As controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hidden emails sparks heightened public interest in the Freedom of Information Act, transparency advocates agree that a week dedicated to exposing government secrets couldn’t be coming at a better time.
During the seven days of Sunshine Week media outlets, nonprofits, schools and concerned citizens team up to promote the importance of transparency and accountability at all levels of government. James Madison’s March 16 birthday is the anchor of the week because he wrote the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But Clinton’s email flap will likely be a sort of unofficial theme of Sunshine Week this year as the initiative celebrates its 10th anniversary championing the FOIA.
The week will be marked by hundreds of events commemorating FOIA reforms being considered in Congress. Separate versions of the reforms were approved in 2014 by the Senate and House of Representatives but the two chambers could not agree on a final version.
Defense spending and government data indexes will also be the subject of Sunshine Week scrutiny.
“FOIA is a lifeline for Americans who want accountable government,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.
“One thing that can come out of Sunshine Week is attention to the fact that we have a transparency crisis in Washington,” Fitton said. “Congress is hapless. The agencies have contempt for the FOIA. The president is a co-conspirator and has an administration that violates the FOIA law and violates records laws in ways that would put any private citizen in jail.”
Judicial Watch, which often files FOIA litigation in the federal courts, has begun to investigate the use of private emails across the federal government, Fitton announced.
“I guarantee you, we’re gonna show this year, when it comes to the email investigation, there are going to be other secret emails in other agencies,” he said.
Joe Newman, spokesman for the Project on Government Oversight, said Sunshine Week should be an opportunity for Washington-based watchdog groups to tout the importance of an open government outside the Washington Beltway.
“While a lot of people know why it’s important that journalists have access to public records, many don’t realize the impact open government can have on their everyday lives,” Newman said, pointing to the work of “citizen watchdogs” in using open records laws to hold their local governments accountable.
Project on Government Oversight plans to highlight the Senate Armed Services Committee’s decision to close markup sessions of the defense spending bill to the public, Newman said.
“We believe there’s no valid reason for senators to make decisions on the Pentagon’s half-trillion dollar budget in secret,” Newman said. “We’ll be pushing Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to open these hearings to the public.”
In addition to encouraging adoption by Congress of proposed FOIA reforms, the Sunlight Foundation will call for the release of data indexes from each major agency, said Jenn Topper, Sunlight’s spokesperson.
“It’s time to bring government into the 21st century, even if we have to drag it along,” Topper said. “The public deserves real-time access to the information it needs to hold government accountable.”
A decade after the American Society of News Editors launched the first Sunshine Week, the transparency legislation that inspired it is “long overdue for an upgrade,” she said.
“While FOIA plays a central role, Sunshine Week goes beyond just improving the law to promoting proactive disclosure and bringing government into the Internet Age,” Topper said.
Transparency litigator Cause of Action aims to illustrate the flaws in FOIA by ranking federal agencies on how well they handle requests for information in its 2015 “Grading the Government” report.
“Sunshine Week is extremely important because the public has a right to know what their government is up to,” said Dan Epstein, Cause of Action’s president. “Unfortunately, when it comes to transparency, most agencies in Washington are performing woefully under par.”
Proposed FOIA reforms include codifying the “presumption of disclosure” Obama advocated for during his first days in office and creating a single website through which requests to any agency can be filed.
More than 70 transparency groups expressed their support for the nearly identical reform bill that narrowly failed to become law in December.
But some open government advocates worry the current proposed legislation doesn’t do enough to strengthen the FOIA, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. One of the measure’s chief congressional advocates that year was then-Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill.
Fitton said the reforms “nibble around the edges of the law” and suggested Congress instead empower citizens and groups like Judicial Watch to exercise the oversight that isn’t always performed by lawmakers on the Hill.
