The federal bureaucracy is failing to abide by President Barack Obama’s inaugural decree that agencies “usher in a new era of open government,” according to a Monday survey by the National Security Archive.

Honoring the kickoff of Sunshine Week, the private archive located at George Washington University concluded Monday that about half of the 90 affected federal agencies “actually made concrete changes in their FOIA procedures” as ordered.

What’s more, there were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies — 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

“The administration refused to release any sought-after materials in more than 1-in-3 information requests, including cases when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law,” the AP found. “It refused more often to quickly consider information requests about subjects described as urgent or especially newsworthy. And nearly half the agencies that AP examined took longer — weeks more, in some cases — to give out records last year than during the previous year.”

The Obama administration, nonetheless, lauded itself Monday over the topic.

“Most relevant for us on the FOIA front is transparency. The value of transparency comes from the belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the recognition that we had better do our best, and act in a way that would make the public proud if they saw everything we did,” said Tom Perrilli, an associate attorney general.

Perrilli said the Justice Department released full FOIA records 42 percent of the time last year, up from 36 percent in 2008.

The National Security Archive’s survey found that Obama’s presidential decree also speaks louder than the government’s overall FOIA actions.

The archive sent FOIA requests to the 90 agencies that have a FOIA officer in a bid to obtain the updates to their FOIA policies. Written policy upgrades were mandated in a White House memo (.pdf) last year by former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

The report, however, noted that 17 agencies were still preparing to respond to the FOIA request after four months, despite the law requiring a 20-day response, the archive said. What’s more, four agencies did not acknowledge the FOIA request.

And the Postal Service said it had “no responsive records,” according to the report.

“Perhaps the Postal Service lost that memo in the mail,” Nate Jones, the archive’s FOIA coordinator, said in a blog post.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, wondered whether “FOIA processing” is the right metric of focus.

“The ability to engage on matters of controversy, that’s really what we’re interested in when we ask for transparency. We’re not asking for piles of paper,” said Aftergood, who files dozens of FOIA requests annually.

Still, he has noticed “improvements in FOIA processing” under the Obama administration. And he said the administration is responsible for some “epochal” disclosures.

“For the first time last year we were given an unclassified description of the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal,” he said. “That is something we have not seen for over a half of a century. We have been banging on the door for 20 years or longer for that.”

And last month, the government disclosed, for the first time, its intelligence budget request — $55 billion for next year.

“I sued the CIA in 1999 asking for total intelligence budget request. They fought back and I lost the lawsuit. The court agreed that this would damage national security,” Aftergood said. “Within the world of secrecy, these are epochal changes. They are entirely to the administration’s credit.”

Jennifer Lynch, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney specializing in FOIA, noted that the Supreme Court in the past month has “issued two important decisions limiting the federal government’s ability to withhold information.”

One case included the release of Navy maps of ammunition storage, the other denying AT&T “personal privacy” that would preclude disclosure of AT&T law enforcement records connected to the graft-ridden E-Rate program.

But Lynch noted that the public-records request process is “slow and frustrating.”

“FOIA departments of federal agencies are underfunded, understaffed, overworked and sometimes don’t try as hard as they should or could to find and release all records responsive to a FOIA request,” she wrote in a blog post Monday. “This means we often have to resort to litigation to get the documents we’re entitled to under FOIA, which is itself a slow and costly process, and one that’s not easily available to the average FOIA requester.”

Photo: Jong Soo (Peter) Lee/Flickr

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