Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
On his very first day in office, President Obama pledged the most transparent administration in history. That's starting to look a lot like President Bush's promise to have the most ethical administration in history. The Huffington Post reports:
One year into its promise of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation's open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines, according to a review by The Associated Press of agency audits about the Freedom of Information Act.
When I first reported on the fact that FOIA denials had gone up in the first year of the Obama administration, some wondered whether that was because the number of FOIA requests had gone up. Here's the answer:
The AP's review of annual Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the administration's use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public increased during fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.The agencies cited exemptions at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Over the same period, the number of information requests declined by about 11 percent, from 493,610 requests in fiscal 2008 to 444,924 in 2009...
The administration has stalled even over records about its own efforts to be more transparent. The AP is still waiting - after nearly three months - for records it requested about the White House's "Open Government Directive," rules it issued in December directing every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public.
The White House on Tuesday described the directive as "historic," but the Office of Management and Budget still has not responded to AP's request under the Freedom of Information Act to review internal e-mails and other documents related to that effort.
Roger Daltrey, you're on.
Politics
Comments
I’m not excusing President Obama’s behavior on this matter or disparaging the GOP either in the below, it’s a frustration that predates this or the previous administration.
I think a productive use of resources for a minority party would be to promote legislation that enhances systemic government processes and reporting. It’s far easier to develop political capital on these matters if the advocate is not in power and far more difficult to oppose such initiatives when one enjoys majority power.
In this case it would be great to see the current minority party, who just happens to be Republicans, focus on creating a process that forces the White House to periodically report metrics that measure particular objectives, in this case transparency. This sort of review should be mandatory, with mandatory metrics that are difficult to obfuscate or modify in order to avoid recent failures, and such reporting should be administrated in a forum open to questions from the press on every item reported. I’m really sick of the Executive branch’s ability to avoid having to respond to both its failures in measuring up to its systemic failures and actions that appear to violate the Constitution or the national interest, e.g., President Obama’s reluctance to aggressively investigate President Bush’s torture policy, President Obama’s abhorrent positions in the federal courts on civil rights and executive power. The state of the union is now a political stump speech, no more.
A management team of a public company is not able to avoid scrutiny by shareholders of the key metrics that determine the success or failure of the enterprise, yet we allow such in government by not enforcing both consistent and regular reporting of specific measurements and their ability to avoid questioning on their actions. Such improvements should include not only on-going measurements, but also project-based initiatives, e.g., stimulus results, Iraq War, viability of General Motors capital investment, Bush’s violation of Reagan-signed treaties on torture, etc. Congress should frame and oversee the terms of this report, not the Executive who given an ineffective media is now literally able to get away with murder, theft measuring in the tens of billions (Medicare fraud, Iraq expenditures), and under the Obama Administration, its cover-up. This sort of free pass on ignoring actions isn’t allowed even in the tiniest public company; why should we allow less from the largest entity in the country?
Posted by: Michael Heath | April 27, 2010 9:39 AM
Well see, uhhh, the first day of the Obama administration, they had everything nice and transparent... then it rained, seee, and in order to save money during a recession the Obama administration didn't pay to have someone clean the windows? Not gonna buy that... huh?
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Seriously,
The question I have, is what do we do? Within our two party system, Obama is marginally better than the alternative the Republicans put up in 2008, and, at least at this time, significantly better than the prospective alternatives for 2012. A principled vote for a third party candidate will likely only cause the situation we saw in 2000 where enough votes are drained away from the marginally better candidate (Gore) leading to the victory of (as history shows) the far worse candidate (Bush) who, at this point, seems like a paragon of virtue and reason compared to the GOP of 2010.
The more I look at it, the more I fear our system is fatally flawed and perhaps beyond redemption.
Posted by: dogmeatib | April 27, 2010 10:02 AM
Posted by: Armored Scrum Object | April 27, 2010 10:44 AM
In fairness to the President, he made that promise before he’d been fully apprised of all our secret activities. Now that he knows the truth about Roswell, the SGC, American Idol, MiB, Kindred, the true purpose of the LHC, and Elvis, he understands the need for secrecy. What other reasonable and justified explanation is there?
Posted by: Abby Normal | April 27, 2010 11:10 AM
So... clarification point, then. The number of requests is actually lower than the number of exemptions claimed, in that story, and they note that they can claim multiple exemptions per request. That makes the raw size comparison seem useless except in an abstract sense: maybe they're just more accurate about the number of exemptions claimed. Or not. Gets a bit Rorschach-y.
