Transcript

FOIA Advisory Committee Meeting  

Thursday, March 5, 2026

10 a.m. (ET)

Kirsten Mitchell: Good morning. We're going to allow a few seconds here for our attendees to join the meeting and then we'll get started. Good morning and welcome to the March 5th, 2026 federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee meeting. I'm Kirsten Mitchell, this committee's designated federal officer. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and is a virtual meeting. I'm confirming that we have a quorum with 15 members present in accordance with the committee's bylaws.

A very special welcome to Sean Glendening, who was appointed to the committee last week by Jim Byron, Senior Advisor to the Archivist of the United States. Sean is the Director of the Office of Information Policy (OIP) at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and we are thrilled to have him here today.

Sean Glendening: Thank you, Kristen. Good morning, everyone. Good to meet you, appreciate it.

Kirsten Mitchell: We have two members who are unable to join us today, Scott Hodes and Sarah Weicksel. Because this is a public meeting, we ask members to keep their cameras on. A big thank you to the audiovisual team at the National Archives for live streaming this meeting on the National Archives YouTube channel and for all their behind-the-scenes support. Thank you also to Dan Levenson, my colleague, who is an alternate designated federal officer, who is joining us today. And I now will turn the meeting over to Alina Semo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, the FOIA ombuds and this committee's Chairperson. Alina, over to you.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Kirsten, I appreciate it. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. I am Alina M. Semo, both Director of OGIS and this committee's chairperson. It is also my pleasure to welcome you all to the sixth meeting of the sixth term of the FOIA Advisory Committee.

Welcome to all of you who are watching us today, either via Zoom or with a slight delay, on the National Archives YouTube channel. Meeting materials, including the agenda and slides, are available on the FOIA Advisory Committee page of our OGIS website, www.archives.gov forward slash OGIS. The committee last met in September of 2025, and quite a bit of subcommittee work has happened since then.

And as a reminder, we have three subcommittees who are working hard this term to develop concrete recommendations for statutory reform of FOIA, to examine the challenges arising from the increasing volume and frequency of FOIA requests, and to increase the adoption and implementation of past FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations.

Before we launch into our meeting agenda today, I have a few housekeeping items to cover, and committee members, I know I go through this every time, but it still bears repeating.

First, the meeting is public in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, FACA, which requires open access to committee meetings and operations. In accordance with FACA, we have already posted both minutes and transcripts for our September meeting. 

Due to the government shutdown last fall, we postponed our December 2025 meeting to give our committee members time to regroup and catch up. And as a result, we have added an additional meeting, July 16, as our final meeting of this term.

On our website, you will also find committee members' biographies, including our newest member, Sean Glendening. Welcome, Sean! We are delighted to have you join the committee, and look forward to your participation and insights as the subcommittees are shaping their recommendations in the next several months.

Sean Glendening: Thank you, Alina. 

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Sean. Please also visit and follow our blog, the FOIA Ombuds, and during today's meeting, here are the housekeeping notes that I really want you guys to focus on. I want to encourage committee members to use the raise hand option. It's the icon at the bottom of your screen, bottom middle of your screen, when you want to speak or ask a question. The raise hand option is even better than what we used to use, which was, emailing the host and panelists in our chat. From the drop-down menu, but it is an option, so you can certainly use that as well. And Kirsten and I will also try to monitor the chat to see whether someone is interested in asking a question or making a comment. 

An important note to both committee members and all Zoom participants. In order to comply with the spirit and intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, please use the Zoom chat function for housekeeping and procedural matters only. Please do not enter any substantive comments in the chat function as they will not be recorded in the transcript of this meeting.

If any committee member needs to take a break during the course of the meeting, please do not disconnect from the web event. Instead, mute your microphone by using the microphone icon, and turn off your camera by using the camera icon. And please send a quick chat to me and Kirsten to let us know if you'll be gone for more than a few minutes. Join us again as soon as you are able. And an important reminder to all committee members, please identify yourself by name and affiliation each time you speak. I always forget that as well, so I'll try to remember again today. It definitely helps make the transcript more clear, as well as our minutes.

Members of the public who wish to submit written public comments to the committee may do so using our public comments form, which is available at archives.gov forward slash OGIS forward slash public dash comments. We review all public comments, and if they comply with our public comments posting policy, we post them as soon as we are able. And we will have a public comment period at the end of our meeting today.

I want to say that although we have allotted three hours for this meeting today, we're going to remain flexible. We may not go the full three hours, and if that is the case, I would be happy to give you the gift of time back to everyone. But we do have a lot to discuss today, so we wanted to assure ourselves that we've got enough time for everything. And just a final note, we have noted in our Federal Register notice announcing the meeting that public comments at the end of our session will be limited to three minutes per individual. Any questions on housekeeping or anything else that I've said so far from our committee members?

Hearing none, I'm gonna keep going. Okay, so we have allocated the bulk of our meeting time today to hear from each of our three subcommittees to share their work since the September meeting. Our hope is that the presentations will spark conversation, questions, and discussion among the committee members. So, with that, if I could have the next slide, please.

And, I appreciate that, and Kirsten, I'm sorry I didn't say that earlier. Next slide for the housekeeping. First up, we are going to hear from the Implementation Subcommittee, co-chaired by Jason Baron and Marianne Manheim. Jason and Marianne, you have the floor.

Jason R. Baron: Thanks very much, Alina Jason Baron, University of Maryland. So we've been primarily working on a focus group exercise, pulling in FOIA, the FOIA community inside the government to have conversations. I'm going to turn it over to Deborah and Shelley, and then we have a few other things to note that we have been pursuing. So, Deborah.

Deborah Moore: Thanks, Jason. Good morning, everyone. I'm Deborah Moore from the Department of Education. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about progress the Implementation Subcommittee has made since our last meeting with regard to the focus groups.

The goal of our working group, which is titled Barrier Analysis Working Group, has been to uncover what prevents federal agencies from implementing the 20 FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations that are directed to agencies for action. As well as learn from agencies what strategies they have found successful in their efforts to implement recommendations.

So, over the past several months, we've conducted multiple focus groups made up of FOIA professionals from across the federal government, and today we're really looking forward to sharing with you what we learned. Before we get to that, if we could just have the next slide.

I want to tell you about the four areas that we focused on with our questions. The first was trying to get at agencies' motivations for implementing FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations. We also asked them about obstacles and barriers they faced in their efforts to do that. Then we shifted to asking about strategies they had found successful in implementing recommendations. And finally, we touched on, sort of, what we call their wish list. What decisions, actions, changes they'd like to see that they felt would help them in their efforts to implement recommendations.

We could jump to the next slide. Before we get into the findings, which Shelley is going to share with you in detail, I want to give you a little bit of insight into some of the key aspects of how we conducted the focus groups, so you can understand how we got to where we are. So, as I mentioned, our target audience was FOIA professionals who've been active in the field within the past three years. We…one thing that was really important to us from the start was to recruit very widely to reach the broadest audience possible, because we wanted our findings to accurately reflect the full variety of experiences of FOIA professionals from federal agencies of all sizes.

So we started with sources like FOIA.gov, OGIS's extensive contact list, and also contacts that our subcommittee members shared with us of FOIA professionals, and we ended up with a list of 400 unique email addresses of FOIA professionals. So, we emailed a series of communications inviting their participation and we augmented that outreach with social media postings. To gather input from potential participants, we used a simple three-question information collection tool that we shared with initial respondents to determine their eligibility and also the size of their agency, as measured by the number of requests they received annually.

