Obama Cabinet Flunks Disclosure Test with 19 in 20 Ignoring Law
Friday, September 28, 2012
Obama Cabinet Flunks Disclosure Test With 19 in 20
Ignoring Law
Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- On his first full day in office,
President Barack Obama ordered federal officials to "usher in a new
era of open government" and "act promptly" to make information
public.
As Obama nears the end of his term, his administration hasn't
met those goals, failing to follow the requirements of the Freedom
of Information Act, according to an analysis of open-government requests
filed by Bloomberg
News.
Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law
requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel
by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met
Bloomberg's request for those documents within the 20-day window
required by the Act.
"When it comes to implementation of Obama's wonderful
transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular,
there has been far more 'talk the talk' rather than 'walk the
walk,'" said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of
Justice's office monitoring the government's compliance with FOIA
requests from 1981 to 2007.
The Bloomberg survey was designed in part to gauge the
timeliness of responses, which Attorney General Eric Holder called
"an essential component of transparency" in a March 2009 memo.
About half of the 57 agencies eventually disclosed the out-of-town
travel expenses generated by their top official by Sept. 14, most
of them well past the legal deadline.
Public Interest
Bloomberg reporters in June filed FOIA requests for fiscal year
2011 taxpayer-supported travel for Cabinet secretaries and top
officials of major departments. Justice Department official Melanie
Ann Pustay said in an interview that disclosure of those records is
in the public interest.
Even agency heads who publicly announce their events --
including Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius -- didn't provide the
costs of their out-of-town trips more than three months after the
initial request.
"It's ironic that the demands in the presidential campaign for
Mitt Romney's tax returns are unrelenting, but when it comes time
to release the schedules for senior appointees there's the same
denial of access," said Paul Light, a New York University professor
who studies the federal bureaucracy.
"Over the past four years, federal agencies have gone to great
efforts to make government more transparent and more accessible
than ever, to provide people with information that they can use in
their daily lives," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz, who
noted that Obama received an award for his commitment to open
government. The March 2011 presentation of that award was closed to
the press.
2013 Delivery
The travel costs generated by some other Obama officials
--Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Energy Secretary Steven Chu,
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and
Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano -- also remain
undisclosed.
A request made in June for the travel records of Susan Rice, the
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will remain unfulfilled for
more than a year, according to a federal official involved in the
case.
"We really appreciate your patience in this matter. The
estimated completion date is July 2013," wrote Chris Barnes, a
State Department FOIA official, in a Sept. 24 e-mail. Under FOIA,
the department is required to offer a timetable for delayed
responses.
GSA Scandal
Government travel costs have received greater scrutiny since a
report by the General Services Administration's inspector general
on April 2 revealed that a 2010 Las Vegas junket -- featuring a
mind reader and a clown -- cost taxpayers more than $823,000. Since
then, GSA Administrator Martha Johnson has resigned and the IG has
referred the matter to the Department of Justice.
Records obtained as a result of another Bloomberg FOIA request
showed that the GSA almost tripled its expenditures for conferences
from 2005 to 2010. Taxpayers paid $27.8 million for more than 200
overnight gatherings attended by at least 50 GSA employees over the
five-year period, according to the records.
Under Obama, federal agencies also have stepped up the use of
exemptions to block the release of information.
During the first year of the administration, cabinet agencies
employed exemptions 466,402 times, a 50 percent jump from the last
year of the presidency of George W. Bush. While exemption citations
have since been reduced by 21 percent from that high, they still
are above the level seen during the Bush administration, according
to Justice Department data.
DHS Exemptions
The majority of the exemptions came from the Department of
Homeland Security, which gets the most requests, records show.
The greater number of documents released online helps explain
the increased use of exemptions, according to Tracy Russo, a
spokeswoman for the Justice Department. "The pool of requests that
are made tend to be more complex," she said.
Open government advocates note that Obama's transparency pledge
is undermined by a federal bureaucracy that often cites staff
shortages and compliance costs to delay the release of
information.
"I don't think the administration has been very good at all on
open-government issues," said Katherine Meyer, a Washington
attorney who has been filing open records requests since the late
1970s. "The Obama administration is as bad as any of them, and to
some extent worse."
Fee Fight
In one case Meyer pursued, the Center for Auto Safety was told
by Treasury FOIA officials that its request for records relating to
the U.S. auto bailout would cost $38,000. Meyer successfully argued
the fees should be waived because the request was in the public
interest.
The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, is designed to open up the process of
government to citizens. Individuals have the right to file
requests, and the law mandates that the department answer the query
within 20 working days, ask for a 10-day extension, or offer a
timetable for the release of the information.
In the past, FOIA has been used to obtain a wide range of
government records. Among them: Documents on the use of the
defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War; Department of
Transportation reports detailing safety issues with the Ford
Pinto's fuel tank that contributed to some 500 deaths; and details
of the Bush administration's deliberations on the use of torture
following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
'Smoking Gun'
"It's the smoking gun that often holds government accountable
for its misdeeds," said Kevin Goldberg, a First Amendment attorney
at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth Plc in Arlington, Virginia, who
also serves as legal counsel for the American Society of News
Editors.
