Broad coalition urges Obama to open government to more scrutiny, expand data available on Web

A broad coalition is urging the new administration "to use the Internet to publish reams of new information about federal spending, policies and performance as well as other records that have been increasingly shrouded from public view," reports Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post. The groups also want Congress to "invest in technology to bring federal record-keeping and communication into the 21st century."

"First and foremost, the group wants Obama to reverse the policies of the Bush administration regarding the handling of public records," which began with the secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy policy task force and President Bush's order limiting access to records of former presidents and "went into overdrive" after Sept. 11, 2001, with such steps as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's advice to agencies "to reject requests for access to public documents allowed under the Freedom of Information Act if they could find a legal argument against the release," Layton writes. "It was a reversal from the Clinton administration's stance, which assumed that records were public unless government proved otherwise." Later, the White House told agencies to limit access to "sensitive" information, some of which was later classified.

"On the national security side, it's almost become a reflexive response. The theme was: Secrecy makes us safer. And none of us agree with that," said Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a nonpartisan group that monitors the Office of Management and Budget and organized the coalition of conservative, liberal, libertarian and non-ideological groups. In contrast, Obama co-sponsored a law requiring OMB to put government contract information online, at http://www.usaspending.gov, and in his campaign said he would open the governemnt to greater scrutiny.

According to the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, the federal government granted only 36 percent of FOIA requests last year. From 1998 to the time of Ashcroft's memo, the figure was 51 percent. "Meanwhile, agencies are taking longer to respond to FOIA requests," with one-third of them backlogged, Layton reports. (Read more)