The Obama administration is blocking The Washington Times from obtaining detailed information about Syria’s extensive chemical weapons arsenal, which was used to kill thousands of innocents and changed the course of the country’s savage 4-year-old civil war.
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President Obama has routinely promised greater transparency within the federal government. Now, Congress is making strides toward achieving this critical goal.
The House of Representatives and the Senate are considering nearly identical bills to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which provides the general public, including journalists, with access to federal government records.
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President and CEO, Newspaper Association of America
President Obama has routinely promised greater transparency within the federal government. Now, Congress is making strides towards achieving this critical goal.
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The Department of Homeland Security has experienced a 182 percent increase in the number of requests it receives under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since President Obama first took office in 2009, according to the DHS 2014 Freedom of Information Act Report published Thursday.
The DHS says it received a record 291,242 FOIA requests in fiscal year 2014, spending about $51.5 million to process and fill them. It fully granted only 16,651 of these requests, or about 5.7 percent, partially granted another 128,603, and denied 6,212 requests, the report stated.
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On his first day in office in 2009, President Obama promised that transparency would be one of the "touchstones of this presidency."
Advocates for open government were ecstatic at the promise of less secrecy and the president's directive to all government agencies that "in the face of doubt, openness prevails."
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On his first day in the White House six years ago, President Obama promised that his administration would “usher in a new era of open government,” making it easier than ever to obtain information from federal agencies.
That is not how it has turned out at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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Two top congressional chairmen demanded Wednesday that the IRS turn over all its emails that might have given private taxpayer information to the White House, after President Obama’s lawyer last week passed the buck to the tax agency, insisting they would be able to search for the emails.
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The government produces petabytes of data every day and the administration is looking to strengthen the collection and analysis of that information and release more of it to the public.
Included in the president's 2016 budget proposal are several initiatives to increase access to data and improve the government's evidence-based decision making.
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IN EARLY December, President Obama announced a series of measures aimed at closing the gap between citizens and law enforcement. One of those measures was a plan to distribute $263 million in funding for agencies to purchase body cameras that can be used during police interactions with citizens.
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Upon assuming the office of the presidency, Barack Obama promised the most transparent administration ever. Nobody asked him to do that, but given the unpopularity of the secrecy of the George W. Bush administration, it was a safe bet that such a promise would be received warmly. President Obama laid out his rationale in a memorandum which included the following key points (emphasis in original):
Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.
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