In addition, it seems to me that the part at the bottom of the story, where they are clearing out old requests from the previous administration could have a significant effect on this sort of behavior (although the drop in requests could mitigate that, not enough information). Let alone the fact that two points do not make a good trendline: that's just bad statistics/science. Is there an easy way to see requests over time? It looks like you'd have to do a lot of report digging when you follow their links, and I'm kinda at work. Seems like the kind of thing the AP might have considered doing to make the story stand up to anything.
This seems largely like a narrative-setting story to me, rather than a solid analysis (with the standard 'Blame the president even if he says not to do it' framing in the re-posted headlines at Huffpo, etc, the AP original line is not quite as pointed: The original seems to be at http://www.ap.org/FOI/foi_031610a.htm.) Some deceptive/underexplained numbers and poor statistics work. Better AP analysis, please.
Thanks for the followup, though. Now if only the AP had done good work _on_ the followup.
(Disclaimer: This does not excuse the ignoring of FOIA requests or any overuse of blah blah blah don't read a political position into this skepticism of what looks like a bad analysis kthx.)
-Mecha
Posted by: Mecha | April 27, 2010 11:11 AM
Abby Normal,
So very true. In fact, has anyone noticed that the reason for the technical problems of the LHC (The Higgs boson going back in time to sabotage its own discovery, as it did with the SSC in Texas) is the same as Dembski's theodicy: man's sin went back in time to create death before the fall? What's up with that? I'll tell you: Man's sin is a a Higgs boson, and the government knows it.
I am afraid of that knowledge--afraid that I'll see cigarette man through my window, standing across the street. Once Obama was briefed on this... well who can blame him? The truth is out there.
Posted by: heddle | April 27, 2010 11:49 AM
dogmeatib @ 2:
How do you know? Due to the nature of the system, we never got to see a McCain presidency in action. Candidate-Obama was marginally better than candidate-McCain, but candidate-Obama and president-Obama didn't have much in common; for all we know president-McCain would have abandoned all of his campaign promises just like Obama did and have been a better president than Obama as a result. I don't think it's very likely, but all the same, comparing apples to nothing is a cheap way of defending apples.As Emma Goldman said, voting changes nothing: if it did, they'd make it illegal. Again, you're comparing apples to nothing. During the 2000 campaign, Bush was talking about "a humble foreign policy" and nonintervention. How'd that compare to his post 9/11/2001 neocon nuttery? For all we know, a Gore presidency might have started a nuclear war. To vote for a third party is to acknowledge that the promises of the candidates mean nothing and that there is, in fact, no a priori reason (and possible even no a posteriori reason) to think that Corporate-Candidate A is better than Corporate-Candidate B and to reject the hysterical notion that the fate of the world depends on whether we are ruled by A or B. The best reason to vote for a third party candidate is not because you want her to win, but rather because you want to express your contempt for the "choice" between A and B. All of the significant political changes in history have come as a result of mass public disobedience continuing to such an extent that eventually the government decided it would just be an embarrassment to continue to pretend that the law was in force. The voting booth, by contrast, is only a collective delusion by which the government maintains the illusion of popular consent.
The saying goes that the real difference between libertarians and (whatever you call your particular branch of leftism) is that you think that the system is flawed/broken whereas libertarians think that the system is working exactly how those who created it intended it to work. You are correct that the system is not redeemable, because it's working perfectly for those who profit from it. But this is only a problem if you accept the premises of the system and confine yourself to working within the system instead of against it.Posted by: Miko | April 27, 2010 3:34 PM
Posted by: Tamarron | April 28, 2010 1:18 AM
dogmeatlib @#2
Does that include Ross Perot? Without him, there would have been no Clinton Presidency
Posted by: teammarty | April 28, 2010 1:50 AM
Then are you advocating what? Rebellion? Voting third party? Moving to Canada?
Did you just skip over the two paragraphs she spent defending the middle option in your list?
Posted by: Velitar | April 28, 2010 4:34 AM
Demanding transparency from those in power is easy when you're not the party in power. Once you hold the reigns of government you suddenly see the benefits of secrecy.
You can see everything you need to see and there are certainly things you would rather the opposition didn't see.
No one trusts "the man" until they become "the man".
Posted by: Lance | April 29, 2010 2:23 AM