FOIA reform

President Barack Obama, on his first full day in office, sent a strong message of his intention to run a transparent government, directing agencies to release information to the public when possible and rolling out a new White House Web site geared toward communication and transparency.

The Justice Department released new Freedom of Information Act guidance Tuesday for agencies, interpreting changes to the law due to take effect at the end of the year.

The most crucial of the provisions requires agencies to process FOIA requests within 20 working days or lose the ability to charge the requester for search and copying costs.

The Justice Department released guidance Thursday on how agencies ought to implement a provision of the 2007 Freedom of Information Act amendments.

The amendments require them to specifically cite the exemption justifying each redaction to a document requested under FOIA. Agencies also have to mark documents in such a way that shows how much information is being redacted.

Open-government advocates renewed their calls Wednesday for quick implementation of the latest Freedom of Information reforms, including the establishment of an ombudsman office.

Congress has appropriated $1 million for the Office of Government Information Services but the money will not be available until the next fiscal year. The reforms were slowed by Bush  administration efforts to move the new office from the National Archives, where Congress placed it in legislation last year, to the Justice Department. 

Two U.S. senators introduced legislation this week that would remove the Smithsonian's exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and the Sunshine Act, according to the Washington Post.

The United States Small Business Association (SBA) must reveal the names of businesses to which it provides government contracts, U.S. District Judge Marilyn H. Patel ruled Tuesday.

A federal district court judge in Montana ruled that Freedom of Information Act requesters who prevail in litigation against federal agencies can recover attorney fees under new statutory reforms enacted in December even if the litigation was filed prior to the reforms' passage.

President Bush has hardly made any progress in minimizing the huge backlog of unanswered FOIA requests over the last two years, according to a recent audit released on the eve of Sunshine Week.

According to the audit, performed by the National Security Archive, the order implemented by the president two years ago provided no financial support for agencies to improve the systems they already had in place. In addition, there was no way of enforcing the changes; so many organizations remained the same.

Fresh off the heels of landmark Freedom of Information Act reforms that President Bush signed into law on New Year's Eve, two U.S. senators are quickly moving forward to further beef up federal open records law.

After more than a decade of a stagnate public records law, new legislation was discussed Wednesday in a Rhode Island House committee hearing that would, among other things, decrease the amount of time agencies have to respond to records requests and increase fines for noncompliance.