I think it's important to note that at no point in the focus group recruitment, establishment, or implementation did we formally collect their names or their affiliation. Throughout the process, we were very clear with potential participants about what information we were collecting, why we were collecting it, and how we would use it. We also took several measures to honor what we promised them from the start, that their confidentiality would be protected at every step. 

And ultimately, these efforts to recruit widely, communicate clearly, and ensure confidentiality protections were in place really paid off.

We held 12 focus groups of 52 FOIA professionals, representing all sizes of agencies, with participants freely sharing with us their experiences and their valuable insights. So, as I said, we're really eager to share our findings, so I'm going to turn it over to Shelley.

Shelley Kimball: Thanks, Deborah. Next slide, please. Thank you. So, just a little explanation on how we analyzed the information that we learned in the focus groups. So we didn't record the focus groups, but we did have a note taker at each group who would take notes on all the comments, and again, making sure that we were protecting, confidentiality of the participants.

So then, when we put together all of the notes, I analyzed them for the primary themes that emerged from each question. So, one thing to note also is that this doesn't mean that these are the opinions of every FOIA professional nationally, but these are the opinions of those who participated in the focus groups, and they really provide great insights for us as a committee to understand how or why access professionals would use our recommendations.

So the first question focused on what motivated the participants to make changes in their agencies to any FOIA-related processes. And the first thing that we were trying to learn was whether our recommendations or committee recommendations were playing a part in those plans. Most of the participants said that they had not seen our recommendations until they looked at the read-aheads we sent for the focus groups, or they had seen content in the Chief FOIA Officer Reports that asked whether our agencies had enacted our recommendations. So, while they're not necessarily the impetus for change in agencies, they told us that often and repeatedly, that they could be used later in the process. To act as leverage, to convince leadership or decision makers to make whatever changes they were proposing.

So, instead, they primarily were making changes in their agencies, as the result of the need for some efficiency in some way, so if there was a better, faster, more accurate way to do something, that was when the change might come in. Anything to reduce backlogs was also a motivation for change, whether there was an internal process or adopting software. There was lots of conversation about software. Litigation risk or any other kind of risk avoidance was another motivation. Maybe discovering that either through being sued, hearing that others were being sued, recognizing that they may be open to some kind of risk, those were definitely motivations to maybe shore up processes.

Anytime there were leadership priorities at any level, that could be a motivation for change. In fact, leadership support or lack of it has a strong place in these results, as you'll see throughout, when we're talking about obstacles, strategies for success, and what participants wish they had, they often came back to that sort of internal cultural structure.

And last on our list here is DOJ and OIP guidance. Participants really appreciate communication about FOIA best practices, and the guidance, resources, reports, and trainings from OIP was definitely valuable to participants, and you'll see in the wish list later on, this is something they would like more of, next slide, please. Thank you. 

So, the obstacles to making change. I don't think that this is necessarily going to surprise anyone who's part of this government transparency world, but I think it can be great fodder for helping agencies implement effective efficiencies, or efficiencies more effectively. Our participants talked a lot about not having time, money, staffing to meet the needs of the rising volume of requests. And adding to that was the pressure from employee turnover and the loss of FOIA workers due to the reductions in force. And then following all of that with the government shutdowns. So, for some participants, responding to FOIA requests was a collateral duty, and at the time of the focus groups, they were still trying to find their way through all of this work that was kind of backlogging for them.

And then, they talked about overlaying the fact that FOIA is not always critical to each agency's mission. We heard time and time again from FOIA workers that their work feels like a low institutional priority in the grand scheme of the work being done by the agencies. So it was then hard to get that additional time, money, and staffing for it. With all of this as a backdrop, they said they just can't always have time to consider, plan, and carry out reforms. And when they do, there are a lot of hoops to jump through because the institutional processes for change can be slow. Next slide, please.

But, they did give us a lot of successful strategies that they had had internally in their organizations for making efficient changes. One of the best uses of our recommendations as a committee was to use them as leverage. We're then explaining to leadership or convincing leadership to support these proposed changes. They also said that if they could show some kind of metric for change, that also provided support for their requests. Again, you see here, risk mitigation was a great way also for them to explain why an efficiency, why a change was necessary. And then having leadership support for their proposed changes goes a long way toward bringing them to life. Next slide, please.

So the final question we asked in all of the focus groups was, what would clear the path for more successful implementation of recommendations or general changes to their FOIA processes? And so you can see here, having that increased funding and staffing, leadership buy-in, supportive internal culture, appropriate technology, and I say that because it depended on the size of the agency. The software wasn't a one-size-fits-all, and so it depended on the number of responses they were managing. Well-organized structural systems and processes, and this could be internal rules and methods, but it could also include statutory reforms. They also would love more access to trainings, awareness building of our committee recommendations. They're interested in figuring out how to harness AI for redaction and analytics. And then more inter-agency coordination and community building. 

So on this final one, one of the most striking parts of conducting these focus groups, I think, for all of us who participated as moderators or note-takers, was the consistent call in each group for connections among them and community building. They want to be able to connect with others who are working in the FOIA space. Sometimes… people would be the only ones at their agencies, or that this was a new collateral duty, and they were looking for others to talk about best practices. Others had been in the profession for a long time and really looking forward to sharing those best practices.

So in every focus group, we really had to open some time for participants to connect with each other, because they seemed almost starved for it. Some said that they participated in these focus groups just for that reason, to connect with other FOIA professionals. So, this last one on the list about interagency coordination and community building was a really common theme all the way through.

So, before I finish up, I just wanted to also say, on behalf of the team who worked on this project, that we wanted to express our deep gratitude for every federal worker who responded to our requests, our emails, who tried to schedule time with us and who participated in these groups. We learned so much, and we are really appreciative of all the insights that they gave us.

Jason R. Baron: Thanks, Shelley, so much. Yes, Deborah, yourself, Sarah, have done yeoman's work over the many months to pull this together, and we're hoping that we will have findings, and… perhaps a recommendation as the result of your efforts in our subcommittee report, which will go to the full committee. That's all great.

We have some other thoughts and activities, whatever, that sort of in the planning works, and I will turn it over to whoever wishes to start. Rick, Marianne, Frank, you all have been involved in, in further brainstorming. Who wishes to go? Rick? Marianne?

Marianne Manheim: Rick, do you want to start with how this all kind of started, like, a year and a half ago, really?

Rick Peltz-Steele: I guess… I guess I could. A little… a bit of context, though I'm not… I think you and Frank are the experts on our present situation. But we've been talking a lot, and…working a lot behind the scenes on trying to figure out ways to organize the universe of committee recommendations that would be maybe more practical or impactful in the FOIA officer community, the agency community, than the accumulated list that is generally chronological.

And this isn't started, actually, with us, the implementation subcommittee preceding us, created a sort of a manipulation spreadsheet of the recommendations. We took a stab at doing likewise. We discussed it, and we surveyed committee members on significant items. And we started to try to think about the wealth of experience and recommendations from the committee in terms of subject matter or practicality, as different dimensions besides simple chronology.

And so, we're really hoping that the culmination of that will be some kind of useful product or presentation going forward, that'll allow the recommendations to be more impactful, again, and better communicated to agencies of FOIA officers. But with that, perhaps Marianne or Frank can speak to where we are with it.

