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Federal agencies have launched FOIAonline, a tool that journalists can use to file, track and appeal requests for documents and data under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Here's what you need to know about the service, which was announced just last week.
Not all federal agencies are participating. Here's who's on board:
You can search for other FOIA requests. This search for "pollution" turns up 31 results.
You can download documents and data that have already been released to other users through the system. For example, one of the results under the pollution search includes a PDF document that government provided to the requester.
If you use the site to request information, other members of the public -- that means your sources and competitors -- can see it and may even be able to read about what you're seeking.
Anyone can file a FOIA request using the system's form. However, if you register on the site you can:
So there's a potential upside in getting to keep tabs on your request and communicate with the people who are in charge of filling it. Whether you want to expose the details of your request is another matter.
In a follow-up to its story on the failure's of Obama administration agencies to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, Bloomberg News reports that at least 25 percent of FOIA requests are outsourced to contractors.
"Since fiscal 2009, the year President Barack Obama took office, spending on FOIA-related contracts has jumped about 40 percent, leaving transparency advocates wondering who’s making the decisions on whether records should be kept secret."
Previously, Bloomberg had found that 19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law and just eight of the 57 federal agencies met the 20-day window required by the act, after Bloomberg filed request for top officials' travel costs.
Check out more from IRE's Transparency Watch, an occasional series tracking the fight for open records.
Transparency Watch is an occasional series from IRE tracking the fight for open records. If you have a story about a quest for public records you'd like to share, email us at web@ire.org.
President Barack Obama on his first full day in office ordered federal officials to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public.
Bloomberg News in June set out to test out that promise of openness. Transparency is a core value of the company and our news coverage, which is why, for example, we don't agree to quote approval or use anonymous quotes.
More than 30 reporters submitted the same Freedom of Information Act request to 57 government agencies: The cost of fiscal year 2011 travel by top officials.
The investigation was in part designed to gauge the timeliness of responses, which Attorney General Eric Holder had called “an essential component of transparency." In addition, anecdotal evidence from Bloomberg reporters was piling up about the lack of responses from various government agencies under Obama.
Three months later, the results were in.
Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information within a 20-day window required by the Act.
About half of the 57 agencies eventually disclosed the out-of-town travel expenses generated by their top official by Sept. 14, most of them well past that legal deadline.
We're still waiting for the other half.
Even agency heads who publicly announce their events -- including Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius -- didn’t provide the costs of their trips more than three months after the initial request.
The reporters involved in the project all requested documentation of the following: A list of trips taken out of Washington, D.C., by the head of the agency; documents showing dates and modes of transport; and a breakdown of travel expenses, including all gifts or reimbursements covered by outside sources. Those travel records, already tracked internally, are of inherent interest to the public, particularly in the wake of the conference spending scandal at the General Services Administration.
The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, is designed to open up the process of government to citizens. In the past, FOIA has been used to obtain a wide range of government records. Among them: Documents on the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War; Department of Transportation reports detailing safety issues with the Ford Pinto’s fuel tank that contributed to some 500 deaths; and details of the Bush administration’s deliberations on the use of torture following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
I, along with my co-reporter Jim Snyder and editor David Ellis, logged the requests in a database, tracking them by their FOIA identification numbers and documenting correspondence.
Agencies are supposed to respond to a FOIA request 20 working days from the time they receive it. We started the clock two working days after we filed each request because some agencies sent us acknowledgments weeks after we had submitted them. Some failed to acknowledge them at all. Moreover, we discovered that here is no uniform method of filing a FOIA request with major agencies: Some accepted e-mail, while others asked for faxes or had set up Web pages for filings. The Internal Revenue Service was unique in requiring that the request be submitted via snail mail.
Eight of the 57 agencies sent responsive documents within the 20-day legal timeframe.
Some of those agencies offered responses that left open questions about the accuracy of the records. National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Charles Bolden, for instance, took at least 46 trips valued at a total of $93,110. Eight additional trips were listed as costing zero dollars, including at least five that were cancelled, according to Michael Cabbage, a NASA spokesman in Washington. NASA's system for tracking the travel doesn't make a distinction between trips that were cancelled and those that occurred.
In other words, the agency that can operate a robot on Mars has a tough time keeping tabs on the whereabouts of its own administrator.
Many agencies said there would be delays, sometimes of indefinite length.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that it would take 30 to 45 days to complete the processing of the request for Secretary Shaun Donovan's records, according to a June 6 e-mail. As of Sept. 28 when we published the story, we hadn't received Donovan's records, 79 days after the request was filed.
