I ask because it’s like this administration never passes up the chance to do that particular group wrong:
One day after being sworn into office, President Barack Obama instructed federal agencies to ensure government transparency by complying with the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act law.
[snip]
One year later, Obama’s requests for transparency have apparently gone unheeded. In fact a provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.
Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.
Via Instapundit. Mind you, it’s fair to take the position that what actually happened here may simply be that this administration just doesn’t really care sufficiently about transparency to do any real heavy lifting on the subject: they said a bunch of things during the campaign to get the digital libertarians to vote for Democrats, Democrats got elected, and now the digital libertarians can be safely ignored until 2012. It’s also fair to not really care that the federal bureaucracy is still playing need-to-know (more accurately, don’t-want-you-to-know) with unrestrained enthusiasm. I take the position that you do need people out there who won’t stop pushing and prodding at transparency, but I can understand if other folks don’t.
But, really. If you thought that your vote for an Illinois Democrat machine politician was going to be a vote for transparency… Abbie Hoffman, thou hath lived in vain!
Well, OK, we knew that already.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
While I’m no fan of either bush or obama, what is the percentage of refused requests? Telling us the number refused without knowing how many requests were made total in each of those 2 fiscal years does not provide enough information.
RT: Didn’t click through, did we?
I know this is off topic but thanks for bringing out the Led ! could listen to them all day long.
But this is perfectly consistent for Obama. If you observe him closely you’ll see the same pattern repeatedly: he makes a declaration about what a policy will be in the future, and then his administration does the opposite. He declared that lobbyists would be kept out of administration jobs and then hired lots of lobbyists; he declared that bills would be posted online several days before being voted on, and then failed to do that; he declared that his administration would stop pursuing users of medical marijuana, and then the Justice department stepped up raids against dispensers of medical marijuana; he vowed to close Guantanamo and more than a year later it’s still open. There are so many examples of it that now when I hear him say something, I assume that it means they’ll be doing the opposite.