A nomination on Bloomberg’s web editor 2012 best-of roundup is a good occasion to revisit the audit they conducted of the Obama administration by filing and tracking FOIA requests with 20 cabinet-level agencies. Of those, 19 failed to respond to requests for travel cost information completely or in the prescribed time frame.
From the Sept. 27 piece by Jim Snyder and Danielle Ivory:
Even agency heads who publicly announce their events — including Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius — didn’t provide the costs of their out-of-town trips more than three months after the initial request.
…
A request made in June for the travel records of Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will remain unfulfilled for more than a year, according to a federal official involved in the case.
“We really appreciate your patience in this matter. The estimated completion date is July 2013,” wrote Chris Barnes, a State Department FOIA official, in a Sept. 24 e-mail. Under FOIA, the department is required to offer a timetable for delayed responses.
It generated a lot of dialogue last fall. Got thoughts on their methodology here? Share ’em in the comments.