(Updated 1:20 p.m. CT 12/5)
Only four agencies involved in national security have updated their Freedom of Information Act policies since the White House issued a directive for more aggressive compliance in 2009, according to data released yesterday from the latest FOIA audit by the National Security Archive.
Nine others, including State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security, haven’t updated their regulations since major FOIA-related legislation in 2007 — or, in some cases, 2002 or 1996.
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.”
This year’s Knight Open Government Survey by the archive found that 62 of 99 agencies have not updated since the attorney general issued a memo to agency heads following up on the president’s order. In its previous audit, 49 of 90 agencies surveyed had made at least some progress in meeting the administration’s requests.
Defense, Homeland Security and National Intelligence were listed in the previous audit as having had taken at least one step to comply with the White House; OTB asked the National Security Archive to clarify why they are now listed as not having changed their policies. ” ‘Updated regulations’ means entered new regulations into the Federal Register,” Nate Jones said via e-mail. A a positive rating in an earlier audit could be earned without necessarily updating the regulations, he said.
Jones said DOD has told him its regulations are completed but “some kind of oversight” kept them from being published in the register. “They say they will soon,” Jones said.
“Outdated agency regulations really mean there’s an opportunity here for a second-term Obama to standardize best practices and bring all the agencies up to his day-one openness pledge,” Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said in a release about the 2012 audit findings.
The archive contends, “The primary cause of this FOIA failure has been the inability of Congress and the White House to find a way to compel recalcitrant agencies to comply with FOIA.”
