Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
And more bad news on the hope and change front. AP reports that the use of exemptions to deny FOIA requests actually has gone up under the Obama administration, even after Obama made a big public show of signing an executive order and allegedly making transparency a priority.
Federal agencies haven't lived up to President Barack Obama's promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office.An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.
Now I suppose it's hypothetically possible that this big increase took place between October 1 and January 21, during the last days of the Bush administration, but this seems highly unlikely. First of all, there was no big rush of answers to FOIA requests in the last days of the Bush administration; there was, in fact, a large backlog of unanswered requests when Obama took over. Second, the numbers have gone up way too much compared to Bush's last full year for that to make sense:
Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored.Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period...
In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found.
This is Sunshine Week, designated to celebrate and acknowledge the importance of the Freedom of Information Act and other laws designed to increase government transparency. Obama made a huge public show of increasing transparency, signing executive orders on his very first day in office. It doesn't look like much has actually changed in the real world, however. Hope without change is empty and meaningless.
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In the "Liberal Bias" department, this topic got a lot of discussion among professional archivists before the end of 2008, but since then not very much. One diehard conservative on the SAA listserv keeps posting these links (with unspoken glee, I suspect), but they just don't get the flurry of comments that Bush's offenses did. No one makes any apologies for Obama; instead, they just maintain an embarrassed silence.
Posted by: Scott Hanley | March 18, 2010 12:16 PM
I know this from direct experience from investigative reporting we do at http://www.StinkyJournalism.org .
During Bush admin. I had waited for years (since 2003) for an FBI FOIA request and finally got it approved by Justice Dept when Obama was elected. They were copying files for me--when...oh no, Obama came into office and the new admin said that authorization to release files (long ago approved by Justice) was a "mistake" said it wasn't approved after all!
So much for transparency talk and no walk--when the Bush admin sets the better example.
Now I have hired a lawyer and a needless expenses-forget about the wasted time.
Posted by: Rhonda R Shearer | March 18, 2010 12:42 PM
Ed, was there any mention on the amount of requests responded to? In other words, has the rate at which those exemptions are taken increased, or are we seeing an increase in requests, or could this be a result of working through the backlog you mentioned?
Posted by: psweet | March 18, 2010 1:42 PM
What psweet said.
How many people didn't bother submitting an FOIA request during the shrub years, knowing it would get turned down, and waited until Obama came in?
Though Rhonda's story is disconcerting.
Posted by: NoAstronomer | March 18, 2010 1:52 PM
Le sigh. I was kinda hoping he'd be different, but alas, he's just a slimy politician with a silver tongue.
Posted by: Madrocketscientist | March 18, 2010 2:06 PM
If there are only nine exemptions, is there really any reason for them to say "nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions" instead of just giving a number?
Posted by: Miko | March 18, 2010 3:10 PM
Not in the article, but they are in the reports which are at http://www.justice.gov/oip/04_6.html. For HHS, the % of request denied based on exemptions increased from 2.7% in 2008 to 3.0% in 2009 and the % of partial denials increased from 1.2% to 2.3%; the total requests decreased from 66,583 to 50,337.
Posted by: MattXIV | March 18, 2010 4:32 PM
Not trying to be an apologist, but is it possible GWB salted the bureaucratic ground enough that a lot of this is happening under Obama's radar? I await (without holding my breath) signs of change now it is visible.
Posted by: Gray Gaffer | March 18, 2010 6:07 PM
Thanks, MattXIV, that answer's the question, and is definitely a troubling trend.
Posted by: psweet | March 18, 2010 6:31 PM
Matt XIV @ 7:
I'm not out to defend the Obama Administration, but I'd like to point out that that statistic is still pretty meaningless from a technical viewpoint. It looks only at quantitative change, without trying to look at a potential qualitative change in the requests submitted - yet the change in administration makes it plausible that such a change could have taken place. That approach would be analogous to looking only at the prescription rate of a drug without looking at the respective disease rates.
The Obama Administration's real track record might be better or even worse than the number suggest, but it's impossible to tell without a much deeper analysis, in my opinion.
Posted by: Phillip IV | March 19, 2010 7:56 AM