Obama Administration Withholds FoIA Requests More Often Than Bush's

bonch writes "Agencies under the Obama administration cite security provisions to withhold information more often than they did under the Bush administration. For example, the 'deliberative process' exemption of the Freedom of Information Act was used 70,779 times in 2009, up from the 47,395 of 2008. Amusingly, the Associated Press has been waiting three months for the government to deliver records on its own Open Government Directive."

Comments

Re:Surprised?

[e2d2]

I've been saying it for a while, the negative mod function does nothing but harm to this site. I have to dig into comments because they might be nuggets of wisdom hidden by mods that down vote it for political or philosophical reasons. I think we'd be well off with just positive modifiers like interesting and insightful.

As for your post, I agree. These numbers have no context which may mean duplicates, trivial in nature, or simply unreasonable. I don't think it's a sign of anything beyond how the institution of government works. I think people see a King in Obama but he's just one man in a huge institution that is hell bent on keeping the status quo. Change will come over 100 years or in the blink of a large explosion. But it will not come in 4 years under one executive. He will make some progress, but it's gonna be a tough row to hoe.

He is failing in many other fronts too

[unity100]

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