Marianne Manheim: And I'll… and I'll take a… I think we kept… we were getting closer and closer to the end of this term, and I kept thinking… we started with, what, 68 of these, and we thought, they're so overwhelming, and there's some that we just all agreed were so important. 

That, to us, were… we… hit us as the most important ones to work on, so we thought we'd take a step back, look at what we did a year ago, and see what could we do, and…

Actually, a lot of things that are there are very similar to the wish list, to what Shelley just went over. So, it's like, in our own way, we were… we were there. They're in these recommendations, but we wanted to actually make… highlight them as we end this, so that way, when the next… if there's another implementation meeting come… you know, coming in the future, or a committee, they'll have sort of, like, the top list, and then I started looking at it a little bit more from, like, how would you actually implement these? And not just leaving it as, here, get rid of your backlog, but, like, here are ideas, and actually giving thoughts to how to implement these things, besides what to do. So, it wouldn't necessarily be a…the list will always be there, but to actually make it more practical as we leave to the next term. So that's where we were going with this, and we're working on it.

Jason R. Baron: Great. And Frank, do you have anything you just want to say for two cents?

Frank LoMonte: I mean, I'll just add, in addition to the good work that Rick is… I'm sorry, Frank LoMonte from CNN representing the news media requester community.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you, Frank.

Frank LoMonte: In addition to the really excellent work that Rick has done in trying to rethink the presentation of the past recommendations along more of a logical subject matter mode that would more attract the way people would be likely to engage with the recommendations. One of the other thoughts that we're developing, and that we really encourage public input on, is trying to make the presentation of these recommendations into more of a toolkit approach, rather than a report card on the work of the committee approach. I think that will be particularly important as we accumulate decades' worth of experience of the committee. No one will go back and dig down to the bottom of 10 or 12 or 20 years' worth of work. 

And so, in order to make the work of the committee into a living document that people can be encouraged to engage with, and perhaps even use to benchmark their own progress, we really need to rethink, not to scrap the current dashboard, but to supplement it with something that is more of a toolkit that invites people in to participate in the process, and I think this really does track right back to the insights that Shelley was reporting. I had the opportunity to sit in a couple of those discussions, and it was really eye-opening to see the level of… the lack of awareness of the prior recommendations of the committee, which I do not fault the FOIA officers for at all.

Lots of people are new to those jobs, or as Shelley was pointing out, they have other jobs. This is not their only responsibility, so it is really our burden and our challenge to figure out ways to keep resurfacing those recommendations outside of the big fanfare announcement every two years.

Marianne Manheim: And I'll… Marianne Mannheim, I forgot to say that I'm with NIH, and I'm just going to throw on one more thing behind what Frank just said, and actually one of the reasons why I joined federal… the advisory committee is because I wanted that coordination. I wanted that chance to talk to other agencies and talk to other people, so it's… it's kind of like this circle that, you know, all the things that come out of these things are why we joined this committee as well.

Rick Peltz-Steele: if I…also, first, I may also identify myself, sorry about that, but I'm at the University of Massachusetts Law School. But I, I just can't help but, I guess second, third, what Frank and Marianne have said, that working at the same time on the focus group data collection the synergy here was striking, and I think something that actually even sort of slowed us down a bit was that we saw the opportunity to use what we were getting from the focus groups  first to learn better how our recommendations could be organized in ways that would be compatible with what the needs of FOIA officers are…and also, it helped us better understand how… what we could be produced, and as an output that FOIA officers would find first of all, and then find usable.

So there's a… kind of a…it shows us, as Frank said, it showed us first the low level of recognition of a lot of the work that went into the recommendations, not through anyone's fault. But it also showed us the opportunity that that presents to… to close that gap. Thank you.

Jason R. Baron: I see that Nieva has a hand up.

Kirsten Mitchell: Oh, Nieva, you're on mute.

Nieva Brock: My apologies. I should know this by now. Nieva Brock, Department of War. This is directed towards Shelley. Shelley, when you did your, or actually the whole group, when you did your research and had… spoke with the focus groups, was there any result that surprised you? Was there something that arose out of these focus groups that were not in line with your experiences?

Shelley Kimball: That's kind of the fun of focus groups generally, is that sense of discovery, and, I would love for Deborah to answer this question as well, because we came at it… I'm from the requester community, and Deborah being part of the federal community. For me, I think what surprised me was, the real craving for information, best practice connections. It just said so much about the motivations of those who participated that they really want to make this process efficient. It's, you know, struggling with backlogs is no fun for anyone on either side of this equation, and so I was impressed, and I also felt like, what can we do? Like, that's really where… where my motivation is, is how can we help get the great information out about the committee, but also find ways to communicate these potential efficiencies. But, Deborah, I would love to know if you, what you thought as a federal worker…

Deborah Moore: Sure, this is Deborah Moore from the Department of Education. Thanks for the question. I think that's a great question. In general, my experience was, I don't think there were too many surprises, but I did feel a little bit surprised, as Shelley mentioned, at sort of the level of hunger of the FOIA professionals for connecting. They used this opportunity as a tool, not just to connect in the group, but a lot of them were like, I can't participate today, but please, if you meet again, or connect me with these people, just… it was so consistent. So that was a surprise. And I guess the only other surprise is I did talk to one FOI professional who said his agency was appropriately resourced. That was a surprise. I didn't think there was any FOIA office that had enough to get there, but they were able to handle their backlog. They did admit that they had a fairly low volume of requests, but that encouraged me. I guess it is possible, so that was a good surprise.

Nieva Brock: Thank you.

Jason R. Baron: Anyone else on the committee with questions? I don't see any, but feel free. Well, let me…close us out, with an opportunity to say hello to Sean Glendening. Sean, you're warmly welcome on this committee. We don't know each other.. Alina and I are veteran alums of Civil Division Federal Programs Branch, and Alina worked in OIP. The first, head of OGIS, Miriam Nisbet, came from OIP. 

Those of us who are alums know every one of your predecessors, including the illustrious Dick Huff and the late Dan Metcalfe, and we worked very closely all along. I've been, this is my third term here, with OIP directors, the last of whom before you, Bobby Talebian, did a wonderful job of, doing, helping out in terms of OIP, assisting in getting the message out of this committee. It was Bobby who took up a recommendation of ours from the last term that came out of the implementation subcommittee that a question would be asked on the Chief FOIA Officer Annual Reports, about what agencies were doing with respect to our many recommendations. I know it wasn't in this report expressly. And we're very much interested in what the results are coming out of this year's annual reports. 

But, in my view, I've been on the Implementations Committee, which, for two terms now, David Cuillier here was the committee chair last year, and…it seems very apparent to us last term, and I think it continues this term, that OIP plays a really central role, that FOIA officers look to OIP for guidance. They're not necessarily following everything that OGIS is saying generally about FOIA, although OGIS does a wonderful effort in getting the word out through their blog or otherwise, but it's OIP that is, you know, has the responsibility for FOIA guidance, and so we've worked very closely with your office in the past has adopted recommendations in terms of putting out bulletins and getting the word out, and I, for one, would like to have a continuing dialogue with you for the remainder of this term, and going forward, so that we can continue to, work jointly together to get the word out from what this committee's fine work is all about.

