Release to one, release to all pilot

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Sean Vitka

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Jul 13, 2015, 1:20:17 PM7/13/15
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Hi all –

Just sharing a write-up celebrating the pilot program that will require publication of FOIA responses after a single request. Great to see this step forward, and we at Sunlight are as eager as everyone else to see what the results look like!

Best,
Sean

Brian Bardwell

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Jul 14, 2015, 10:34:56 AM7/14/15
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Is this really a step forward?

I agree that a policy like this has value, but until agencies can get requests out the door on time, extraneous efforts like these seem like a waste of resources. If there's even one hour of processing requests taken away and spent on publishing, this isn't something anyone should be celebrating.

If they want to improve FOIA, they need to release more records.

Daniel Schuman

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Jul 14, 2015, 10:46:25 AM7/14/15
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Respectfully, Brian, I disagree.

Current policy requires documents to be published online if they are the subject of 3 requests. So, many documents already should be published online. 

Some agencies, however, fail to count the number of requests and consequently don't publish the responses online. The result is duplicate requests are filed and the FOIA request is processed over and over again. This results in significant delays and FOIA backlogs. It eats up resources that should go to responding to new requests. It also is a violation of current policy.

By moving to the request-once-and-publish-online model, people can find online the results of earlier FOIA requests and thus do not need to make a new request themselves. This saves time and resources. In addition, the agencies that have been conscientious about the current 3x request policy no longer need to keep track of how often a document has been queried. 

This new policy lowers overhead, maximizes public access to requests, and creates efficiencies for FOIA offices. It should contribute to lowering the workload on agencies and thus make it easier to get requests out the door. 

I hope this is helpful,

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Demand Progress | Policy Director

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Yogin Kothari

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Jul 14, 2015, 10:54:02 AM7/14/15
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I’m curious to hear what people have to say about some criticism that this puts journalists and news media at a disadvantage because it doesn’t allow them to go through to documents before others, even though they put in all the work.

 

Yogin

 

 

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Yogin Kothari

Senior Legislative Assistant

Center for Science and Democracy

Union of Concerned Scientists

202.331.5665

Follow me @YoginUCS

Daniel Schuman

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Jul 14, 2015, 11:16:06 AM7/14/15
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Yogin,

I wrote about that here. Although I think Alex Howard has the definitive roundup.  


Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Demand Progress | Policy Director

Elizabeth Hempowicz

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Jul 14, 2015, 11:16:31 AM7/14/15
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I vaguely remember reading something somewhere that said they would address that issue by having some sort of delay between giving responsive docs to the requester and posting them. 

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Yogin Kothari <YKot...@ucsusa.org> wrote:



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Elizabeth Hempowicz
Public Policy Associate
CFC #10785 

Brian Bardwell

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Jul 14, 2015, 11:35:34 AM7/14/15
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I was initially very optimistic about this proposal, too, and I hope that my analysis is wrong. Certainly I agree that thisshould lower the workload, but that sort of assumes that FOIA offices have the training and authority to properly process requests, which I don't think is true.

If they can't keep track of how many times they've processed a request, how does this new policy fix that? It seems like they'll just continue reprocessing identical records and then repeatedly publish them online. 

FOIA reading rooms are already pretty unfriendly places to do research, and OIP's proposal is to add all the records that only one person is interested in, as well as redundant copies of records that multiple people are interested in. That doesn't save anyone time or money, and in fact does the opposite.

The only way I see that this change could improve things is if they both improve their record-keeping and drastically improve reading rooms so that their organization and searchability equals the agencies' internal mechanisms for finding records.

I don't understand how people can assess this as a more valuable use of resources than finding ways to get more records out the door, with fewer redactions, in less time.

I'm even willing to propose some alternative pilot projects:
  • testing the feasibility of responding to FOIA requests on time;
  • testing the feasibility of presuming openness as required by the Obama FOIA memorandum; 
  • testing the feasibility of releasing unrequested records; 
  • testing the feasibility of replacing most public information officers with FOIA officers; or
  • testing the feasibility of removing political appointees from the review process.
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