Of openness. That is not the case when it comes to filling foya requests. March 2014, the Associated Press reported the Obama Administration more often than any other administration had sensors government files or outright denied access. The administration used exemption to withhold information more than 550,000 times. Agencies must consult with the white house on all document requests that may involve documents with white house equities. Just in the last year the government fully denied access or censored records in at least 250,000 cases or roughly 39 of all whys. This is the highest number of denials in the history of foya. We waited to hear from individuals to get Public Records they requested. This came from media and the foya system is broken and probably broken by design. In preparing for this hearing, the Committee Received numerous examples of delays, unreasonable redactions and abuse of fees, all of which hindered transparency. The epa strategically avoided disclosure disclosure. Documents obtained by the committee advocated a preemptive veto. The irs contacted one requester, colin hannah on four separate occasions to explain it needed more time to respond to his request. But after two year ss they closed his request. Gsa identified 70000 records as responsive to a foya request. And used the number of records as a reason to close a request from the Taxpayer Protection alliance. A requester waited ten months before the dea told them that his request for 13,000 documents related to the capture of mexican drug lord el choppo would cost 1. 4 million 1. 4 million. One freens journalist wrote, i often zrab the handling of my request as the single most disilusing experience of my life. The responses are enlightening and continue to come in they seem to be numerous bipartisan across the board insistent and just absolutely frustrating. We also saw unreasonable and inappropriate redactions. They show the fcc blacked out the chairmans initials on every email he sent or received. Blacked them out. In doing so, the fcc claimed a personal privacy exemption that isnt permissible for use even with lower level staff. Staff commentary like wow and interesting were deliberative and redacted them under b5 exemption exemption. The time and expense it takes to go through such silly, silly things is so frustrating and ridiculous. It gets very frustrating here, anybody claims, we spend this exorbitant amount of money, when youre blacking out. Interesting, the name one of my favorites, is blacking out the name of the department of defense person who sang the National Anthem as if thats some state secret. In one instance, simply quoting an attached press release qualified for a redaction while the press release itself was released in full. Its amazing how many instances we have of publicly available information that is on the departments websites, comes back via foia as redacted. And a press release . Press release that it was publicly released, is something you have to hold back from the public makes no sense. How can we trust the governments examples. Despite significant corruption within the agency in recent years, the irs is still on strakting taxpayers efforts just getting the witness here today required a subpoena. The other four agencies we asked to invite their Senior Officers they all agreed they all showed up. Not the irs, no, no not the irs, we cant have that. Only one person can testify mr. Coskin. How wrong he is. I appreciate you being here but i should not have to issue a subpoena to get your presence here. Youve dealt with this for year s s. We had to issue a subpoena. When we sent a letter asking for information, anywhere between 2 and 8 different examples we wanted information, department of justice at least they sent us a letter, at least they gave us something. It was terribly incomplete the irs no letter, nothing. We sent a request to you, i sent a subpoena to you. You give us nothing . These other four did. Im telling you, we will drag the irs up here, every single week if we have to. You are going to respond to the United States congress. You are going to respond to the American People you work for the American People. You know what if it was the other way around if the irs went after an individual, you wouldnt put up with it. Theres no way you would put up with this. We expect you to respond to requests from the United States congress 37 we have a right to see it. We have a constitutional duty to perform our oversight responsibilities. For you to not respond to this committee by giving us an electronic copy which is what you were supposed to do which the other four figured out, is not appropriate. We dont have that material and we wanted it before the hearing i had to get a subpoena to drag you here, and its wrong. Ive heard personally from multiple foia requesters that they wait and wait and wait. When they finally get a response, the response is either flatly denied or the pages are blacked out. We saw examples of that yesterday. Why is this necessary. Are there some cases where you do have to redact material. I understand that. I understand that, i appreciate that. But the lack of consistency is just stunning. The time that it takes is just unbelievable. Justice is the foia litigator and the provider of agency wide guidance ought to be the model agency, but we know it is not. The department of justice denied 40 of its fiscal year 2014. 3 of foia requests were denied based on exemptions. 37 were denied for other reasons. 