FOIA Performance is Deteriorating, Journalists Say
If the Leahy-Cornyn bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act that was adopted in the Senate last week becomes law, as expected, it will not happen a moment too soon, because current government handling of FOIA requests is deteriorating, according to a new analysis from the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government.
“Over the past nine years, the number of FOIA requests processed has fallen 20%, the number of FOIA personnel is down 10%, the backlog [of pending requests] has tripled, and costs of handling a request are up 79%,” the CJOG study (pdf) reported.
In fact, “the cost of processing FOIA requests is up 40% since 1998, even though agencies are processing 20% fewer requests.”
Productivity of FOIA requests has dropped in other respects as well.
“The number of denials [of FOIA requests] increased 10% in 2006 and the number of full grants, in which the requester got all the information sought, hit an all-time low.”
See “Still Waiting After All These Years: An in-depth analysis of FOIA performance from 1998 to 2006,” principally authored by Pete Weitzel, Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, August 8, 2007.
After months of delay, the council tasked by President Trump to review the FEMA released its final report. Our disaster policy nerds have thoughts.
FAS and FLI partnered to build a series of convenings and reports across the intersections of artificial intelligence (AI) with biosecurity, cybersecurity, nuclear command and control, military integration, and frontier AI governance. This project brought together leaders across these areas and created a space that was rigorous, transpartisan, and solutions-oriented to approach how we should think about how AI is rapidly changing global risks.
Investment should instead be directed at sectors where American technology and innovation exist but the infrastructure to commercialize them domestically does not—and where the national security case is clear.
To tune into the action on the ground, we convened practitioners, state and local officials, advocates, and policy experts to discuss what it will actually take to deploy clean energy faster, modernize electricity systems, and lower costs for households.