It’s Time To Overhaul FOIA
By Curtis Schube & Gary Lawkowski, RealClearPolitics, Oct. 16, 2023
When it comes to the federal government and responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, it is so commonplace for federal agencies to drag their feet and not provide fully responsive documentation that it is not even newsworthy when those agencies do not comply with the law.
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To this effect, we have identified a series of reforms that attempt to change agency incentives at the individual level, reduce backlogs for the most frequently requested records, and impose uniformity where there is arbitrary decision-making.
One such mechanism is a dramatic expansion of proactive disclosure obligations to include the administrative record (which provides the rationale for government decisions), senior officials’ calendars and external communications (which shows outside influences on their actions), ethics records (which show potential conflicts of interest), and settlement agreements (which show the details of settlements between government and public interest groups). All of these records are vital to transparency and are a source of burden for the agencies (both in the search and production phases, as well as in the often unavoidable litigation phase). To be successful, agency compliance must be automatic and not subject to record custodians’ whims or bureaucrats’ prioritization with other incoming requests or duties.
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