Senate Bills - 110th Congress

S. 2427—Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007.

On December 6, 2007, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), introduced the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007. S. 2427 would amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to revise requirements for federal agency disclosures of information requested under that Act. Provisions of interest to NIH would shorten the time limits on which to act on requests, require agencies to establish a system to assign an individualized tracking number for each request for information, establish a telephone line or Internet service regarding the status of a request, institute additional reporting requirements regarding FOIA requests and processing times, and provides a definition of “a representative of the news media” directly in the statute. S. 2427 was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Related measures include H.R. 1309, H.R. 1326, S. 849, and S. 2488, which became P.L. 110-175 on December 31, 2007.