We have reached the end of Sunshine Week. This annual observance was first created 10 years ago by the American Society of News Editors in commemoration of James Madison’s birthday. Americans are invited this week to celebrate, reflect upon and act in support of openness and transparency in government.
Unfortunately, though, there is precious little to celebrate this year. Despite laws requiring transparency and better tools for providing it (including the Internet) than at any time in history, government has been getting more opaque.
An extensive Associated Press review has shown that the Obama administration, already the most opaque in American history, got even worse this year. The executive branch is taking longer to make public information available to the public. It is improperly refusing to release public documents with greater frequency. It is also letting more Freedom of Information Act requests fall through the cracks, such that the government’s FOIA backlog grew by 55 percent last year to more than 200,000 unanswered requests.
Of course, this problem did not begin with Obama, even if his stewardship has made it worse. The bureaucrats of the executive branch have been hiding from the sunshine for decades. And in this respect, today’s desk-jockeys are standing on the shoulders of giants.
Lois Lerner, the IRS official who targeted conservative nonprofits for bureaucratic hazing, had her hard drive crash under mysterious circumstances, and for months the IRS claimed falsely that they could not be recovered. In one email that was preserved, she was caught asking IT officials whether her instant messages would be preserved and subjected to FOIA requests (They weren’t.). One can only guess how many thousands of senior bureaucrats behave this way and are never discovered.
And of course, America also has a famous former secretary of state who protected herself from transparency by sending all work-related correspondence through a private email system on a server in her own home.
The Washington Examiner‘s Sarah Westwood recently looked at the state of FOIA and found that the oldest unanswered FOIA request dates all the way back to 1992. She also looked at the many creative ways in which federal agencies avoid compliance and keep their internal activities secret from taxpayers. They engage in years-long delays, demand exorbitant fees to produce documents that belong to the public in the first place, and – when documents actually are released – make unnecessary redactions. Bureaucrats also have a habit of hiding behind the law in order to subvert its intent. They are known at times to require journalists to file FOIA requests for documents which they could easily release without all the formality and which should be public.
Americans should be proud that they have strong transparency laws, but they need to demand better enforcement, and perhaps stiffer penalties for those who would frustrate the cause of open government. Government transparency is arguably the most important safeguard of Americans’ God-given rights, and recent events and scandals have amply demonstrated that government can be much more open than it is today.