Sean Glendening: Jason, I appreciate that, and appreciate the work of all of the committee in putting together these recommendations fully agree that it's coming out of OIP it carries a lot of weight, and we are always looking to make this process a more efficient process to solicit recommendations as to how we can do things better. So, yeah, absolutely, I would like to have an ongoing dialogue about how we can improve and how OIP can amplify the message to make things more efficient.

Jason R. Baron: Thanks. I think with that, I have one other thing to say, which I know, you know, in every webinar I participate in, I answer the comments that are in chat. I know there's a public comment period, but I encourage people on our subcommittee and others to look at what the comments have been this morning on chat, and if we have the opportunity to, respond to those comments, or to any, oral comments that are made, you know, I would appreciate reserving that opportunity. Back to Alina, Kirsten.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Jason. I really appreciate that. I just… before we move on from all the great work that the Implementation Subcommittee has been doing, I just want to pause for a minute and make sure that no other committee members have… Questions or comments about what everyone presented today? Just taking a beat. And that doesn't mean you can't ask a question later. It's certainly not prohibited. Okay, I'm not seeing any hands.

So with that. Let's move on. We're actually making great progress in terms of time. Thank you, Kristin, for advancing the slide. We are now moving on to the Volume and Frequency Subcommittee, co-chaired by Nick Wittenberg and Nieva Brock. And I am going to turn the floor over to them, so they can tell us a little more about what's happening on their end. Although I do understand that Shelley Kimball again, from Johns Hopkins University, is planning to present on behalf of the subcommittee this morning, so should I give Shelley the floor?

Alina M. Semo: Nieva or Nick?

Nick Wittenberg: Yes, that's correct.

Kirsten Mitchell: thumbs up.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you. Alright, so Shelley, back to you.

Shelley Kimball: Okay, so next slide, please. Perfect, thank you. So, although our focus groups are closed, there's still a great opportunity for federal FOIA workers to share their experiences on a couple of topics that we're trying to learn more about for the Volume and Frequency Committee. So, what you have here on the screen, there's a QR code and a shortened link to a survey. We are looking for current, federal FOIA, workers, or anyone who's worked in the past three years to respond to FOIA requests. And we're… this survey covers two topics. First, we're looking at the most challenging kinds of requests, whether they're unduly burdensome, vexatious, voluminous, whatever is most challenging, and how to manage those requests, and then separately, we're looking at AI-generated requests, and the effects they are having on the request system, and also how you are, recognizing that they're AI-generated, just to sort of get a handle on what's happening here, with the introduction of AI to this process. These questions are, primarily open-ended, so it's an opportunity to really share your experiences, what you're seeing, what's happening in your agency, and again, I'll be coding through and reading every answer and finding those prominent themes so we can find some solutions based on this for the Volume and Frequency Committee.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, Shelley, thank you so much. Nick and Nieva, anything to add?

Nick Wittenberg: Nothing additional at this time.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I just want to remind everyone who is watching us today, the slides for the PowerPoint slides that we're showing today are also available on our website. So, if you don't have a chance to scan the QR code right now, you can always go at your convenience to the website and scan the QR code in order to take the survey. So…thank you, Shelley, and thank you, Nick and Nieva. I really appreciate your work. And thank you to Dave Cuillier. He's also on the subcommittee.

Okay, I know we had built in a break from 11.15 to 11.30, but we are way ahead of schedule, and I wanted to ask the committee members if they want to just keep going and power through our Statutory Reform Subcommittee. How does everyone feel about that? That seems fine. Okay, thanks, Frank. Thanks, Nick. Okay, so, I'm sorry, we need to go back a slide.

Kirsten Mitchell: Forward a slide.

Alina M. Semo: Forward a slide.

Kirsten Mitchell: One more.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you. Thanks, Kristin. Okay, so we are certainly not least now going to hear from the FOIA Statutory Reform Subcommittee, co-chaired by Ryan Mulvey and Whitney Frazier-Jenkins. They are our co-chairs, and I'm going to turn it over to them. I don't know who's presenting, Ryan or Whitney, but you…

Ryan Mulvey: We are both presenting and Deborah, too. We're gonna invite...

Alina M. Semo: [inaudible]

Ryan Mulvey: as well.

Alina M. Semo: Great, thank you.

Ryan Mulvey: So we've been hard at work, our working groups and the full subcommittee, and we have passed out of the subcommittee three recommendations for the consideration of the full committee. Obviously, you will have just received these with the reminder for the, last week for this, for this meeting, but they're… you have them in there posted online, and I think what, Whitney and I, and also Deborah, will do is we're just going to briefly highlight what they are, and then you can take a look for yourself. None of the three are very extensive, but I think at least the FOIA log one should be a basis for interesting conversation. Either at this meeting or next...at the next. You can switch the slide. 

Okay, so the first recommendation that we have, is to recommend that Congress amend FOIA, and to create, to basically place the advisory committee into the FOIA statute and make it a non-discretionary or statutory federal advisory committee. The full explanation for why this should be done is in the two-page recommendation that you have. But the basic idea is that, you know, the purposes of this committee are evergreen. There's always going to be a need to address FOIA performance and ways to improve FOIA compliance across agencies, and I think that this committee in particular, you know, our subcommittee's feeling was… has shown itself to be a great place where the government and non-governmental members come together to work on issues, and where, given the nature of FOIA, non-government, members, have as much interesting insight into the statute and how it can be improved, as government members do. And that, ensuring that the committee's work continues, is, is important.

We note here that this is not, based on any indication that… of which we are aware, that the committee's charter is not going to be renewed, or that it is going to be suspended. Rather, this is, really just, inspired by what we think should probably have already happened, that the statute should reflect the existence and work of this committee. And I think the next slide is for Deborah.

Deborah Moore: Okay, thank you, Ryan. Deborah Moore from the Department of Education. So, this recommendation seeks to right-size federal agencies' funding of their FOIA operations through congressional direction to agencies to fund their FOIA offices in a manner proportional to the workforce those FOIA offices serve. So the model is built basically on the concept that people create records, so the more people an agency has, the more records get created, thereby increasing the size of the workload of a FOIA office.

The model also assumes that request volume will either remain steady or more likely increase, which I think if we look at OIP's 10 years of data on incoming requests across the government, I think we can say that is a fair assumption based on 10 years of history. Also built into the recommendation are a few caveats that I think are important. There's a baseline funding threshold recommended, so that would be established so that agencies with, like, a smaller number of personnel allocation, they'd still have a minimum budget set aside for the FOIA operations.

Also built in is the idea that it might be necessary in some instances. Upward adjustment could be necessary, such as in an agency, for example, that has a large contract staff, so you've got a lot of people creating records who are not accounted for in the personnel allocation that the agency receives. Other complicating factors would need to be considered, such as differences in how agencies are appropriated, centralization versus decentralization of FOIA operations in agencies, delegated authority issues, and so forth. So all of that would need to be considered.

But the overarching idea is to make the FOIA funding proportional to workforce size, and that it be a required element of agencies' operating budgets to enable FOIA offices to keep pace with the ever-increasing workload, as well as to potentially look at investing in advanced technologies to streamline request processing, increase training, and implement other efficiencies.

