Obama administration failing to meet open government goals, Knight survey finds

The Obama administration is failing to fulfill its promise of improving Freedom of Information responsiveness by federal agencies, according to a Knight Open Government Survey by the National Security Archive, released March 13 for Sunshine Week.

In a news release, the Knight Foundation reported that fewer than half of the federal agencies have complied with a presidential memorandum Barack Obama signed in January 2009 instructing federal agencies to “usher in a new era of open government.”

The Knight Open Government Survey found that 49 of the 90 agencies had made concrete changes in their procedures to process requests for government records covered by the Freedom of Information Act. A year earlier, the number was 13. The news release said after the 2010 survey was released "The resulting national headlines sparked a new White House call to all agencies to show concrete change."

“At this rate, the president’s first term in office may be over by the time federal agencies do what he asked them to do on his first day in office,” commented Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the study. “Freedom of information laws exist to help all of us get the information we need for this open society to function. Yet government at all levels seems to have a great deal of trouble obeying its own transparency laws.”

Read the entire report here.

Mine-safety agency not living up to Obama's promises for transparency, Ky. lawyer says

The Mine Safety and Health Administration is getting heat from groups who claim the organization is withholding information that should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.

OMB Watch reports that the secretive tactics of MSHA are not meeting the standards of a transparent government President Obama promised when his term began. In the past 25 years, Kentucky mine-safety attorney Tony Oppegard says, he has requested and received information from MSHA without issue. But, in October 2008, that openness stopped. Since then, Oppegard says MSHA has given him the runaround and cited several exemptions to the FOIA as reasons for withholding information, which he calls “utter rubbish.” He has denounced MSHA’s failure to disclose and reminded the agency's legal counsel of the Obama administration’s new FOIA policies.

In an article in Mine Safety and Health News, Oppegard wrote that more enforcement is needed to achieve transparency on the part of MSHA. “Miners can only hope – and trust – that when the new assistant secretary takes office, he will put a quick end to the agency’s blatant attempts to protect operators who have been charged with discrimination by miners,” he wrote. Obama has yet to name an assistant secretary of labor for coal-mine safety and health.

The subscription-only newsletter also reports that it has had difficulty extracting information from MSHA. In an editorial in the same issue, it says the agency’s secrecy is suspicious. "Regarding FOIA, MSHA is spewing red tape and accomplishing nothing, except alienating the American people – miners, their families, industry and the press." (Read more) –From The Rural Blog