House panel’s pointed letter to Justice sends impatient message on #FOIA

In a renewed and welcome spirit of bipartisanship, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this week sent a letter to the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) asking pointed questions about OIP’s actions to encourage agencies to comply with FOIA by reducing backlogs, reigning in the use of statutory exemptions and updating FOIA regulations.  We’re especially appreciative that Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) mentioned a database of the statutory exemptions to FOIA that we compiled and ProPublica published a while ago.

This is a great time for FOIA because so much has evolved since Congress enacted the 2007 FOIA amendments (pdf) five years ago. FOIA Online is now a realistic option for agencies to go digital with their FOIA operations while realizing huge savings for the federal government, an important aspect to getting any legislation through Congress.

Congress could mandate that agencies move to FOIA Online as their current contracts for FOIA processing expire, invest the savings from the move to a shared service to improving FOIA.  Improvements could include developing further the FOIA Online system, targeting efforts to improve FOIA processing and reduce backlogs and delays, and quickly convening a FOIA Delays Commission to compile and identify other areas for improvements.

There are many problems with FOIA administration today and many areas for improvement.  Some require executive branch action while others would require legislation.  Any legislative actions around FOIA will have attract the support of Senate and House leaders, a growing number of whom want to see the Freedom of Information Act inform the American public while protecting what deserves protection and serve as a dependable tool for obtaining from government vital information in a timely, efficient and impartial manner.

RCFP’s Dalglish testifies for SGI about DOL “lock-ups”

A House panel this morning encouraged the Labor Department to abandon its announced changes to the way it releases unemployment data and other market-moving statistics.  Media groups protested almost immediately when the Labor Department announced on April 10th that it would force media groups to rip out equipment from the labor Department’s press room and require reporters to draft stories on government computers as part of wholesale changes intended to prevent early leaks of jobless claims and other economically significant information.

Issa Offers Transparency Reform Package

On Monday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced H.R. 2146, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 (DATA Act; text), in an effort to make federal spending information easier to collect and track, so people can evaluate and compare federal expenditures. The legislation is designed to build on previous legislative efforts and technological advances, while establishing an independent board to monitor federal spending.

“Incompatible technologies, inaccurate data, and a lack of common standards impede transparency,” Issa explained in a press release. “The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act will revolutionize the accessibility of government information.”

The DATA Act builds on previous transparency initiatives such as USASpending.gov, a product of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), and Recovery.gov, an offshoot of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. (It also comes the same day the Obama administration issued an executive order pushing very similar efforts.) The DATA Act, if enacted, will:

• consolidate information reported by agencies and recipients on a single electronic platform,
• reduce overlapping reporting systems/websites/databases,
• delegate some federal-spending tracking responsibilities from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to a proposed Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board (“FAST Board”), and
• empower the FAST Board to establish standards for data.

Shortcomings in existing federal data and reporting practices led Issa to introduce these adaptations. For example, the Sunlight Foundation found that USASpending.gov was providing flawed data about federal programs, which prevents people from seeing trends or drawing meaningful conclusions. However, as OMB Watch notes, the DATA Act takes one step forward at the price of threatening to take two steps back when the new law would expire. That’s because House rules of the 112th Congress require new programs to sunset within seven years (unless successfully reenacted into law). And because the DATA Act repeals FFATA instead of merely updating it, after seven years the DATA Act’s sunset would take its FFATA-related provisions with it, leaving us with no DATA Act – and no FFATA either.

We agree that federal spending data could – and should – be gathered and maintained in a more efficient manner. We suspect that improvements in technology can keep up with an ever-increasing volume of data. We hope Congress can create systems for handling this data and acting on it that are more functional than the status quo… but not at the cost of undoing some of the hard-won progress of recent years.