White House officials: Transparency reducing documents requests

Senior White House officials said Wednesday that the Obama administration’s focus on transparency is leading to fewer records requests from the public.

Norm Eisen, the president’s ethics counsel, and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra said actions taken by the administration — specifically releasing government data and posting it on public websites — are reducing the need for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as they are already freeing up information that is often being requested.

The two officials spoke to reporters on a conference call Wednesday announcing the latest step in the Open Government Initiative. All cabinet-level agencies released their Open Government Plans, which are designed to increase transparency and collaboration with the public. 

Eisen pointed to statistics that show a decrease of about 46,000 FOIA requests from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2009. 

“You see a dramatic decrease,” he said.

The White House attorney believes the downward trend in FOIA request correlates more and more government data being released on Data.gov, a website set up by the Obama administration to release the new data. There are now more than 169,000 sets of government data available on the website.

“We think the results are showing that, with a decrease of more than 40,000 requests in the last fiscal year,” Eisen said. He also believes the number of requests will continue to decrease as the administration further instills a culture of transparency throughout the federal government.

One reason for the FOIA requests’ decrease is that government officials have been choosing to release the information most frequently requested under the law when complying with the administration’s transparency initiative.

“There is an affirmative effort to get frequently FOIA-ed information out there,” Eisen said. “We do try to put out databases that are news you can use.”

As well as considering what information to release by seeing what was most requested under FOIA, Chopra said all federal agencies reached out to the public via the web to see what they wanted released too.

“All of them engaged the public in an open way to see what they wanted,” Chopra said. “There is an ongoing process of public participation in the identification of and deployment of these data sets.”