Obama's Secrecy Record Is Mixed

An annual report card on the Obama administration's secrecy track record found slight decreases in secrecy in the last year of the Bush-Cheney administration and a very mixed performance by Obama in upholding his promise of unprecedented transparency.

The report card, which was released on Tuesday and authored by Patrice McDermott and Amy Fuller Bennett of Openthegovernment.org, notes that there aren't yet enough quantitative indicators of secrecy in the new White House to compare the Obama administration to its predecessor. So, the study lists qualitative examples of President Obama's promising policies and, in some instances, "discouraging" practices.

Key tech findings:

• Classification Activity Still Remains High: In 2008, the number of original classification decisions decreased to 203,541, a 13 percent drop from 2007, but the numbers remain high.
• FOIA Requests and Costs Appear to Drop: Both the total number of public requests (506,471) and the total spent processing those requests ($338,677,544) dropped from 2007 to 2008. This is largely attributable to a change in how agencies classify Privacy Act (PA) requests for information about one's self: previously, some agencies had included PA requests in both their total number of requests received and their total of the cost of FOIA.
• FOIA Backlogs Slightly Reduced: The federal government processed 17,689 more FOIA requests than it received in 2008. The net improvement is in part the result of significant backlog progress on the part of a few agencies.
• More Than 25 percent of All Awards Are not Competed: In 2008, 26.6 percent ($140 billion) of federal contract dollars were uncompeted; slightly more than one-third of contract dollars were subject to full and open competition. On average since 2000, approximately 25 percent of all contract funding has not been competed, and full and open competed contracts have dropped by almost 20 percent.
• Scientific and Technical Advice Increasingly Closed to Public: In 2008, governmentwide 65% of federal advisory committee hearings were closed to the public; 17% of those not held by groups advising the three agencies that historically have accounted for the majority of closed meetings were closed. The same number of meetings was closed in 2008 as in 2007, but the total number of meetings fell--leaving fewer opportunities for public participation.
• On his first full day in office, Obama issued a memo that directed agencies to administer the Freedom of Information Act with a clear presumption in favor of disclosure.
• In June, the FDA formed a task force to develop recommendations for enhancing the transparency of the agency's drug approval process.
• Obama's open government directive process was an innovative experiment in soliciting public participation in the policy-making process: this first use has produced mixed results. A number of non-profit organizations are evaluating the process with the goal of helping the administration hone the "tools and rules" it uses to engage the public online.
• At the end of the Obama administration's participatory process of publicly brainstorming revisions to classification policy, the public had no sense of what would be included in the final recommendations.
• The government is working to overhaul Recovery.gov, the official Web site tracking the stimulus spending. Even after the redesign, however, there will be limitations to Recovery.gov that keep the stimulus program from being a model of fiscal transparency. This is because under the Recovery Act and current federal guidance not all subcontractors that receive stimulus money are required to report on the uses of the money.