The White House on Tuesday morning signaled that it would support legislation passed by Congress to update and modernize how agencies handle Freedom of Information Act requests.
The House approved the FOIA Improvement Act on Monday night. The legislation passed the Senate in March by unanimous consent.
The bill would require federal bodies to default on the side of transparency when processing records requests. It stipulates that if agencies intend to withhold documents, they have to provide specific reasons why release could lead to “foreseeable harm.”
“We look forward to continuing to improve access to government information by signing this bill into law,” the White House said in a statement Tuesday morning.
The administration had been mum in public on its support for the bill, often criticizing Congress for subjecting executive agencies to more disclosure rules while continuing to preclude itself from FOIA oversight.
At one point, behind the scenes, the White House even lobbied against the legislation. A secret six-page Department of Justice memo released in response to a FOIA request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation showed that the administration “strongly opposed passage” of the legislation.
The memo claimed that the reforms would “substantially increase costs and cause delays in FOIA processing.”
Despite the change of heart on the legislation, the administration again took shots at Congress for not playing by the same transparency rules as the executive.
“We continue to believe that extending FOIA to Congress would serve as another important step in increasing government transparency,” the White House statement read.
The FOIA Improvement Act would also make it easier to unearth aging secret documents stored by the government. It prevents agencies from using the “deliberative process” exemption in FOIA for records that are more than 25 years old. The loophole is intended to enable government employees to freely debate matters under consideration.
Another provision of the bill mandates the creation of a government-wide online FOIA portal for individuals to submit records requests across all agencies.
Not included in the bill passed Monday night were controversial carve-outs that would have allowed national security and intelligence agencies to be exempted from certain FOIA requests.
The digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a statement applauding passage of the bill. “EFF remains cautiously optimistic that this new language will lead to greater government openness,” the organization stated.
EFF added, however, that the bill “falls short of fixing some of FOIA’s biggest problems, including agency delay and stonewalling.”
The group called for Congress to provide for technical and financial resources to executive agencies to speed up processing of FOIA requests.
