FOIA News: DOJ-OIP Releases 18F "Discovery Phase" Report

OIP and 18F Release Report on the "Discovery Phase" of the National FOIA Portal and Ask for Your Continued Participation with Development

Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y, Sept. 20, 2017

Today, OIP is pleased to announce the results of its collaboration with GSA’s 18F team on the discovery phase of development of a National FOIA Portal.  As we enter development, we want to again solicit both public and agency participation in providing feedback on our work.

The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to build a “consolidated online request portal that allows a member of the public to submit a request for records . . . to any agency from a single website.”   In April 2017, the Office of Information Policy (OIP) announced its partnership with the General Services Administration’s (GSA) 18F team to create a consolidated online request portal.  To begin the project, OIP compiled a team with members including its own FOIA subject matter experts, 18F’s digital services team, and technical staff from DOJ’s Office of the Chief Information Officer and contractor support.  The team began by embarking on a “discovery phase” that included conducting extensive research, interviewing requesters, agencies, and the advocacy community, and testing prototypes of possible functionality.  The discovery phase focused on four categories of potential functionality:  the ability to submit a request to any agency, interoperability (i.e., making the new portal work with other existing systems), generating status updates, and the option to search for already released records.

Read more here.

Report available here.

FOIA News: DOJ-OIP Releases Training Schedule for Federal Employees

First Slate of FOIA Training for Fiscal Year 2018 Now Available

Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y, Sept. 20, 2017

As part of its responsibility to encourage agency compliance with the FOIA, OIP offers a number of training opportunities throughout the year for agency FOIA professionals and individuals with FOIA responsibilities.  These courses have been designed to offer training opportunities for personnel from all stages of the FOIA workforce, from new hires to the experienced FOIA professionals or FOIA managers. As Fiscal Year 2018 quickly approaches, we are pleased to announce the first set of training courses and dates through the first quarter of the next fiscal year.

OIP’s training courses and dates for the first quarter of FY 2018 are:

         Annual FOIA Report Refresher Training
         October 10, 2017

         Freedom of Information Act Litigation Seminar
         October 30, 2017

         Introduction to the Freedom of Information Act
         November 7, 2017

         Chief FOIA Officer Report Refresher Training
         December 11, 2017

All of these seminars will be held in Washington, D.C., and are open to all federal government employees.  Descriptions of each seminar as well as class sizes are available on the Training page of OIP's site.  As with last year, registration for courses will not open until two months prior to the date of the training.  Registration prior to that date will not be responded to or accepted. 

Read more here.

FOIA News: OGIS Visits USCIS

OGIS Visits U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

Nat'l Archives & Records Admin., The FOIA Ombudsman, Sept. 20, 2017

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) FOIA program in Lee’s Summit, Missouri invited several members of the OGIS staff to visit their facility this week to provide their FOIA staff with training and to facilitate an agency FOIA compliance assessment.

OGIS’s training sessions are intended to teach FOIA professionals practical communication skills to help them understand and resolve disputes. During the sessions, we also give training participants a chance to test drive their skills and fine-tune their approach through activities and a role-playing exercise. We provide this training twice each year at the National Archives, and also provide agency-centric training upon request. To learn more about our training program, or to find out more about setting up a session for your agency, please email us at ogis@nara.gov.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Watchdog demands cause for White House refusal to release Mar-a-Lago visitor logs

Watchdog demands cause for White House refusal to release Mar-a-Lago visitor logs

By Mallory Shelbourne, The Hill, Sept. 20, 2017

An ethics watchdog on Wednesday filed a motion requesting that a federal court compel the government to provide cause as to why it did not release the bulk of visitor logs from Mar-a-Lago.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), along with the Knight First Amendment Institute and the National Security Archive, filed the motion after the Trump administration last week rebuffed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

“[T]he government has repeatedly represented to the Court and to plaintiffs that the Secret Service was processing and would produce all non-exempt records for presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago, a process it claimed would require months,” the motion said. 

Read more here.

FOIA News: Op-Ed Asks If the White House is Misleading Congress on FOIA

Is the White House misleading Congress over a contentious FOIA policy?

