When DOJ announced last week that Bobak Talebian had been appointed Director of the Office of Information Policy, succeeding Melanie Pustay after a dozen years at the helm, the National Security Archive took the opportunity to criticize Ms. Pustay’s leadership:

Under Pustay, OIP regularly published misleading FOIA statistics and provided an incomplete view of FOIA processing to both Congress and the public. In a prime example, the office’s annual summary of agencies’ FOIA reports regularly touted FOIA release rates of well over 90 percent across the government, a laughable claim. OIP arrived at this figure by excluding FOIA requests agencies denied by: overcharging fees (pricing requesters out); referrals (passing the request off to another agency while the requester still waits);  issuing a “no records” response (very frequently the result of inadequate searches); and requests deemed “improper for other reasons” (which ostensibly includes the increasingly-common “can neither confirm nor deny” Glomar exemption). A more accurate release rate calculated by the National Security Archive and others hovers between 50 and 60 percent.

See Lauren Harper, Border Agency Gets OK to Hide Previously Public Info from FOIA, and Much More, Feb. 6, 2020.

NSA’s criticism misses the mark. OIP’s annual summaries spell out exactly how agencies have processed their FOIA requests. In a section entitled “Disposition of Requests,” OIP reports the percentage of agency responses that fall within twelve categories: full grant; partial grant; full denial via exemption; no records; records referred; request withdrawn; fee-related closures; not reasonable described; improper request; not an agency record; duplicate request; and others. For fiscal years 2011 through 2018, for example, OIP indicated that agencies had released records, either in full or in part, at rates between 58.7 and 65.8 percent of all requests submitted—a range that is only slightly higher than NSA’s.

It is true that OIP reports a much higher “Release Rate,” which OIP calculates by comparing the number of requests denied in full pursuant to an exemption with the number of requests in which records were released in full or in part. The value of this statistic is debatable, to be sure. But OIP is upfront about what that rate represents; it is as illustrated by a pie chart that takes up nearly an entire page—and there is no fine print.