This week, Office of Information Policy (OIP) Director Melanie Ann Pustay wraps up a trip to Beijing, China, where she participated in two forums as a guest of, and sponsored by, The Carter Center.  Beginning this past weekend, Director Pustay took part in a forum entitled “Transparency and State-Owned Enterprises” at China’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, for an audience of Chinese government officials and members of the academic community.  Then, earlier this week, Director Pustay was a panelist for a discussion regarding  the deliberative process privilege and related issues surrounding the disclosure of internal working documents, which took place at Tsinghua University.  This forum was attended by students from Tsinghua University, as well as Chinese government officials.

As head of the U.S. government’s lead FOIA policy and guidance office, Director Pustay works extensively with government officials in other countries to assist those officials in implementing their own openness-in-government initiatives.    In addition to participating in international events, Director Pustay frequently hosts foreign representatives at OIP in DC.  You can view all of the events that Director Pustay and other staff participate in on the Key Dates page of our site.

This week, Director Melanie Ann Pustay spoke with Federal News Radio and discussed OIP’s recently released review and assessment of agency progress in implementing Attorney General Holder’s FOIA Guidelines.  Director Pustay highlighted the progress made by agencies as noted in agency 2012 Chief FOIA Officer Reports and addressed areas where agencies can improve in the administration of the FOIA.  You can listen to the entire interview on the Federal News Radio website.

Earlier this summer, OIP introduced a new training program – the Director’s Lecture Series.  Focusing on FOIA Fundamentals and Achieving FOIA Goals, the first two sessions of this series provided agency personnel with the opportunity for discussion and an open dialogue with OIP Director Melanie Ann Pustay and other attendees.

Next week we will hold the final seminar of this summer series with a lecture and discussion of OIP’s recently released review and assessment of progress in implementing Attorney General Holder’s FOIA Guidelines.  The 2012 assessment of agency Chief FOIA Officer Reports provides a “visual snapshot” of agency activities in key areas of FOIA administration, illustrating “the many areas where agencies have made real progress [and highlighting] areas where further improvement can be made.”  The details for this lecture, which is open to all agency FOIA personnel, are:

Director’s Lecture Series
Tracking Agency Progress to Implement the FOIA Guidelines
Department of Justice, Robert F. Kennedy Building
10^th and Constitution Ave., NW – Great Hall
August 15, 2012, 10:00 am – noon

Registration required.  You will need a picture ID to enter the building for this seminar.

The lecture will provide an opportunity for agency personnel to discuss the 2012 assessment with Director Pustay, as well as the OIP guidance for further agency improvement included in the assessment.  Director Pustay also welcomes feedback from agencies on milestones to consider in future assessments in the years ahead.

If you are interested in attending this event, you can register by e-mailing your name and phone number to OIP’s Training Officer, Bertina Adams Cleveland, at DOJ.OIP.FOIA@usdoj.gov.  If you have any questions regarding this event, please contact Ms. Adams at (202) 514-1010.

As a part of his 2009 FOIA Guidelines, Attorney General Holder directed the Chief FOIA Officers at each agency to review “all aspects of their agencies’ FOIA administration” and to report annually to the Justice Department on the steps taken “improve FOIA operations and facilitate information disclosure.”  These “Chief FOIA Officer Reports” provide descriptions of the steps agencies have taken to improve FOIA administration and serve as a complement to the agencies’ Annual FOIA Reports, which contain detailed statistics on the numbers of requests received and processed during the preceding fiscal year.

Last year, the Office of Information Policy (OIP) conducted an assessment of the progress made in FOIA administration by the fifteen executive departments.  OIP identified metrics for assessment, such as improvements to efficiency and reduction in backlogs, and then used data from both agency Annual FOIA Reports and Chief FOIA Officer Reports to score the agencies on their progress in those areas.   

For 2012, we have expanded the assessment to include all ninety-nine agencies subject to the FOIA in fiscal year 2011. We also have changed several of the metrics, taking into account the progress that has already been made in implementing the FOIA Guidelines to make the assessment progressively more challenging.   

For 2012, we have also prepared a narrative to accompany the assessment. The narrative provides a wealth of examples from large and small agencies of the improvements that have been made to help improve the FOIA process.   Lastly, OIP has included guidance to agencies to assist them in making additional improvements in the years ahead.

The 2012 assessment provides a “visual snapshot” of agency activities in five key areas, specifically:

• applying the presumption of openness,
• increasing efficiencies,
• making information available proactively,
• using technology, and
• reducing backlogs and improving timeliness. 

The assessment is meant to “readily [illustrate] the many areas where agencies have made real progress and also serves to highlight the areas where further improvement can be made.”  Notably, our review found that:

“Agencies continue to make concrete progress in implementing the President’s FOIA Memorandum and the Attorney General’s FOIA Guidelines.  The 2012 assessment shows that agencies are applying the presumption of openness, are taking steps to ensure that they have effective systems in place for responding to requests, are increasing both the content on their websites and its usability, and are offering requesters the opportunity to submit requests electronically.”

