Tag Archives: history

Department of Justice misleads Americans about the true causes and costs of FOIA delays during Sunshine Week

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For the first time in over a decade, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) celebrated Sunshine Week with a blog post, instead of a public event. In past years, a high-ranking DOJ official — often the DOJ Chief FOIA Officer – would make a speech, followed by the Director of the Office of Information Policy (OIP).

The OIP director would make a presentation about the state of FOIA compliance across the executive branch, backed by data they’d collected from the annual reports agencies were required to submit.

And then the OIP Director would give out awards to the FOIA professionals across the executive branch, offering important public recognition for their service. (I know, because I have attended most of these events since 2016 at “Main Justice” in downtown DC.)

In 2026, there was no public ceremony or speeches, nor has OIP published and socialized open data that shows the state of agency compliance with the statutory obligation to respond to FOIA requests within 20 days that Congress has repeatedly mandated. 

Instead, OIP published a short statement by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Chief FOIA Officer of the  Department of Justice, atop a short blog post about Sunshine Week by Office of Information Policy Director Sean Glendening. 

To be clear, we vigorously agree with AAG Woodward that “our FOIA professionals are the unsung heroes of democracy” and welcome the Department honoring their service. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice also made several false assertions in his short statement to the American people that require correction.

1) This is not “the most transparent Department of Justice in our nation’s history,” by any objective measure. Any subjective assessment that ignores the contempt the USAG has shown towards Congress and the free press or the stonewalling around the Epstein Files isn’t honest.

2) Prior administrations made real progress in “improving FOIA processes and prioritizing citizens’ access to information about their government” by proactively disclosing data online. This administration has not. 

They’ve gutted FOIA offices, taken down public data and fired statistical officials, and stonewalled requestors, the direct result of which is more litigation and wasted taxpayer funds. It is downright Orwellian to state the inverse is true on a Department of Justice website during Sunshine Week. Doing so may even run afoul of the Information Quality Act, which requires officials to ensure “the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal agencies.”

3) The “ever-increasing burden” placed on FOIA professionals is the result of multiple administrations failing to invest far more in the FOIA, from modernization, increasing state capacity, carving out dedicated, secure alternatives for first-party records access to veterans and people seeking immigration records, to proactively disclosing records corporations are buying under the FOIA and other frequently requested records.

The need for systemic investment in improving the systemic problems that have made FOIA broken for people unwilling or unable to file lawsuits for access to information has been abundantly clear for decades. The American people can see this truth for themselves in the breadth and depth of recommendations made by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee, or experience it by making a FOIA request through FOIA.gov.

As Nate Jones reported for the Washington Post, instead of “improving FOIA processes” as DOJ falsely claimed, this administration cut FOIA staff. That predictably has negatively affected the capacity of agencies to respond to requestors quickly – much less provide records responsive under the FOIA in a timely manner.

In his first public post about FOIA, the new OIP director did not recognize any of those facts, nor offer any thanks to the FOIA staff dismissed and honor their service — including his predecessor.

Instead, he and the AAG chose to try to create an “alternative fact” during a national celebration of public access to information. 

Namely, they’re advancing a narrative in which “a small group of frequent requesters accounts for an increasing volume of both total and complex FOIA requests” – without showing any data to back up this claim. In this alternative narrative, this “forces agencies to divert a disproportionate share of limited resources away from the timely processing of simpler requests submitted by individual members of the public.”

Got it? Increased secrecy, censorship of open data, legacy systems, diminished state capacity, lax Congressional oversight, malign negligence by OMB, firing the AOTUS, and serial underfunding for decades aren’t at fault for the increasingly poor performance by FOIA offices. Instead, it’s a “small group of requestors” that’s “forcing” agencies to divert “limited resources.” That’s transparently misleading.

As it does every year, OIP quoted James Madison, who famously stated “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”  

That’s more true than ever in 2026. 

Thank you to the dedicated FOIA professionals and everyone else in and outside of government who continues to arm the American with the self-knowledge required for self-governance – including about the true state of the administration of the Freedom of Information Act and public access to the public records we all pay for with our taxpayer dollars. 

New beginnings

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lincoln-memorial

“One nation, undivided, with liberty and justice for all.”

