FOIA: Room to improve?

For more than 40 years, the Freedom of Information Act has governed how federal agencies are to make public most information pertaining to the operation of the government. But is there room to improve the FOIA law?

The answer is "yes", according to Linda Koontz, the former Director of Information Services Issues with the Government Accountability Office. She's now the Principal Information Services Engineer for Privacy at the Center for Enterprise Modernization with the Mitre Corporation.

"FOIA programs are like many of the programs I dealt with when I was at GAO," she told the FOIA conference at the American University's Washington College of Law, sponsored by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy. "It's clearly been undervalued. It's clearly suffered from a lack of top management attention. There definitely are resource issues."

Koontz says she was especially heartened that the Obama Administration has used the first several days of business to overturn the so-called "Ashcroft Memorandum", which she says gave Bush Administration agencies arbitrary carte blanche to stonewall most FOIA requests.

"For a report we issued in 2003, we (GAO) surveyed FOIA officers at 25 major agencies. And we wanted to know if there had been any change in the likelihood of discretionary disclosures under FOIA. The largest percentage of FOIA officers said they hadn't seen any change at all. About a third said that there had been a decrease in their likelihood to make discretionary disclosures, and most of them thought it was due to the Ashcroft Memo."

Much has been made in recent years about some federal agencies which have backlogs of FOIA requests stretching back months, and in some cases, even years. And with the benefit of hindsight, Linda Koontz now concludes that it has been difficult for even the GAO to measure compliance with the FOIA law. She says in some cases, the congressional watchdog agency did not report on the FOIA activities of some agencies because there was question as to whether or not they were filing the appropriate data regarding their agency's FOIA compliance.

Now freed from the shackles of silence imposed by her service with the GAO, Koontz outlined some ideas she has for helping to improve the Freedom of Information Act in meeting the mandates set by statute.

"We need to continue to look at investing in technology, case management technology, redaction technology, content management systems, electronic records management systems, and everything else that helps you speed up the process. Things that will make possible to know where our information is, and how to access it easily."

Koontz concluded her talk with the hope that President Obama's "transparency memo" is embraced and followed by all who work for the federal government.

"I hope the things that are in that memo is the way that every department secretary and agency head talks to their staff, because this needs to be pushed down in the organization all the way to every rank and file staff in agencies."

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