5 were denied on the basis that documents were not reasonably described. Dhs is drowning in foia requests and needs to ensure the right resources are put toward properly clearing these backlogged cases. The department of Homeland Security receives about one third of all foia requests and is responsible for two thirds of the federal backlog. So its particularly disappointing to see that dhs dhs foia program, and the gaos duplication report. Even the gao has come in and said, this is a terribly mismanaged, ill executed system. So much so that theres highlights in the the gaos 2015 duplication report. My disappointment grew yesterday when the foia Research Center revealed to us that dhs hired contractors for the primary purposes of closing rather than completing cases. Individuals requesting records from Homeland Security might hear from contractors multiple times inquiring about whether or not theyre still interested in their requests. That always cracks me up, right . Citizen, person from the media goes out of their way to put in a foia request so much time goes by that government comes back to them and says are you still interested . That takes time and resources. The state department is as bad if not worse than dhs on foia compliance. The agency has opened cases dating back for decades decades. Last year the state department failed to fully respond to more than 65 of its requests. The center for efficiency government graded 15 of the top foia agencies and gave the state department an f on foia processing. The agencies before the committee today need to bring sunshine to their foia programs. The Agency Leadership has failed to make it a priority. And that makes the job of the witnesses before the Committee Much more difficult if not impossible. We know you have a tremendous amount of requests coming your direction. There are a lot of good people who work if your departments and agencyies and we thank them for their service. Not everything is bad. But it is our role and responsibility to understand how it really works, what youre up against, what youre dealing with in a very candid way. So that we can help make it better. And that we can understand it. And there undoubtedly have to be changes. My guess is you want to see some changes. We want to see some changes. We want to ferret that out. Weve heard from the people who are critical but youre right there on the front lines and you represent hundreds and literally thousands 0 people who are trying to do their jobs and deal with the tensions that come from a political persuasions that have been in both the democrat and republican side of the aisle. You have career professionals that have been there through lots of different organizations. We want to hear candidly from you what is working, what is not working but give us candid information so we can help better understand it. We thank you again for your presence and at this time ail now recognize the Ranking Member, mr. Cummings for his Opening Statement. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. I thank you for holding these very important hearings on the freedom of information act which is the corner stone of our nations open government laws. Thank you also to our agency witnesses for being with us today. You do have a critical responsibility which is to make federal records available to the American Public as effectively and efficiently as possible. Youre also charged with implementing the directive president obama issued on his first day in office to implement a new presumption of openness that reverses the policy of with Holding Information embraced by the Bush Administration. Your job is also extremely difficult and its getting harder. You and by itchmplication, the president are being blamed for the increase in foia backlogs. As we heard at our hearing yesterday, foia backlogs have increased in part as a result of cuts to sergeancy budgets and the dwindling number of foia personnel forced to process Record Numbers op incoming requests. But we did not just only hear that. Mr. Mcgraw of the the New York Times talked about a culture of unresponsiveness. And i hope that we will get to that and talk about that. Because i agree with the chairman. In order to get to the bottom of this weve got to have an honest assessment of whats going on. There were a number of witnesses that came before us yesterday to talk about a fear of people who are dealing with the foia requests honoring them the way they should be because theyre afraid to get in trouble. If thats the case, we need to hear about that. The number going back to personnel. The number of foia requests skyrocketed from 2009 to 2014. In 2009 when president obama took office, there were about 558,000 requests submitted to the federal agencies. By 2014 that number rose to more than 714,000, the surge of 28 . Thats quite a surge. On the other hand, the total number of fulltime agency foia personnel dropped to its lowest point since president obama took office. In 2009 the number of fulltime foia staff at federal agencies was 4,000. In 2014 that number dropped to 3838. A decrease of about 4 . It seems obvious they congress cannot continue to starve federal agencies for resources through budget cuts. Staffing reductions sequestration and shutdowns and then blame those agencies for not being able to do their jobs effective effectively. But again i want to go back. I want to not only deal with the personnel issues, but this whole culture that mr. Mcgraw talked about of unresponsiveness. I want to deal with that too because i want the total picture so we can be effective and efficient in trying to remedy this situation. If we want foia to work, we need to restore Adequate Funding staffing and training so agencies can handle the increasing workloads they will continue to face. Thats another issue. Is there an issue of training. Its one thing to have personnel. Its another thing to have personnel that are properly trained. Now but this is not what House Republicans are doing right now, today. Today, right now, down the hall in the appropriations committee, republicans are voting to withhold nearly 700 million, hello, 700 million from the state departments operational budget until it improves its