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Gainesville Sun NO CONSEQUENCES The Federal Freedom of Information Act turns 40 this year. But it functions as though it were 80 and in an advanced state of bureaucratic senility. Even routine FOIA requests for "public" documents can linger for months or years. The backlog of pending FOIA requests, at last count, was nearing 150,000. But even that's misleading, since some agencies don't even bother to submit annual compliance reports. "Federal FOIA is the water torture," Charles Davis, of the National FOI Coalition, told the Associated Press this week. "It's just drip, drip, drip. You wait and you wait and you wait." If only the government had that much patience when it wants something - taxes, for instance - from us. The cause of FOIA's paralysis is not bureaucratic senility, but a strategy of delay by an administration obsessed with keeping secrets. Since former Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote a memo five years ago telling agencies to look for any excuse to deny FOIA requests, official Washington has adopted a "public be damned" attitude about public information. They are free to do so because there are no consequences for noncompliance. Unlike Florida's open government laws, federal employees are not subject to fines or prosecution for ignoring the law. "There is absolutely no incentive for federal government employees to act with any sense of urgency on FOIA requests, and there is every incentive to delay and delay," Paul McMasters, First Amendment Center ombudsman told AP. A bill in Congress called the "Faster FOIA Act" would have required an expedited processing of requests. But it was dropped after President Bush issued a directive that seemed to instruct agencies to step up FOIA compliance. Given Bush's mania for secrecy, that directive was almost certainly a sham. Forty years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act, Congress should this year insist that it be taken seriously by bureaucrats who think the public's right to know is a joke. Reproduced courtesy of the Gainesville Sun. |