Future of FOIA?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I agree-- just make all emails public after scrubbed of PII and national security details. Will it make people think twice both sending an email? Maybe, but too bad. You don't have to work for the federal govt.

Any reasonable Fed already thinks twice before sending an email.

[Anonymous]

OTOH, FOIA can be illuminating.

https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/lottery-winners-foia-reporting.php

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are we now advocating for a secret government with no citizen oversight or general accountability?

The new Just Trust Me government!

Yay for the JTM party

OP here. Not at all. It's just how many people do you want processing and reading FOIA requests versus the people doing the mission work? 10 years ago we had maybe 1/10th the emails that are produced today.

I hear this. I write FOIA requests. I've always known and respected that there is a real live human being that is on the receiving end of the request. These folks are absolutely getting buried and backlogged, especially with staff cuts. That said, this is a *precious* law and tool for our citizenry, and I'd fight tooth and nail to keep it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are we now advocating for a secret government with no citizen oversight or general accountability?

The new Just Trust Me government!

Yay for the JTM party

OP here. Not at all. It's just how many people do you want processing and reading FOIA requests versus the people doing the mission work? 10 years ago we had maybe 1/10th the emails that are produced today.

I hear this. I write FOIA requests. I've always known and respected that there is a real live human being that is on the receiving end of the request. These folks are absolutely getting buried and backlogged, especially with staff cuts. That said, this is a *precious* law and tool for our citizenry, and I'd fight tooth and nail to keep it.

PP again. I will also say that it is possible to crappily write an overly broad request that is impossible to fill in a timely fashion. There's a way to do it right to get what you're after without gumming up an agency.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I agree-- just make all emails public after scrubbed of PII and national security details. Will it make people think twice both sending an email? Maybe, but too bad. You don't have to work for the federal govt.

Any reasonable Fed already thinks twice before sending an email.

This will decrease the amount of healthy debate on federal programs, which truly would hinder programs.

Also, a good deal of emails that are sent are related to managerial duties, which isn't necessarily PII and I'm not sure the public needs to know or wants to spend the money to know those insignificant details.

I vote we eliminate emails all together for feds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are we now advocating for a secret government with no citizen oversight or general accountability?

The new Just Trust Me government!

Yay for the JTM party

OP here. Not at all. It's just how many people do you want processing and reading FOIA requests versus the people doing the mission work? 10 years ago we had maybe 1/10th the emails that are produced today.

I hear this. I write FOIA requests. I've always known and respected that there is a real live human being that is on the receiving end of the request. These folks are absolutely getting buried and backlogged, especially with staff cuts. That said, this is a *precious* law and tool for our citizenry, and I'd fight tooth and nail to keep it.

PP again. I will also say that it is possible to crappily write an overly broad request that is impossible to fill in a timely fashion. There's a way to do it right to get what you're after without gumming up an agency.

As a FOIA officer I'd love to give you exactly what you're looking for. Very, very few reporters know what they're looking for. Most are fishing expeditions that want "any and all emails" pertaining to a topic and nearly all refuse to narrow a request. Buried is an understatement. And then we're sued for not complying with a 20 day deadline.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Are we now advocating for a secret government with no citizen oversight or general accountability?

The new Just Trust Me government!

Yay for the JTM party


It's a slippery slope. Many FOIA requests are too broad. For example, the EPA may get a request for all emails related to "climate change." Ok, so then the FOIA office at the EPA needs to review all documents and emails with that phrase. It needs to redact any confidentialncy /national security information not for the public, personal information, and non-related subject matters. It's a massive expansion of government and requires armies of lawyers, paralegals, and assistants to review the documentation. It requires a ton of $$$ to fulfill the requests.

Many times, the FOIA requests are fishing expeditions.

Congress has the powers to subpoena any and all emails and documents, if they want to investigate an issue. That's where requests should come from. Likewise, the Office of Inspector General of each agency has the authority to investigate, if they suspect law breaking or abuse of agency resources.


Agreed. And most agencies are doing really well with proactive disclosures on their websites. But the fishing expeditions are real.

I just had a request for every email mentioned in my agency on a specific program. It's a program that hundreds worked on for over a year. Tens of thousands of pages of emails. The cost to our agency in manpower hours is huge and this was just because the reporter was interested in the topic.


So government is now exempt fro reporters reporting on it.

Trump loves you.


Not at all. There just needs to be a better way to manage the FOIA process. Personally, I recommend that FOIA requests from reporters be extremely detailed in order for the agency to consider the request. No fishing expeditions.

Otherwise, I'd actually prefer it if all agencies just publicly published ALL emails and final documents one year after their creation (stripping out any PII and national security details). That would be way less burdensome than dealing with a deluge of FOIA, since FOIA requests are extremely manually intensive. The agencies could easily set up automated processes for publishing such info and consistently budget for it. But of course, that would mean FOIA wouldn't be a useful tool for clogging up the agency from conducting its mission. #DeconstructionoftheAdministrativeState


[b]I agree-- just make all emails public after scrubbed of PII and national security details. Will it make people think twice both sending an email? Maybe, but too bad. You don't have to work for the federal govt.


The bolded part sounds like you have a bone to pick with federal employees. But restrictions on making all emails public are not just about employee rights. When Congress wrote FOIA I don't think they intended to have every email on display. I think they recognize that when the government is deciding what to do, the deliberative process does not need to be on display, and should not be, because that would impede deliberation. This is why documents have to be decisional to be covered by the law.

[Anonymous]

If you all want FOIA so much, you need to lobby for more money for FOIA programs. We're getting sued right and left because we don't have enough staff to complete FOIAs, but FOIA is an unfunded mandate. No money to hire more personnel and no way to limit the number of frivolous requests. The lawsuits actually take money away from our staff budget.

[Anonymous]

FOIAs have definitely been on the rise, with all of the corrupt and secretive business going on with Trump and his appointees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:FOIAs have definitely been on the rise, with all of the corrupt and secretive business going on with Trump and his appointees.

We haven't seen that in my agency, but reporters definitely THINK there's some secretive business dealings going on.