document production processes. The operational budget includes the salaries for all, for all of the state departments foia employees. Let me say that again. Today with a Record Number of foia requests and a record low foia staffing the answer from the republicans is that we withhold two thirds of a billion dollars more than all state department foia staff salaries combined. How in the world is this supposed to help . It simply does not make sense. We know that there are problems with foia. We know there with delays. We know that we must do better. But it is hard imagine a more counter productive attack on a foia process. I also take issue with the claims that president obama has not been one of the most aggressive and forward thinking president s in the history and pressing for more open government. Ive often said that he would never get credit for anything. If things go wrong, they blame him. If things go right, he gets to credit. Those who try to argue that president bush took the same kinds of transparency actions as president obama must have amnesia. There simply is no comparison. None. Beyond ordering the presumption of openness for foia the Obama Administration issued a National Action plan to establish a consolidated foia portal and enhanced training for foia professionals. President obama did that. Established a foia Advisory Committee to improve implementation, increase proactive disclosures of government information. President obama did that. The administration implemented a new policy of disclosing white house visitor records. President obama did that. Established ethics data. Gov which posts lobbying, disclosure reports, travel reports and federal Elections Commission filings all in one place and it has made enormous amounts of government Information Available through data. Gov. Thats right. President obama did that. Finally i suspect some of my colleagues will continue their focus on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her email. Lets review the facts. On december 5th 2014, secretary clinton provided more than 30,000, 30,000 email totaling about 55,000 pages to the state department. The department has those email and is currently reviewing them to make them available to the public under foia. This is a sharp contrast to former secretary of state colin powell who admitted that he used a personal email account for official business all the time unlike secretary clinton, secretary powell did not did not preserve any of his official emails from his personal account and he did not turn them over to the state department. Im not naive. I understand the republican focuses on Hillary Clinton as she runs for president. But if we really want to review compliance with foia, if we really want to review it and straighten it out and make it right and have the law, foia law to do what theyre supposed to do and if we really want to be most effective and efficient we should not do so selectively by ignoring facts based on political expediency. As ive often said, were better than that. To conclude, theres a may jr. Bipartisan step we can take to improve foia now. In february i joined with represent iso thats what i said, i joined with former chairman, on a bipartisan basis to introduce the foia oversight and implementation act. We passed it out of our committee unanimously. Out of this committee. Unanimously. Several months ago and i hope we can move forward in a bipartisan way to pass this bill. Now the chairman said yesterday to me that were going to see what we can do to work that out. And what we need from you is suggestions. Sure maybe all of you are familiar with 653. And if there are things that you think we can do to improve that bill to make it so that it can be more effective and efficient and that you can do your jobs better, then we want to know it. Ladies and gentlemen we can go round and round and round and round in circles and well be talking about the same stuff ten years from now and the backlog will be even greater. So i look forward to hearing what you saul have to say. Give us the good, the bad and the ugly so that we can now effectively address this issue. Mr. Chairman i thank you for your indulgence. With that i yield back. Ill hold the record open for five days for writ statements. Let me introduce them. Ms. Joy ba with is chief foia officer with the defendant of state. Ms. Barr was confirmed as the assistant secretary for administration in december of 2011. As assistant secretary shes responsible for the daytoday administration of a variety of functions ranging from logistics, Records Management, privatety programs, the rk woing can tall fund and president ial travel. We appreciate you being here. Ms. Melanie ann pustay is the director of the office of information policy at the department of justice since 2007, has worked with foia for at least the last 12 years. The office of information policy sometimes we ferd to as oip is responsible for developing guidance for executive Branch Agencies on the freedom of information act. Oip is charged with ensuring that the foia guidance a implemented across the government. Before coming director she served eight years as the Deputy Director oip. Ms. Karen neuman serves as the chief foia officer within the department of Homeland Security. In her hole was chief privacy officer, ms. Neuman is responsible for evaluating Department WideProgram Systems technologies and rule making for potential privacy impact. She has extensive expertise in Privacy Policy law both within the department and in collaboration with the rest of federal government. She centralizes both foia and privacy acts to provide oversight and support implementation across the department. Mr. Bordi fontenot serves as the assistant secretary of management in the department of treasury. The chief foia officer for which year did you become that . Just this year