Lawmakers: Government spends too much taxpayer money hiding information from taxpayers

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s bipartisan leaders are concerned that the government is spending too much time and money fighting Freedom of Information Act information requests, according to a letter the lawmakers sent to U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy of (D-Vt.) asked Dodaro to provide the committee a detailed accounting of how much taxpayer money the government spends fighting FOIA requests.

The lawmakers said they were alarmed by a recent Associated Press report that found: “The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act…”

From that report:

The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.

Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.

According to the report, the government spent about $434 million in fiscal 2014 handling FOIA requests and at least $28 million in legal fees to keep information secret.

“This is not how FOIA is supposed to work,” Grassley and Leahy wrote. “Withholding information from the public unless sued undermines the very spirit of FOIA and wastes significant taxpayer money in the process.”

According to the lawmakers, the government is providing incomplete information to taxpayers about how much it actually spends in an effort to withhold information.

“While each agency is required to provide its annual FOIA litigation costs in its report, the reports fail to distinguish between the litigation costs in those cases in which the court found the government to have lawfully complied with FOIA, and the litigation costs in those cases in which the complainant substantially prevailed,” they explained.

To get a better understanding of how far the government has gone to undermine FOIA, the legislative duo has asked for a breakdown of how much taxpayer money each agency has spent trying to thwart Americans’ FOIA requests since 2009.

“This should include not only the complainants’ attorneys’ fees and other litigation costs that the court ordered the government to pay, but also the money the government spent on its own personnel, litigation overhead, and litigation-related expenses in such cases,” they wrote.

Since the beginning of year, legislative proposals to reform the way government handles FOIA requests has appeared in both chambers.

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