The House Oversight Committee is holding hearings this week to discuss the backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests and the use of redactions in response such filings—both practices have burgeoned, respectively, in size and frequency under an Obama administration that has failed to live up to its promises to be the most transparent administration ever.
But if you ask White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest about it, the tables should be turned on the committee.
In response to a question during a daily press briefing on Tuesday, Earnest said that he is “justifiably proud” of the administration’s record on FOIA and claimed that 647,000 such requests were processed last fiscal year.
“I would note that that is 647,000 more FOIA requests than were processed by the United States Congress,” he remarked. “And those who are interested in advocating for genuine transparency in government should advocate for Congress being subject to those kinds of transparency measures.”
When pressed if the White House is supporting any reforms to FOIA, he asked, in response, if any would “reform the FOIA law in such a way that Congress would be subject to it.”
“They wouldn’t huh? Well, hopefully the transparency advocates who are testifying before Congress today will urge them to do so,” he added.
First signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, FOIA applies only to the executive branch.
While many journalists would probably not turn down the opportunity to stake a legal claim to access lawmakers’ and their staffers’ emails, one of the world’s most prominent journalistic outfits has not been amused by the administration’s response to FOIA requests.
After conducting an investigation, the Associated Press concluded in March that the US government, last year, “more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them.”
One out of three FOIA requests initially denied last year were rejected improperly, the AP found, and the Obama administration fully or partially rejected about 39 percent of the 647,000 FOIA requests trotted out before the press on Tuesday by Earnest—a further 250,581 of the “processed” filings were rejected by the administration, the AP noted, because either they were considered improper, did not lead to responsive records, or those who filed requests wouldn’t pay fees charged for the production of relatively large caches of information.
The AP also noted that the majority of executive branch agencies “took longer to answer requests last year” than it had in 2013, and said that journalists “and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever.”
The rate of expedition requests granted by Obama administration FOIA officers dropped to 12.5 percent last year, from 50 percent in 2009, the AP additionally found, while noting that the Central Intelligence Agency declined every request for fast-track processing in 2014 and 2013.
The Obama administration’s own statistics show that the backlog of requests last year alone increased by about 66 percent to 159,451, from 95,564.
While the House Oversight Committee’s ranking member Elijah Cummings said Tuesday, in his opening statement, that the administration has been less able to deal with the recent increase in requests due to a lack of funding for FOIA officers, one witness said in her remarks that the administration’s approach to FOIA is indicative of a broader disdain for transparency.
“There are no Washington editors here today from any of the big newspapers, and the reason why – because I spoke to them – is that they are concerned about a chilling effect for even speaking out on this,” Leah Goodman, a Newsweek investigative reporter and finance journalist, told the committee. “They are concerned about the consequences of coming here. This, I think, speaks to the seriousness of this matter.”
