Rescinding a Bush policy of defending any legal reason to withhold information, Obama ordered agencies to release any information whose disclosure wasn’t prohibited by law or wouldn’t cause foreseeable harm.
The audit was released yesterday, the first day of Sunshine Week, an annual observance by journalism organizations to promote open government and freedom of information.
The Obama administration “has clearly stated a new policy direction for open government but has not conquered the challenge of communicating and enforcing that message throughout the executive branch,’’ the report concluded.
The archive found that old requests linger, and 33 of the 90 agencies now have an older unfulfilled request than they did on Sept. 30, 2008.
Five agencies reported releasing less and withholding more information during the 2009 budget year, which includes the first nine months of the Obama administration, than they did the previous year. And 35 of the 90 agencies told the auditors they had no records of putting in place the new Obama FOIA policies.
The oldest pending request the auditors found is approaching 18 years old. It was submitted Sept. 21, 1992, by the National Security Archive itself to the National Archives and Records Administration for files on nuclear arms control and test information from 1959 to 1961. The audit said the request is probably languishing at the Energy Department and the Air Force because the National Archives must refer requests to the agencies where the information originated.
On a positive note, the audit found that 20 of the 90 agencies had improved the date of their oldest open request from 2008 by more than one month, and the CIA improved its oldest request by nearly a year and a half.