Miriam Nisbet, the head of the Office of Government Information
Services, which acts as a FOIA ombudsman, said Obama deserves
praise for highlighting government accountability.
"We see a great deal of emphasis and attention paid to
transparency," she said. "That is a really important message."
Nisbet's office offered travel documents three days after
acknowledging the FOIA request.
The Bloomberg FOIA filing also asked each department to identify
trips, lodging and meals provided by non-federal sources. All told,
30 of the 57 agencies contacted replied with those travel records
by Sept. 14.
SBA Response
Of the 20 Cabinet-level agencies contacted by Bloomberg News,
only the Small Business Administration met the legal 20- day
deadline by disclosing that Administrator Karen Mills took 27 trips
out of Washington at a total cost to the U.S. taxpayer of
$15,856.
The records of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, Labor
Hilda Solis, former Secretary of Commerce and Acting Secretary Gary
Locke and Rebecca Blank, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and
Jacob Lew, the former director of the Office and Management and
Budget who is now White House Chief of Staff, were released to
Bloomberg News under the request, though those agencies did not
meet the 20-day deadline.
Kirk, "who travels all over the world" for his duties according
to the USTR website, took 23 business trips in fiscal 2011, 17 of
which involved domestic travel, for a cost of about $45,000. Kirk
"has said many times that increased outreach to the American
people" is important for economic growth, USTR spokeswoman Carol
Guthrie said in an e-mail.
No Excuse
Eric Newton, senior adviser at the Knight Foundation, a
Miami-based group that promotes citizen engagement, said agencies
have no excuse not to rapidly disclose travel costs.
"In a 24/7 world, it should take two days, it should take two
hours," Newton said. "If it's public, it should be just there."
The Department of Justice, which is charged with monitoring how
all federal agencies respond to FOIA requests, has yet to release
the travel details of top officials at three of its affiliated
agencies: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,
the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Pustay, head of the Justice Department's Office of Information
Policy, said that taxpayer-supported travel records are "certainly
something that people would ask for and something that's of
interest to the public." She said "the crush of work" makes swift
replies difficult.
Redacted Information
None of the nine exemptions under the FOIA -- which protect
national security, personal information or corporate trade secrets,
for example -- allow taxpayer-supported travel expenses to remain
hidden from view.
Those records may include information, such as private
mobile-phone numbers or information related to security, that is
exempted from disclosure, which could be causing the delays, Pustay
said.
Responsive agencies were able to redact personal details within
the FOIA time period. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the chief
regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, provided the travel
expense records for Acting Director Edward DeMarco's six trips out
of town within 15 days of the filing.
DeMarco's trips cost $5,653.29, the documents show. Personal
information such as his Social Security number and home address
were blacked-out in the file.
The process for accessing information that hasn't been already
released remains confusing, time-consuming and at times
antagonistic, said Thomas Blanton, director of the National
Security Archive, a Washington-based open-information
repository.
'Obfuscation' Culture
"There is a culture of obfuscation among agency Freedom of
Information officials," he said. "Bureaucrats are able to deter a
lot of citizen engagement."
Travel records were largely shielded from public view until
Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act on July 4, 1966.
Congress adopted post-Watergate reforms in 1974, giving agencies a
deadline to comply with requests and narrowing exemptions for law
enforcement and national security agencies. The FOIA law was
updated another four times through 2007, when the Office of
Government Information Services was established as the federal
ombudsman.
The White House says it has released more than 2.5 million
records since Obama took office. Recovery.gov allows citizens to
track stimulus spending by state. The administration also has for
the first time posted the names of White House visitors, though not
a full list of who has attended meetings.
Backlogged Files
Other records now disclosed include the number of weapons in the
nation's nuclear arsenal, report cards for veterans' hospitals, and
employer-specific workplace safety records kept by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.
The total number of FOIA requests increased, with 631,424
processed last year, compared with 600,849 in 2010.
The government's website dedicated to monitoring its response to
filings, FOIA.gov, shows the number of backlogged requests grew 20
percent to 83,490 filings from 2010 to 2011.
The Justice Department reported in 2008 that there were 3,691
full-time FOIA personnel across all departments and agencies. In
2011, the figure increased by 19 percent to 4,400, according to the
department. Some agencies outsource FOIA- related tasks, including
the redaction process. The government has spent at least $86.2
million on contracts described as pertaining to FOIA since 2009,
according to federal procurement data compiled by Bloomberg.
The administration acknowledged systemic issues with the FOIA
process when the Office of Management and Budget issued guidelines
Aug. 24 to all federal agencies on how to streamline government
information. The memo called for all government information to be
stored in an electronic format by December 2019 -- almost three
years after the end of a potential second Obama term.
Stephen Hess, a presidential historian at the Washington- based
Brookings Institution, called the survey results a "grim"
assessment of Obama's transparency record. He said the president --
like many of the men who have occupied the Oval Office -- has
discovered how difficult it is to bend the government's
bureaucracies to his will.
"The sad part is it won't be any better for the next folks
either," Hess said. "The only difference perhaps is the Obama
people led us to believe it would be different."