The White House is set to announce Tuesday that it will exempt its Office of Administration from federal rules requiring it to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, allowing the record-keeping agency to reject transparency asks.
Formalizing a de facto policy that was upheld under previous presidencies, the move came in the form of a “final rule,” which means it will be codified without public comment. The action effectively eliminates any formal process for the public to request that the White House voluntarily release records through a system known as “discretionary disclosure.”
The Office of Administration is part of the Executive Office of the President, which is federally required to hand over certain documents when they are requested. Although it complied with those rules for 30 years, the Office of Administration generally ceased responding to FOIA requests under President George W. Bush and has continued to ignore them under President Barack Obama.
Although the rule stems from a years-long lawsuit, filed before Obama took office in 2008, the announcement comes at a particularly ironic time—the start of Sunshine Week, during which civil liberties watchdogs promote accountability and push for the government to be open in disclosing information. Monday was National Freedom of Information Act Day.
“It’s a little tone deaf to do this on Sunshine Week, even if it’s an administrative housecleaning,” Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government initiative for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told USA Today.
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“[T]he systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.”
—Greg Pruitt, Associated Press
Among the records that the Office of Administration keeps are White House emails. In 2007, the government watchdog group Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) requested documents from the office to look into a cache of up to 22 million emails missing from White House servers. The center’s request was denied.
CREW filed a lawsuit against the office, but that claim and a lengthy appeal were overturned by a 2009 court ruling which found that the Office of Administration was not an “agency” as defined by FOIA, and thus lacked independent authority.
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