I remember those words well from my days as a schoolboy, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

Decades later, after I’ve spent years living in the the District of Columbia and writing about governance and technology, those words are imbued with a special poignance and power for me.

We live in extraordinary times, yet access to opportunities, capital and the law is not equal.

We can hear the voices of people crying out for help and justice from around the world at an unprecedented scale and velocity, yet our leaders do not always listen.

We can separate fact from fiction and publish the data that underlies those arguments, yet our capacity to reason and compromise is not always augmented.

We, the People, can do better. Whenever I run down to see Mr. Lincoln and stare out at the Mall, imagining what he might think of our own historic moment, I can’t help but conclude that he would agree.

I intend to share the stories and voices of people who are doing better here, drawing from years of interviews, reporting and exploration. You’ll find analysis, original essays, pictures, videos and data, mixed together and presented in what I hope will be a compelling mix. I hope that you find it worthy of your time.

-Alexander B. Howard

How can government adapt to exponential technological change?

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Can the agile development cycle be applied to government? Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of Second Life, offered up a provocative paean earlier this year at the Gov 2.0 LA Camp for more flexible adaption to new online platforms for citizen engagement and empowerment.

“Who will know first if the rules have changed: customers, partners, clients?”

In his talk, Ondrejka drew a fascinating parallel between today’s open government movement and an open data case study from another age: the Era of Sail.

In the The Physical Geography of the Sea,” published in the mid-1800s, a disabled sailor who could no longer serve as crew found something to do from ashore: aggregate the logs of weather, winds and current.

As Matthew Fontaine Maury started aggregating that data, he found patterns. There are better ways to travel.

After he published the data, Maury then shipped to anyone who asked for it and asked for contributions.

That became a worldwide project that created value from information. Maury saw great value in publishing the data “in such a manner that each may have before him, at a glance, the experience of all.”

Notably, President John Quincy Adams agreed. Not long afterwards, the United States created standards for reporting meteorological data and endowed the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Ondrejka suggested that government agencies and those creating applications that use open data a“when possible, write less code, get more data.” When it comes to resources, he asked “who’s cheaper: a silicon or carbon employee?”

His observation that social computing platforms will “require different level of trust, support and information” is apt; citizens now have different expectations from a government that’s gone online than existed in an analog world. As Ondrejka put it, online users represent the “largest focus group in the world.” And in that content, he says, there is a role for government innovation, and it should be occupied by both leaders and citizens.

Ondrejka provided one more “analog” example of how government data was used in the 1800s. By studying harpoon designs,  Maury found that many whales in the Pacific has previously been harpooned in the Atlantic and vice versa. He used that as evidence of a Northwest Passage. While that didn’t go well for subsequent explorers who went north and ran up against a frozen ocean, the ’49ers were able to use the data to reduce the length of time it took to get around Cape Horn. In those days, it took more than 200 days to travel from New York City to San Francisco.

As the Gold Rush was on, time was at a premium, and for “extreme clipper ships” like Flying Cloud, any advantage that could be derived from patterns in the data had economic value. A similar parallel to innovation using government data can be seen today in the use of the global positioning system (GPS) that the U.S. funded.

With any of these technologies, however, there’s a long-standing pattern in technology adoption, the data around which follows a “fairly predictable” curve, said Ondrejka.  That “linear to exponential” is something that’s been true in multiple technologies, from email to the VCR to the DVD to social media platforms like Facebook.

In government, however, applying such technology has multiple considers, including regulations, transparency and cybersecurity.“When you’re driving institutional change, you’re requiring people to be fearless,” said Ondrejka. “Experimental culture doesn’t mean just go try stuff.” Measurement is key. “Stay out of the Church of Assumption.The plural of anecdote is not evidence.”

Concerns about data ownership are also central, as are questions about vendor lock-in or the use proprietary formats. “We need to be careful about not releasing the data that taxpayers pay for,” said Ondrejka.

Ondrejka’s presentation is embedded below. You can read more of his thoughts on government 2.0 at Ondrejka.net.

Cory Ondrejka Government 2.0 LA Opening Keynote http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

The full hour of his talk is embedded below:

Cory Ondrejka Delivers Keynote Address to Gov20LA 2010 from Gov20LA on Vimeo.