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Under pressure, FOIA ombudsman releases recommendations

Under threat of subpoena from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the federal agency responsible for improving the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) sent to Congress last night a set of recommendationsso mundane that the effort to extract the document from the executive branch calls into question the agency's independence.

Under threat of subpoena from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the federal agency responsible for improving the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) sent to Congress last night a set of recommendationsso mundane that the effort to extract the document from the executive branch calls into question the agency's independence.

The recommendations issued by the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) fail to address many of the most important FOIA issues raised by the Sunshine in Government Initiative (SGI), a coalition of media organizations that promotes open government. ASNE is a founding member of SGI.

"From the outset, OGIS was supposed to speak with an independent voice to identify FOIA's biggest problems and recommend potential effective solutions," said SGI Director Rick Blum. "We're glad that OGIS was able to finally release its recommendations, but we were hoping for more."

OGIS has faced intense political pressure to send the recommendations since a heated March 12 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. During that hearing, Chairman Leahy and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA) expressed bipartisan outrage that the White House Office of Management and Budget had yet to respond to recommendations on improvements in the administration of FOIA that had been submitted by OGIS more than 12 months earlier. (For more on this issue, see "White House inaction stalls FOIA recommendations," in the Nov. 21, 2011 issue of ASNE's email newsletter.)

"OGIS sits between requesters and federal agencies," SGI noted last week, by way of explaining the importance of the FOIA ombudsman's recommendations. "Its unique position would help inform discussions about how best to improve FOIA. ... Congress could use these ideas to focus agency and public attention on the biggest problems of FOIA and examine potential improvements without regard for who must act."

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