washington watch

Government bureaucrats hate the Freedom of Information Act. We understand why. By law, the FoIA allows nosy taxpayers to ask what bureaucrats are doing with our money, is it something we really need to spend money on and, if not, why,

All agencies of government, from those in Lexington County all the way up to Washington, bureaucrats should make it easy for any citizen to request open records.

The US Department of Interior does not and even wants to make it harder, the National Newspaper Association reported.

The group joined 39 other news organizations to oppose the Interior Department’s proposed Freedom of Information Act rule.

The department includes such agencies as the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which community newspapers cover in their localities.

Interior has proposed several changes in its regulations that would make it hard for citizens and journalists to get information.

Among the changes are to

• Eliminate the ability to make FoIA requests by email.

• Require such detailed specifics in a request that requesters could easily fail to pass the hurdles to even get the agencies to search for records;

• Make it harder to get fees waived. That could make FoIA research unaffordable.

• Limit the agencies’ obligations to search for records in response to a request.

NNA President Andrew Johnson, publisher of the Dodge County Pionier, Mayville, WI, said restricting public information for agencies that so broadly touch American’s communities prompted the opposition.

“We frown on barriers thrown down before any citizen’s efforts to get information from government agencies.

“In this case, the Interior Department particularly caught our attention because its work so intimately touches smaller communities. Community newspapers cover these agencies and, although we do not often have time to wait for the slow FoIA process to get information to us, our experience is that the formal FoIA rules tend to bleed into the agencies’ general public affairs stance in talking with journalists.

“We should not have to be private detectives to investigate exactly what records are called and where they are to get a request answered. That is not what the federal FoIA law requires. We think these regulations are way over the top. We will be discussing them with our Congressional delegations.”

Formal comments to the Interior Department were filed by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and joined by other news organizations as a coalition.

In the comments, the group said: “The News Media Coalition is gravely concerned about the proposed rule, many provisions of which are flatly inconsistent or incompatible with the act, and would harm journalists’ ability to gather and report information to the public about the actions of the Department and its personnel.”