So, when we discussed the draft proposal, both at the working group level and then at the subcommittee level, some questions were erased, so I thought it would kind of highlight some of those here. One was the issue of changes to agency size and how that would impact their FOIA funding. And that is definitely a very valid issue, and it's why the recommendation proposes to consider a 5-year average of personnel allocation, as opposed to just take one year and then figure out what the FOIA office should get. You look at the last five years so that would, it would help slow the transition if a FOIA office needed to change size based on the change of the agency size.

The subcommittee also raised the possibility of using backlog numbers instead of personnel as the metric to determine FOIA funding. And although I think that, at first blush, that kind of would make sense, but I think looking at backlog numbers measures the problem once it's occurred, as opposed to addressing FOIA as a statutory-required aspect of agency operations, which is what it is, of course. And…then there's the issue of once a backlog is addressed, then the agency funding would be reduced, but the problem doesn't go away. The need to staff the FOIA office appropriately doesn't go away, and the problem of the backlog will resurge.

So, instead, this approach is looking to right-size the agency funding, so… of the FOIA office, so the backlog problem is handled before it becomes a reality. And then another thing we discussed at the working group level is that and this also, we looked at this in the focus groups, is that, you know, FOIA, it really is no agency's mission. It's not mission central work. It's not… it's extremely important, but it's nobody, no one agency's mission. So it can be challenging for those folks who are making those budgetary decisions to prioritize it. So, we think it's important with a recommendation like this to emphasize that to those folks who are making budgetary decisions that not all agency functions are non-discretionary duties imposed by statute with enforceable consequences, as is the fulfillment of the FOIA. So that's my nutshell. Thank you.

Whitney Frazier-Jenkins: If you could advance to the next slide, please. Whitney Frazier-Jenkins from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. I'm going to be discussing the third recommendation from our subcommittee, which addresses the proactive publication of FOIA logs. This recommendation would make it a statutory requirement for agencies to routinely publish FOIA logs and contain 13 identified data fields. 

The FOIA Advisory Committee has addressed the need for FOIA logs in prior committees in the 2016-2018 term, and an official recommendation in the 2020-2022 term. FOIA logs are helpful to the requester community, to see what an agency has previously released, and it's also helpful for agencies to look at what other agencies are producing and records as well. This recommendation specifically, would make regular publication required. So, for agencies receiving 100 or more requests, agencies would be required to publish proactively the logs quarterly, and if an agency was receiving 100 or less requests, they would be required to publish that log semi-annually. 

The 13 specific data points. The committee and working group discussed those extensively. And ultimately, we reviewed information that is needed and collected during the annual reporting process to determine what those final categories would be. This was a recommendation that was, again, extensively discussed at the subcommittee level, and some of the areas of discussion or concern included the frequency of the publication and whether that would be a burden on the agency and the ability and a possibility of posting the logs to FOIA.gov. It also kind of veered into a great technology question regarding how agencies maintain data and their ability to fulfill this request. Again not as another burdensome reporting requirement. But again, we do think that FOIA logs are a useful tool to both the requester community and the federal agency community. With that, I guess we can open it up to discussion regarding the three recommendations.

Alina M. Semo: Everyone's very quiet today. Has everyone had their coffee? I imagine we would have a lot of heated discussions. Don't be shy. Comments? Questions? Okay, I think all three presentations were so stellar. You Whitney, Ryan, and Deborah.

Marianne Manheim: Margaret has a question.

Alina M. Semo: Oh, good! Who has a question?

Margaret Kwoka: Hi, Margaret Kwoka, Ohio State University.

Alina M. Semo: That's right.

Margaret Kwoka: I, I just wanted to, I mean, I strongly support all three of these recommendations. I wanted to just add that, I believe in the materials that were circulated, correct me if I'm wrong, Alina, there is a very helpful chart about which of these FOIA log fields are already routinely maintained by agencies, and which are required, in fact, to be maintained by agencies by, regular reporting requirements already, which I think demonstrates that although this sort of, no doubt would, you know, require agencies to report this, slightly differently than they might have, or slightly more completely than they might have in the past. It is not a huge leap from where we're standing, and I think that chart sort of demonstrates that. 

And I wanted to just highlight that, I think, in our discussions at the subcommittee level. And certainly my own view is that when a requirement like this is, put into the statute, and we've seen this happen in the past, we see that the vendors of technology, the major technology platforms used by FOIA offices you know, do adjust their products to ensure, that these, that, you know, new reporting requirements or documents maintained, can be, sort of easily pulled from their systems. And so, I do think this is, you know, potentially also helpful in terms of, technology forcing, that it would, you know, improve the offerings of the various types of platforms that agencies are using for processing. So, I think there's, sort of a couple different, benefits to this and I think the previous recommendations in our documentation about this, too, sort of highlight the various ways in which the public having access, to detailed FOIA logs can help the public really shape their requests better, know what kinds of records agencies have, you know, and in that way, potentially, help with some efficiencies in terms of the requesting process.

And allowing agencies to get better crafted, and more narrow requests. So I think these are really important recommendations, and just because the FOIA logs was the last one, and we probably had the most discussion on it, I've highlighted some comments about that, but the other two recommendations, I just want to strongly support as well. You know, Deborah's description about the funding model, I think, is, was exactly spot on. I don't think that we thought that this would be, an absolutely perfect one-to-one relationship between dollars needed and dollars allocated, but that this would be a huge step in the right direction in terms of making sure that FOIA is adequately funded, and to the extent that there might be more funding, God forbid, that is needed, that this would really allow agencies to start to use that to do more than simply try to keep up with the ever-growing number of requests, and instead be able to invest in systems changes that would really benefit the functioning of FOIA overall and the public's interest in, you know, government-maintained records. And then, I think, you know, Ryan did a fantastic job sort of summarizing the reasons to make this committee statutory, which I think are extremely important. So I just want to strongly support all of these recommendations.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Margaret, I appreciate it.

Kirsten Mitchell: Marianne, it looks like you're up here.

Alina M. Semo: hand up. Yep. Go ahead, please.

Marianne Manheim: Hi, this is Marianne Mannheim, NIH. I keep always thinking about the funding one, because being in FOIA, we definitely want more staffing, and we want it to be enough, but I just wonder, in this process, as we were looking at this model, did we specifically look at the agencies with the highest backlogs to see how, if these… if this model were to be implemented, what would that actually look like? And I just wonder, I mean, because for the ones that maybe already have adequate staffing, like, what does that look like for them? I guess maybe as we're going deeper down this, it all sounds good to have adequate staffing, and I think that is a baseline, and I completely agree with that. But I do wonder if, besides, of course, the question of technology, which is happening right now at the same time, if just looking at the ones that have had, for the last number of years, the largest backlogs. What… how would this even look like that? Would this be, like, 100,000 extra people there? Like, what would this even look like if you were to implement that in these agencies? Because those are the ones that are going to be the most noticeable, I think, for this. 

Deborah Moore: No, I totally understand where you're coming from, Marianne, and, like, what actually… how would this play out? And I think that the recommendation would need to stay at a higher level. Like, I didn't go into providing, like, here's the math, and here's the actual percentage number that should be applied, and so forth. I think that wouldn't work, first of all.

Instead, it needs to be…I think it needs to be more of a recommendation to Congress to consider when they're formulating their appropriations language for different agencies, that this be part of it. It may not look the same in every agency like, DHS has this percentage, and HHS has that, education has that it might not look like that, but we need to get the conversation started, and we need those appropriators to start thinking along these lines, thinking about size of agency as measured by personnel, because that's what makes FOIA… that's the work of FOIA. So, it's more of a push in that direction, as opposed to a formula.