Three days before our project ran, we received an e-mail from a State Department FOIA official, explaining that the travel records of Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, would remain unfulfilled for more than a year.
“We really appreciate your patience in this matter. The estimated completion date is July 2013,” the FOIA official said.
In the course of reporting for the project, we discovered that agency officials sometimes appeared unsure of their obligations under the law, undertrained or overworked.
For example, Kathleen Miller, a reporter who writes about government contracting, had sent a FOIA request to the State Department on May 23, requesting records of gifts to foreign dignitaries and gifts to federal employees from foreign sources. She had received a June 4 letter, acknowledging the request.
On July 27, having heard nothing more about the request, she called the contact number listed on her acknowledgment letter. The man who answered the phone said his office had contacted three separate offices to get the information she was seeking but they had nothing.
She said she understood they had 20 days to reply.
He said, "Go ahead and sue."
He added, "It takes six months to a year to get a request done. That's just the reality here."
When she asked for his name, he refused to give it. He said he was tired of being yelled at all week. Then he hung up the phone.
This is the first post under Transparency Watch, an occasional series from IRE tracking the fight for open records. If you have a story about a quest for public records you'd like to share, email us at web@ire.org.
The Dayton Daily News published a hard hitting Sunday story on Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee spending $7.7 million on housing, travel, entertainment and community outreach.
The tab included $64,000 for bow tie cookies, bow ties, bow tie and O-H pins, $31,000 for a party attended by just 90 people, private jet travel, international trips, stays at the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton, flowers sent to power brokers and politicians and hundreds of parties for thousands of guests.
The university also did an extreme makeover on the Pizzuti House, a 9,600-square-foot house in a verdant Columbus suburb provided to Gee. Renovation construction costs ran $1.3 million and interior designers shopped for just the right antiques, Persian rugs, wallpaper and decorative pillows to outfit the place. Furnishings cost $673,000, including $532 for an extra-long shower curtain in the guest bath.
The Wall Street Journal called Gee out for lavish spending back in 2006 when he was chancellor of Vanderbilt University. But our interest in Gee didn’t start there.
Instead, it came during the 2009 campaign for Ohio governor when Republican John Kasich disclosed his $50,000-a-year job as an OSU presidential fellow. It piqued our interest because $50k is about the average household income for Ohioans, yet it was just one of the many sources of income Kasich listed. We dug into it, found out Kasich was paid out of the Mershon Endowment Fund and wrote a story about what he did for the $50,000-a-year stipend.
Months later, Gee threw a good-bye party at the Pizzuti House for a high-level staffer who was leaving OSU to become a lobbyist. The party tab was paid out of the Mershon Fund. That prompted us to ask for spending records for the Mershon Fund. In September 2011, we wrote about how OSU spent freely from the fund for things like 10 tickets to a Lady Gaga show, $13,114 for tax prep for Gee, $8,142 for catering for the board of trustees meeting.
We immediately followed up that story with a request for Gee’s travel, housing and entertainment records as well as employment contracts for top managers and other documents. The idea was to try to find out who Gee’s top lieutenants are and how he operated behind the scenes.
We received some documents without too much delay – employment contracts, some months from Gee’s calendar, a spreadsheet of university payroll. But the university’s excuse for taking months on the spending and travel data was that they were swamped with public records requests relating to then Head Football Coach Jim Tressel. We agreed to start with one year of data in an effort to speed things up but seven months later, OSU provided less than 10 pages with a summary of Gee’s flights for just 2009. We expressed our disappointment and displeasure. Using the summary information as well as Gee’s travel information provided on financial disclosure statements filed with the Ohio Ethics Commission, we wrote a story in May about Gee spending at least $844,000 on travel since 2007, including half a million in the last two years.
I wrote a series of emails to Jim Lynch, the OSU media relations director. We exchanged more than 50 emails over the course of the year. After consistent follow up contact with OSU media relations and a few harshly-worded letters from our attorneys, Ohio State began releasing more records.
Gee’s calendar, American Express statements, employment contract, quarterly discretionary spending reports and invoices for the Pizzuti House renovation were the most crucial documents that allowed us to give readers a glimpse of how OSU’s president lives, travels and reaches out.
Even though I’ve been a reporter for more than 20 years, I learned a few valuable lessons from this:
1) Regularly follow up on your records request and keep track of who you contacted and when.
2) File all correspondence regarding the records request into one folder in your email program or desktop.
3) Keep a spreadsheet of what was requested, what has been delivered, what is still pending.
4) Read every scrap that is delivered – you might find a $532 shower curtain in there.
Looks like you haven't made a choice yet.