At the same time, the assessment shows that there are areas where further improvements can be made.  For example, while sixty-six agencies either had no backlog of pending requests or were able to reduce an existing backlog, there were others whose backlogs increased.  Similarly, while sixty-eight agencies closed all of their ten oldest pending requests, or had none pending to close, there were others who did not meet this milestone.

By assessing agencies on a wide variety of factors that all contribute to improving information disclosure, the public, as well as the agencies themselves, can readily see where agencies have excelled, and where further work can still be done, in improving the administration of the FOIA.

You can access the 2012 Chief FOIA Officer Report Summary and Assessment, along with summaries from previous years, success stories from the Chief FOIA Officer Reports, and the reports themselves on our reports page.

As agencies approach the last two months of the fiscal year, FOIA professionals are doing all that they can to keep up the pace and to close as many FOIA requests and appeals as possible by September 30th.    Heading into the home stretch of the fiscal year agencies are working with requesters, completing records searches, and reviewing records for disclosure, as part of their efforts to close out this fiscal year as strongly as possible.  While there might not be a gold medal and cheering fans, or the national anthem playing in the background when we end the fiscal year, there will still be the satisfaction of  knowing that all our efforts in implementing the FOIA form a key part of how our country works.

During these last few months of the fiscal year it is critical that agencies not only work to close pending FOIA requests and administrative appeals, but that they also focus on closing the oldest of those pending requests and appeals.  Both the President and the Attorney General have stressed the importance of timely disclosure of information.  In his FOIA Guidelines, the Attorney General declared that “timely disclosure of information is an essential component of transparency” and that “[l]ong delays should not be viewed as an inevitable and insurmountable consequence of high demand.”  Building on that directive, our office has put a particular focus on the need for agencies to close their oldest pending requests and appeals.  After the close of Sunshine Week, OIP issued guidance to all agencies asking that they set a goal of closing their ten oldest pending requests and appeals each year.

Most recently, the Acting Associate Attorney General, who also serves as the Department of Justice’s Chief FOIA Officer, together with the Counsel to the President, sent a memorandum to Agency General Counsels and agency Chief FOIA Officers emphasizing that over the past three years agencies “have disclosed more, withheld less, processed requests faster, reduced backlogs, improved [their] FOIA infrastructure, and not least of all provided the public with voluminous information proactively.”  They then specifically asked agency General Counsels and Chief FOIA Officers to focus on resolving their agencies’ oldest requests.

“To further ensure that FOIA is administered in a way consistent with the President’s Memorandum and that agencies provide timely response to FOIA requests, we request that you review your oldest pending FOIA requests, and take affirmative steps to resolve them.”

This latest memorandum is designed to build on the momentum already established by agencies and to ensure that as the fiscal year ends, agencies continue to focus on closing their oldest requests.  We believe that with sustained focus on the discrete goal of closing the oldest of the pending FOIA requests and administrative appeals at each agency, we can achieve a systemic improvement in a key area of FOIA administration.

You can read the full text of this new memorandum, along with our guidance to agencies on closing their oldest pending requests, on the OIP Guidance page of our site.

Dir. Melanie Ann Pustay speaks during the Director's Lecture Series

Last month we hosted the first session of our new training program, the Director’s Lecture Series.  Focusing on FOIA Fundamentals, FOIA professionals from across the government joined Director Melanie Ann Pustay for an open discussion on the building blocks of FOIA administration.

Next week we will be hosting the second session of this lecture series, which will focus on achieving and furthering FOIA goals based on Attorney General Holder’s FOIA Guidelines.  This lecture will address such topics as discretionary disclosures of information, closing the ten oldest requests and consultations at agencies each fiscal year, and utilizing multi-track processing to improve timeliness.  The details for this lecture, which is open to all agency FOIA personnel, are:

Director’s Lecture Series
Achieving FOIA Goals
Department of Justice, Robert F. Kennedy Building
10^th and Constitution Ave., NW – Great Hall
July 24, 2012, 10:00am – noon

 Registration is required.  You will need a picture ID to enter the building for this seminar.

The goal of this lecture series is to complement the training already offered by our office with focused sessions on specialized topics and the opportunity for discussion and an open dialogue with attendees.  With fiscal year 2012 almost over and agencies across the government making their final push towards their specific goals and milestones, it is important to look at how these individual agency efforts contribute to the goals of the entire government.

If you are interested in attending this event, you can register by e-mailing your name and phone number to OIP’s Training Officer, Bertina Adams Cleveland, at DOJ.OIP.FOIA@usdoj.gov.  If you have any questions regarding this event, please contact Ms. Adams at (202) 514-1010.