Marianne Manheim: And I agree, I'm glad there is a push in that direction, so thanks, Debra.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, Deborah, thank you. Marianne, thank you. I'm just looking to see if there are any other hands. People are… Formulating their questions or comments in their heads?

Liz Hempowicz: Hi, Liz Hempowicz here from American Oversight. I didn't even raise my hand, don't worry, Alina, you did not miss it. I'll just jump in to, to echo Margaret, strong support for all three. I think, hopefully, the absence of questions, here demonstrates the extensive back and forth that we had at the subcommittee level, and at the working group level in pressure testing these, but I think they would be both, hopefully non-controversial and, and a significant step forward when it comes to FOIA administration. So, just voicing my strong support as well.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thanks, Liz, I appreciate that. All right, Ryan and Whitney, can I turn back to you and ask, what your thoughts are in terms of whether you want to have the committee vote on these recommendations today, or you want to hold them to the next meeting, since we're meeting sequentially, in the next 5 months? So we could also vote in April. What is your thinking?

Ryan Mulvey: This is Ryan Mulvey from Americans for Prosperity Foundation, and I apologize if you hear a clock chiming in the background. It's 11 o'clock. I mean, I…for the benefit of those members who are not on the subcommittee, I would prefer to hear from them as to whether they would want to vote today on any of these, since they are newer to the materials. That said, I… personally, I'm ready to vote, and maybe, maybe… maybe one of them, or, you know, we don't have to vote on all of them. I feel like the… making the, in my view, the making the advisory committee a statutory committee, is probably the most straightforward one, and if there were to be one that we voted on today, I… I think that's probably a…good candidate.

Whitney Frazier-Jenkins: I agree. If committee members are comfortable with the material, I'm comfortable with moving forward with voting, but I can also understand if there's time needed to review the material in greater detail.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, I see Jason's hand is up. Jason, go ahead, please.

Jason R. Baron: Well, I have a friendly amendment, which is…I have no problem with us taking a provisional vote or a vote, but I would wish to do so on the understanding that the text or the precise language of the recommendation itself, and the accompanying commentary would be subject to tinkering or revision before a final report is issued.

Alina M. Semo: Ryan, do you believe that you already have the language that you want to move forward? It may not be fully reflected in the slides.

Ryan Mulvey: I don't know what tinkering, Ryan Mulvey, AFP Foundation. I don't… I don't know what…a provisional vote means, or if the bylaws allow for that, or what tinkering might… might mean. If it's minor stuff, if there… let's put it this way, Jason, if you have recommendations on any of the proposals, then maybe we'd not vote today, and we can address that and have revised text available ahead of the next meeting. I don't… because I don't… I don't think it's best practice to approve something, and then…mess with the actual recommendation. Of course, the line between what the recommendation is and what the justificatory language that would be in the final report is, I suppose, is something that we could discuss, because that's not.

Jason R. Baron: Well, yes, we run…

Ryan Mulvey: Awful.

Jason R. Baron: we always have, massaged the commentary in subcommittee reports, or whatever, for the final report. As for the text, I would defer to Alina and Kirsten whether there's been provisional votes before. I strongly support these three recommendations, but I'm not sure I've had the time to, in my own mind, make sure that it's worded precisely. And so, anything would be a grammatical thing, right. It wouldn't be a substantive thing.

Alina M. Semo: Kirsten has her hands up.

Kirsten Mitchell: Yeah, this is Kirsten Mitchell, the designated federal officer, and I was just going to endorse what Ryan said, that we…you know, that the language of the recommendation stay largely as it is, unless there's, you know, a misplaced comma or something like that. But it's the language of the report that gets tinkered with, and you all wouldn't be voting on the language of the report, since that's still being completed, but would be voting on the recommendation language.

Jason R. Baron: Can you go back and show us the three…headings for the recommendations.

Ryan Mulvey: This is Ryan Mulvey. I guess, sorry to just jump in, I guess to reiterate the point I had made, and I guess this is a question now, Kirsten and Alina, for the two of you - what precisely is the recommendation? Is… right? Because I mentioned, like, it's not clear to me exactly where the distinction is between, in the three documents we've circulated, what the recommendation is and what the justification or the commentary might be. So…I mean, we have these three headings that we've kind of… these three summary lines that we've put on the slides, but are we treating these as the recommendations now? What exactly are we voting on?

Kirsten Mitchell: That is completely up to you, and the subcommittee. I thought you all had agreed to that.

Jason R. Baron: And I thought they were in the nature of titles to an extremely fine commentary, Ryan. I have no issue whatsoever with what has been done. I think it's very fine work. I just think that the wording of all three may be better aligned with past recommendations. It's very close.

Ryan Mulvey: So I take your point, Jason. I'm not… I'm not… I agree with you. I welcome that point. My concern is that maybe we should address all that in the three documents we have, and then vote on them. Right, because there's gonna be a whole other process, as I understand it, is gonna be discussed later in the meeting, about the drafting of the final report, which may end up elaborating on these, or summarizing them, or, I don't know, something, right? But these three documents themselves are…the recommendations, not just the language in the slides. At least that was my understanding, but…

Jason R. Baron: Well, no, that's not the historical practice of the committee. The recommendations are the bold heading, you know, Recommendation 2024-1, and the comment is simply a comment. It's like in the, you know, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. There's the rule, and then there's an advisory committee comment. And the comment is not binding on anything, and can be changed, and has…

Ryan Mulvey: It can't be the case here because, for example, with the FOIA log recommendation, the list of items that we're proposing Congress is in the… it's in the document, it's not in the slide.

Jason R. Baron: That's correct, and that's part of what I'm suggesting taking a second look at, because there have been longer recommendations that have had some degree of additional granular detail, but it isn't the standard practice, and if the committee wants these to be widely adopted, then there's a further conversation to be had as the exact language of the recommendation that the that the head of NARA would sign off on.

Ryan Mulvey: Oh, I think that just then underscores that we're not ready to vote on them today.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm hearing, too. I think we take a beat and give ourselves the benefit of time between now and our next meeting, and circulate you know, what, a little more of what Jason is calling for. I do agree, the Recommendation 3, SR3, is…very explicit in terms of the items that should be included. So, I just want to encourage all the committee members to please look at the material that's on, today's meeting, website link. Everything is there, including that wonderful log that Whitney referenced earlier that I want to give full credit to Kirsten Mitchell for, our wonderful DFO. She did a great job of putting that log together, and it's a very helpful tool. So unless I hear disagreement from anyone, I think we're just going to hold off on the vote till next month. But, I want to just give… pause a second to make sure that everyone is in agreement with that.

Jason R. Baron: Alina, I didn't hear the answer that Ryan asked, and, which is, have we taken…provisional or, you know, some kind of straw vote of a committee in the past. I believe we have.

Alina M. Semo: [inaudible]

Jason R. Baron: You, you tell me.

Alina M. Semo: I don't, you know, I don't recall off the top of my head. I'm just going to be very honest with you. I… there might have been that kind of vote that we might have taken in the past, where it was sort of the general sense. That the committee wanted to vote forward on a recommendation, and then we went back and tweaked the words of the recommendation, but I do think the better practice is to vote on the actual wording. I think that's much cleaner.

