Getting documents from the Department of Defense might get a little easier, thanks to an updated DOD directive (see document below) that declares a “presumption in favor of disclosure” for Freedom of Information Act requests.
The directive says DOD will “respond promptly to all requests in a spirit of cooperation” and will “take affirmative steps” to maximize what’s made available.
You can get a sense of the exact key change in this screen grab of the edited document:
Fierce Government earlier this week parsed out a few more of the changes in the directive.
President Obama in an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.”
The Defense Department fared fairly well in March in a Knight Open Government Survey on the status of agency progress in meeting the Obama administration’s request for FOIA enhancements. DOD had taken two action steps — one of only 13 in 49 agencies studied that achieved two.
In another FOIA development, the “FasterFOIA” bill that’s been up and down in Congress was passed by the Senate on a voice voice earlier this month, and sent to the House, where it had been entangled in the debt ceiling debate, MainJustice.com reported. It notes “even among transparency advocates, the bill has critics who say it amounts to nothing more that Washington’s favorite refrain: Let’s create a commission.”
Below are two documents. The first, the edits DOD made in its FOIA directive. The second, a good background and status report on FOIA released in late July by the Congressional Research Service.
[field name=”foiadoc”]
[field name=”crsstatus”]
