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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."
Meaningless, it's an AP story. Would you feel better reading it on The Stamford Advocate? Or the San Jose Mercury News?
I'd also like to point out that a knee-jerk accusation of bias sounds and awful lot like . . . bias.
-Peter
Totally agreed. That it is from breitbart is utterly irrelevant. And the raw number is not too interesting unless you know the number of requests, and probably the specific agencies (and topics) the requests were for. Though while, yes, more years will reveal better data, there's nothing wrong with looking at it in-progress.
FTA: Google edition:
The agencies cited exemptions at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Over the same period, the number of information requests declined by about 11 percent, from 493,610 requests in fiscal 2008 to 444,924 in 2009. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request.
So, the number of requests declined 11% and the number of exemptions was much higher.
Awesome.
The original article does have some additional data, for example, in addition to the "deliverative process" exemption going up to 70,779 from 47,395, total exemptions also went up, to 466,872 from 312,683. Most damning, though, seems to be that total requests went DOWN, from 493,610 to 444,924, which means that they cited more exemptions than they actually received information requests (I wonder if that's ever happened before).
The first reaction, especially given the headline is, Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
But, as pointed out in the article: "Obama's directive, memorialized in written instructions from the Justice Department, appears to have been widely ignored."
Then we look into the details. The fiscal year that this article is covering started in October 2008 and ended in October 2009. So for the first quarter of the time period covered by this article, we weren't even in the Obama Administration.
Also, if we assume that the decision to exempt information from FOIA requests is made by senior officers in the respective agencies, and we know that Bush had 8 years to appoint people who shared his views, and that the Senate Republicans have been doing an impressive job of blocking and delaying Obama's appointments, let alone the "cleaning" that occurs once the new bosses are in place.
Should it come as a surprise to anyone that this last year was no better, and perhaps even worse than the previous year? Absolutely not. I would expect that this coming year should show improvement, provided the white house is willing to back up Obama's directive now that they have had time to get more of their appointments into positions of authority.
That said, I sure hope this article makes it to the President's desk and that he thinks long and hard about it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
hehe, he asks which progressive and left-oriented site would write about it, you answer an honest one, but don't provide any....does that mean there are no honest left-oriented sites?
Every time I read a story about how Obama is continuing a Bush administration policy, or extending and exceding it, I post it to http://obamaisthenewbush.tumblr.com/
Having kept this up, on and off, for the last 6 months some patterns definitely appear. The Justice Department is seriously entrenched in covering its ass, cracking down hard on individual freedoms and privacy, and almost always falling on the side of big business.
I'm not disappointed because I believed all the pablum about "Change" and "Hope," but because Obama was a frickin' law professor. He should know better!
Go get more informative numbers from here. In 2008 56% of requests were granted. In 2009 61% of requests were granted. 2009 also worked to clear up the request backlog. It is a move in the right direction and as others have pointed out Bush was still in charge for part of FY 2009, so he might have skewed the numbers for the year.
No that's Bullshit. Democrats have presented a bill that's far to the right of a bill that Republicans would have even proposed, and Republicans are refusing to be a part of it at all. If there was not bi-partisanship than they would have rammed this through Congress and I'd be sitting pretty with socialized medicine right now. The problem is there have been far too many overtures to bi-partisanship.
Republicans don't want bi-partisanship. They want Obama to fail.
Closed door meetings? Stop bringing up bullshit Limbaugh talking points. There are always closed door meetings on capital hill. Are Republicans having public meetings on crafting there competing health care bill? That's a bullshit point.
They denied FOIA requests in their entirety based on exemptions 20,005 times last fiscal year, compared with 21,057 times the previous year.
Oops. So much for the damming evidence. Clearly though, I think we can all agree that we should all be pushing for less denials and more transparent government. If we sit around stirring the shitpot about who's guy is better, then we're doing ourselves no good at all. Well, except for generating a little ad revenue for slashdot and brietbart.
meep
I've done some work with federal agencies and how they process FOIA requests:
A request for information under the FOIA can be granted, partially denied, or denied. If the request is granted, the exact records requested are returned unedited. If the request is denied, one or more reasons (exceptions) must be stated from a list of allowed exemptions. If a request is partially denied, one or more exemptions must be stated and what the requester receives back will either be a subset of what was asked for or will be redacted to remove sensitive information. For example, PIA (personally identifiable information - like SSNs, birth dates, medical records, etc.) is an exemption and is grounds for a partial denial, but it usually only means that this information will be redacted from the requested records.
So if you are looking at statistics (annual FOIA reports are required by law from every government entity and the reports themselves are either published or available via FOIA request themselves), you need to know the total number of new requests, the total number of requests held over from the previous fiscal year, the number of requests granted, the number partially denied, and the number totally denied. There are also individual statistics for denials and partial denials broken down by exemptions. There isn't anything on the annual report about how many exemptions were applied to individual requests - that would just have to be averaged out.
The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it. The other thing that has been encouraged is pre-emptive release. For any request that is granted (no exemptions) there is no reason to not put that record on the agency's public web site to avoid processing any future requests for it. Or if there are certain types of records that can be released and that get requested often, go ahead and publish them. Theoretically this will reduce the number of FOIA requests processed, but I think it's probably too early to see a difference based on this policy.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
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