Denials of access and censorship of federal records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have reached an all-time high under the Obama administration, according to an analysis conducted by the Associated Press.
The news service looked at 2014 FOIA request response data from 100 federal agencies and found that backlogged requests, denials, and information redactions had reached record levels for the second straight year.
The number of backlogged requests in 2014 increased by 200,000 — or 55 percent — over 2013, the AP found.
Federal agencies also fully denied or censored a record 250,581 FOIA requests — or 39 percent. The overall response rate dropped by four percent from the previous year to 647,142 requests. The overall number of requests submitted by journalists, watchdog groups, and companies reached 714,231, also an all-time high.
The AP also found that federal agencies routinely denied requests despite having the sought-after records.
In one-third of cases in which agencies claimed that records did not exist or that the documents were exempted, the agencies ended up admitting that their initial responses were faulty when challenged by records-seekers.
The AP’s damning analysis comes amid a firestorm surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private email use as secretary of state. That issue has highlighted weaknesses in the State Department’s handling of FOIA requests. State received numerous requests for Clinton’s emails but wrongly claimed that it did not have the records.
The AP’s report also undermines the Obama administration’s recurring claim that it is the most transparent in history. That increased transparency was supposed to have included greater access to government documents under FOIA.
As the AP notes, the White House claims that in cases where records exist and where FOIA filers are willing to pay reproduction fees, federal agencies provide some sort of record 91 percent of the time. But that is still a record low for the Obama White House, according to the AP.
In what was seen as a gesture symbolic of its failure to live up to its pro-transparency hype, the Obama administration announced on Monday that it was officially exempting the White House’s Office of Administration from FOIA requests. The office had benefited from a de facto exemption since the George W. Bush administration.
Asked Tuesday about that move, White House press secretary Josh Earnest denied that the policy shift was evidence of a lack of transparency in the administration.
“We actually have a lot to brag about,” he told reporters.