Jason R. Baron: Alright, well, let me state that my feeling is that, Ryan, you'd get a unanimous or near-unanimous vote of this committee for the work you've done, which is great work.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. All right, Ryan and Whitney, so we'll continue to work on this in the interim and then we'll revisit, at our next meeting, in April. Does that sound okay?

Ryan Mulvey: I think Margaret has her hand.

Alina M. Semo: Oh, I'm sorry, Margaret, yes, please, go ahead.

Margaret Kwoka: I was just gonna ask what process we're proposing to use to collect additional granular feedback before the next meeting? Is this now…is the idea that now that everyone has this in front of them, and we've had this discussion, that anyone on the committee would submit any proposed…proposed granular changes to Whitney and Ryan? To… how… like, what is the…I'm just asking what the mechanism is, that we're not having the same conversation, because this work is the work that came out of the subcommittee. So, if we're not voting on this, then others are going to need to have a way to participate outside of this meeting so that we are not drafting on the fly during the next meeting changes that we then want to vote on. So, I just wanted to clarify what that process would be.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, that's fair. I see Jason has his hand up, so maybe he'll clarify, but I have my own response.

Jason R. Baron: Well, I… there are many ways to go, but I think, Margaret, one way to go is to, have this as an action item for the other two subcommittee to talk about, and then the chairs of those subcommittee in a, you know, co-chair meeting present whatever it is that's being proposed. That would be a clean process, and, you know, rather than necessarily, you know, getting individual comments back and forth.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, that sounds like a good plan if the committee co-chair… subcommittee co-chairs are in agreement on Jason's proposal, we can certainly move in that direction. Any objection from the subcommittee co-chairs. No. Okay?

Jason R. Baron: I also… I don't want to preclude anybody from talking to anyone, so that wasn't a cut-off discussion, it just seemed to be a nice clean process to do that.

Alina M. Semo: To funnel it through your subcommittee co-chairs. Yes. Okay. Does everyone feel comfortable with that? I'm not seeing any hands up, so…Jason, I think your proposal seems to be carrying the day, so we'll use that mechanism to allow all committee members through each of their respective subcommittees to raise any comments. 

Ryan, do you have, I see that the version that is posted on our website today, it has a draft stamp on it. For one of the recommendations and is there a more recent draft, or this is the… it says “not final” discussion draft. This is for the statutory…designation of the, of the, FOIA Advisory Committee.

Ryan Mulvey: Yeah, I think that that just has the stamp, because the PDF version was created way back when the working group sent it to the subcommittee, and we just didn't remove it when it got forwarded on.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Just wanted to clarify that.

Ryan Mulvey: If Kirsten doesn't have a Word version of that. I know we have it on our shared drive, and we can just re-PDF it, or… I suppose the word version will be needed anyway for the people who are going to be… for the committee members who are going to be drafting the final report.

Alina M. Semo: Sure. Okay, thank you.

Kirsten Mitchell: Correct. This is Kirsten. I'm happy to assist with that and I did post the most recent version that was available.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thank you. So, Kirsten, that gets us off the hook today of going over, procedures for voting, which we were fully prepared to do, in the event there was going to be a vote today, so we will cover those at our next meeting, so no one has to memorize them, and we will refresh everyone's recollection on that. But, before we move to the public comments, again, I'm just checking in with committee members, is everyone okay powering through without taking a break?

Jason R. Baron: I… I would recommend taking a break.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Does anyone else feel the same way as Jason? Or feel differently. All right, I'm not hearing any responses. Okay. Well, let's take…how about if we take a 10-minute break instead of 15? How does that sound? I'm just trying to keep the momentum going. So, it's 11:14 right now, let's try to come back… 11:15 now, let's try to come back at 11.25. Does that sound good to everyone?

Marianne Manheim: Yes.

Frank LoMonte: Yes, I agree.

Alina M. Semo: Alright, thank you very much.

Kirsten Mitchell: This is Kirsten. I just want to say, do not disconnect from the…

Alina M. Semo: Just turn off your camera with the video icon and your audio, turn off your audio with the audio icon.

Kirsten Mitchell: Correct.

Jason R. Baron: Is the public still on the line?

Alina M. Semo: Yes. Yes. 

[BREAK] 

Okay, welcome back, everyone, or a lot of you. I'm just gonna give everyone, like, another second or so to tune back in. Alright, I think we just need, need Liz and Margaret. Kirsten, I hesitate to get started again. We have barely a quorum right now, right? So I want to give Margaret and Liz just one more minute.

Hello! Welcome back. We'll give Liz 30 more seconds. The professors among us should be taking note of tardiness. Okay, why don't we get started? Hopefully Liz will be able to join us in a minute. We do have a quorum, Kirsten, yes? I counted 14 of us now.

Kirsten Mitchell: Yes, we do. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: I just wanted to double check. So, Jason, thanks again for suggesting a break. I think that was probably needed by more of us than we thought, but I'm glad we're all back. I wanted to just address a couple of important pieces of committee business before we turn to our public comment section. Liz, welcome back! I stretched it out as much as I could, so I could get you back on. 

So, we are looking for a few volunteers from the committee to work on the committee's final report and recommendations. We have typically had two government and two non-government committee members on the working group, although we are not wedded to that. The final report is written based on the subcommittee reports, as we've been discussing, and of course, the recommendations that are passed. You might ask what's involved with being on the final working group. You would be meeting every two weeks with Kirsten, our alternate DFOs, Kimberlee Ried and Dan Levenson and me. And, as the term draws to a close, every week, probably, to work on the sections of the report that we assign, you know, amongst ourselves. Our goal was to get the final report working group established in the next couple of weeks. So if you are interested, please email me and Kirsten as soon as you can. And, we would like to target a kickoff meeting for early April. So, hopefully keep that in mind, and, you don't have to commit at all right now, just think about it, and just wanted to plant that seed. And then before we get to public comments, I was going to turn to Dave Cuillier, who might have some Sunshine Week-related announcements to make, or at least one announcement. Dave?

David Cuillier: Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, coming up here, March 15th through the 21st is National Sunshine Week, every March, and so there's a lot of great activities going on. If you go to sunshineweek.org, there'll be more information. And, we're also putting on a conference again, Sunshine Fest in Washington, D.C. It sold out really quick. In fact, I think a lot of the people on this call will be there, and speaking, even. And, we're gonna try to stream and record some of the sessions, so if you go to sunshineweek.org, there's more information. It's all about everybody celebrating the ability for people to see what their government's doing, and it's a shared celebration of requesters and government, so check it out. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me, or complaints or suggestions, I'll take anything you got. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Great, thanks. And Frank, do you want to just read out loud your chat comment? Because I thought that was very helpful.

Frank LoMonte: I can, yeah, and thank you to Dave for making room on his schedule for this. For anyone who is registered to attend, on March the 17th at 3 p.m, the committee plans to have an open mic session to elicit stakeholder feedback during Sunshine Fest, and part of what we hope to do is workshop some of the in-progress ideas that we intend to bring back at future committee meetings, and so that will be an additional opportunity, besides this one, for people to have input as those ideas are taking shape.

Alina M. Semo: Great, thank you so much. Really appreciate that. I am sad to report that this year, OGIS will not be helping NARA put together a Sunshine Week event. We're taking a short break. We do hope to be back in full force next year. We are hopeful that we might be able to publish some written pieces that we would welcome everyone to look for on our website. That's at least our target, although it's coming up very quickly…in a week and a half. So, yeah, hopefully we can… we can accomplish that goal. With regard to OIP, if I could… I don't want to put Sean on the spot, but do you want to share what you're planning for this year?

