The SEC-ret of their success?

Last summer, we happened to be looking for some agency success stories about FOIA request backlog reduction, and we thought we’d found one at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

DHS accounts for nearly all backlog reductions in 2009. That’s right, DHS

FOIA followers have read that the aggregate government-wide FOIA backlog is down from about 157,000 to about 102,000 requests, a reduction of about 35 percent. (We’ll use round numbers for ease of reading.) This statistic shows broad improvements.

This must be a general trend of agencies getting the message and doing a better job, right? Wrong.

The Department of Homeland Security accounts for all of the backlog reductions.