The Obama administration can boast better responsiveness to public requests for information than the previous administration, but given that Obama has said government transparency is a priority, the latest numbers show that much more needs to be done.
Government responsiveness to open records requests under President George W. Bush was poor. Bush even signed a memo instructing departments to lean toward denying requests if they could at all make a case for secrecy. Obama, during his campaign and later when he came into office, pledged more transparency.
His first step was to reverse Bush's order, telling agencies that if at all possible they should release information that was requested. But there remained a tremendous backlog and the time it took for agencies to respond was often months.
An Associated Press report on federal open records request as part of national Sunshine Week - a week devoted to open government - shows that some progress has been made. According to the AP, in 2011 the government responded to more requests than ever. The 576,000 requests represented a 5 percent increase over the year before.
Additionally, according to the AP, 23 or 37 agencies either reduced backlogs of requests, or at the least kept them getting bigger.
But those same 37 agencies only turned over records in 65 percent of the requests, according to the Associated Press report. The White House, however, said in its own report that it provided all or part of the requested records 93 percent of the time when you exclude instances where it cannot find the requested records, where the request is determined to be improper under the law or where the person requesting didn't want to pay for copies.
Clearly, the administration is more focused on transparency than the previous administration when it comes to requests for public records. But the time involved in complying with requests - in many cases several months if not longer - is still too long, and the number of instances where people do not get the information they want demonstrates that additional work needs to be done.
The administration says more people within the departments have spent time filling PIA requests, and it noted that the government has increased spending by about $19 million on processing requests, according to the Associated Press.
No one can deny that access to information has improved under Obama. But more needs to be done in order to instill a culture of openness within the federal government's various agencies. Government workers at all levels must understand that they work for us, the taxpayers, and as such we have a right to see how our government is operating, whether at the federal, state or local level.