By Ryan Mulvey, The Hill, Sept. 20, 2017

The one thing that can be said with any certainty about the Trump administration’s position on transparency is that it is uncertain. Consider the president’s alleged directive to federal agencies that they ignore “oversight requests” from individual Democrat legislators, including ranking members on congressional committees. The directive, allegedly delivered by Uttam Dhillon, Special Assistant to the President, reportedly instructed agencies “not to cooperate” with requests except those from committee chairmen. 

News of the directive sparked outrage in Congress, yet the White House was initially reticent to provide any meaningful clarification. Bipartisan pushback only increased with the revelation of a May 1, 2017 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion letter, which seemingly corroborated press reports but presented a distorted view of the law. The White House disavowed the OLC opinion letter as a statement of government-wide policy, but a newly-disclosed document from the General Services Administration (GSA) now presents a potentially troubling contradiction to that claim. At worst, it suggests the White House misled Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in an attempt to allay the senator’s concerns over the congressional inquiry policy.

Read more here.

FOIA News: NCPC finalizes revisions to FOIA regulation

The National Capital Planning Commission ("NCPC") published a final rule implementing revisions to the agency's FOIA regulations in today's issue of the Federal Register.  The rule, which is effective on October 20, 2017, follows the publication of proposed revisions on August 1, 2017.  NCPC received no public comment and made no changes to the proposed rule.  These changes are being implemented to comply with the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016.

FOIA News: State agencies sue FOI requesters

Governments turn tables by suing public records requesters

Ryan J. Foley, Assoc. Press, Sept. 17, 2017

OWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — An Oregon parent wanted details about school employees getting paid to stay home. A retired educator sought data about student performance in Louisiana. And college journalists in Kentucky requested documents about the investigations of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Instead, they got something else: sued by the agencies they had asked for public records.

Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests — taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

Read more here.

FOIA News: EPA inundated with requests

FOIA explosion at EPA, over 60 per day

By Paul Bedard, Wash. Examiner, Sept. 19, 2017

Reporters and special interests groups critical of President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency have filed Freedom of Information Act requests at a record-breaking pace, a rate of over 60 a day.

Through last week, 10,970 have been filed, many so broadly worded that it will take years to answer. What's more, there are still several weeks left in the fiscal year for more to come in. The most ever filed for a full year has been 11,820 in fiscal year 2007.

Critics have assailed some actions by Trump's EPA and Administrator Scott Pruitt and many FOIA's seek emails on their decisions.

But some are poorly focused and broad. Several seek all emails that include "climate change" in them, a list in the millions and will be costly in money and hours to retrieve.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Court opinions issued Sept. 15, 2017

McNeely v. U.S. Dep't of Energy (N.D. Cal.) -- finding that: (1) government conducted adequate search for records pertaining to plaintiff's childhood medical records and a study at Hanford nuclear site; (2) government properly withheld names of third parties pursuant to Exemption 6.

Gelb v. DHS (S.D.N.Y.) -- concluding that government performed adequate search for records concerning unclaimed funds and that it properly withheld the names of account holders pursuant to Exemptions 6 and 7(C).

Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here. 

Court opinions issued Sept. 13-14, 2017

Sept. 14, 2017

Sanchez-Alanis v. BOP (D.D.C.) -- finding that agency properly withheld certain records from plaintiff's inmate files pursuant to Exemptions 5, 6, 7(C), 7(E), and 7(F), and that agency's delayed releases of records did not preclude summary judgment. 

Sept. 13, 2017

Tuffly v. DHS (9th Cir.) -- affirming district court's decision that Exemption 7(C) protected disclosure of names of 149 non-citizens who were released in 2013 from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention pending final removal determinations.

Wadhwa v. Sec'y U.S. Dep't of Veterans Affairs (3rd Cir.) -- affirming district court's decision that: (1) agency properly withheld records pertaining to complaints of employment discrimination pursuant to Exemptions 5 and 6, and (2) agency properly refused to confirm or deny existence of disciplinary records of named agency employees.

Carter v. USDA (W.D. Ark.) -- determining that Food and Nutrition Service performed reasonable search for records concerning institutions disqualified from food program between 1995 and 2001.

Summaries of all opinions issued since April 2015 available here.