1.3 percent, from the year before.
In fiscal year 2013–a time frame that saw former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclose details about vast US spying programs–requests ballooned by 8 percent.
It was the biggest annual increase since fiscal year 2011—12 months that took place right after Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, and raw reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That year, the volume of FOIA filings shot up by 7.8 percent.
Despite the long-term increase in the use of the transparency-promoting legislation by journalists and private citizens, the Obama administration last year presided over a 9 percent decline in the number of full-time FOIA officers–a drop that left Executive Branch with its smallest aggregate FOIA staff in half a decade.
The US government also spent less overall in 2014 on its FOIA functionaries–$434 million, down from just less than $447 million in fiscal year 2013. It did, however, spend more on lawyers fees for knock-down drag-outs designed to keep information in the dark. All FOIA litigation cost the government $28 million in 2014–up from $27.2 million the year before.
The White House seems to think that it is living up to its hype—that the President has made good on his campaign promises about transparency, as he claimed in February 2013, despite his decision to pursue whistleblowers with Espionage Act charges at historical levels. The administration said that it released records in 2014 in response to 91 percent of FOIA requests, a number that includes requests deemed “improper” by the government, cases when the government couldn’t locate records, and when those making requests refuse to pay. By the White House’s own calculations, however, the AP noted that 2014 was “still a record low” in terms of release rate.
The AP, however, found that almost four out of every 10 requests–39 percent of them–resulted in releases of information that was either fully or partially redacted by the government.
“It more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them,” the wire service’s report stated.
Read the full AP report here.
Update: a previous version of this story did not contain a quote from Sen. Leahy and information about the FOIA Improvement Act. The language in the story was also changed to stress that the administration has not denied one in three FOIA requests, but that it has improperly denied requests in one out of every three initial rejections.