Sean Glendening: So we are doing our awards this year for FOIA professionals and for teams. We have received those awards, and we are reviewing them, and so we are going to announce awardees. It's going to be virtual this year. It's going to be a blog post. We will have awardees out there, we will have some statements out there. So stay tuned for that. There'll be an announcement on our website.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Great, thank you so much. Okay, so, if everyone's ready, let's turn to the public comments part of our meeting. I know it's much earlier than we had planned, but we are rolling right along. So we have now reached the public comments part of our committee meeting, and we do look forward to hearing from any non-committee participants who have ideas or comments to share, particularly about the topics that we have discussed today.

All oral comments were captured in the transcript of the meeting, which we will post as soon as it is available. Oral comments are also captured on the NARA YouTube channel recording, and are available on the NARA YouTube channel. As a reminder, public comments are limited to 3 minutes per person. I know we've had a number of chat comments, during the course of our committee meeting, and I'm going to turn things over to Kirsten now, and…Let her run the show. Kirsten.

Kirsten Mitchell: Great. Thank you, Alina. So as you mentioned, we did have several questions and comments that came up. I'm going to endeavor to answer those before we turn to oral public comments, so bear with me as I try to get through all of these. There was a question early on about the platform that NARA uses for these meetings. We have indeed changed vendors and Zoom for Government is what we are using these days. 

A question arose about how members of the public and the press can engage with members of the committee. Anyone can submit written public comments to the Advisory Committee, or to OGIS, at any time, and also anyone who registers with Zoom can comment verbally during the public comment period.

There was a question about, the, regarding the awareness of recommendations by the committee. What concrete steps has OGIS and OIP taken in the last two years to increase awareness in Congress with FOIA officers, stakeholders, with policy-making authority at OMB, 

Office of Management and Budget? I cannot speak for OIP, and Sean Glendening, having just arrived, probably cannot address what has happened in the past two years there. But I will say that at OGIS, we are statutorily required to submit an annual report to Congress. We do that every year, and we convey the recommendations, through that report.

There was a question, is the committee that… or is the survey that Shelley is, spearheading also surveying agencies about AI, artificial intelligence? And, yes, there were some open-ended AI questions there. There was a question, how has the headcount of FOIA officers across the federal government changed since January of 2025? I can say that the FOIA annual reports for FY25 are being published on agency websites across the government and they've been coming up almost daily. There's, I can paste this link in the chat, to OIP. They have a central website there where they can, where you can go and see what is/has been posted.

So, let me see… How has the affected…capacity of… oh, how has these headcount reductions affected the capacity of agencies to meet their statutory obligations under FOIA and agency backlogs? I don't know that that's been studied yet. These reports are just coming out. I would also give my favorite answer, which is, it depends. I imagine there's not one… a one-size-fits-all answer, and it just depends on the agency.

And then I, I pasted the link in the chat to federal agencies submitting their, 20… FY2025 FOIA performance data. For those who are watching on the National Archives YouTube channel and don't have access to the chat. Go to justice.gov forward slash OIP, and you can find a page there for annual FOIA reports. So, I think that covers what is going… what I… what we received. If there's anything that didn't get addressed there, I ask that you please submit in written public comments, which, as I said, we can do at any time. You're welcome to do it at any time. And we can… we will get those posted if they meet our posting policy.

So, I think we've now, I'm gonna pause for a second, actually, to see if any committee members have any questions, or…any, anything they wish to say in response to everything I just read.

Okay, I don't think so. So, we can…

Alina M. Semo: Don't see any hands up.

Kirsten Mitchell: Margaret has her hand up, I believe. Margaret, go ahead.

Margaret Kwoka: Yeah, I just wanted to quickly state my own views regarding Alex's important question about how much money is collected from fees, from commercial requesters, and whether that money could be used to fund FOIA offices. I think this was related to our discussion about, you know, funding models and thinking about recommendations about ensuring FOIA offices are fully funded. I just wanted to say that, in my own work, I think I've found that FOIA offices collect very, very, very little in fees. They definitely collect more fees from commercial requesters than other kinds of requesters, there's no doubt about that. But, but it's very… it's a very small amount, and so I don't think that… I mean, certainly not under our current funding model, is that going to make a huge difference, even if we reallocate that money, or let agencies keep that money, or, you know, however you might want to do that funding model.

I don't… I have… I think I have concluded, over thinking about fees for a long time, that it's not actually a great idea to think about significantly increasing fees for commercial requesters on a couple of levels. There are some benefits to having commercial requesters, right? This does facilitate, you know, businesses' compliance with the law, it facilitates businesses' ability to operate in the marketplace, it facilitates competition in ways that I think can be healthy for society as well some public benefits, but I think the bigger problem is that if we were to…adjust the fee schedule such that it really did make a big difference. Like, the amount of money they collected would be, you know, something like the actual amount it cost to fulfill their request. I think it would incentivize, sort of, gamesmanship to some degree, in terms of, you know, if you find someone else to make the request for you, or you don't put the business name on it, or whatever. Right now, I think companies are mostly just requesting in their own name, if they want to make requests directly, and paying the fees that they owe, and I'm not sure that we want agencies to have to spend a lot of time and resources trying to figure out, is the true party in interest to this request the person whose named, or is there some commercial interest underlying it? So I have never actually supported the idea of raising fees on both of those levels, I think, there are other ways to think about how, you know, this is, how this is sort of structured. So, that's… that's my own two cents.

Kirsten Mitchell: Agreed. Thank you, Margaret. I noticed that Ryan has his hand up, and Dave has his hand up. So, Ryan, over to you.

Ryan Mulvey: Thank you, Kirsten. Ryan Mulvey, Americans for Prosperity Foundation. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that there will be posted as a public comment some draft legislation that we received in our Statutory Reform Subcommittee from Gabe Roth, from, Fix the Court. It is a, relatively short, piece of legislation that would provide for affirmative disclosure of certain discrete categories of records at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. So, it is a way to extend a FOIA-like process to a non-executive branch administrative agency. So that… that… I think it just hasn't been posted yet to the NARA website, but that did come in, and I… we are looking at it and incorporating it into, the…at the working group level, our draft recommendation addressing the expansion of FOIA or FOIA-like processes, to legislative and judicial branch administrative agencies. And that all builds on past work of last year's committee, and I think the committee before that. Or two committees ago, and the committee before that.

Kirsten Mitchell: Yes, thank you, and we will ensure that that gets posted, Ryan. Thank you, Dave?

David Cuillier: Yeah, thanks, yeah. I actually posted it to the Sunshine Fest website, on the schedule with, next to Gabe, with his permission. Put the link in the chat in case people want to check it out right now. Very interesting stuff. And, of course, Ryan has written some really interesting things on court transparency in the past. Just Google his name and you'll find some great pieces. And I just wanted to mirror what Margaret said. And there's been some really good research on copy fees, and we've talked about this in past terms as well. I remember one term, a lot of the government folks actually were fine with just eliminating fees. They're kind of a pain. But, they don't recoup even close to what it costs to maintain and disseminate records. One study, I think less than 1% of the cost of administering records are actually recouped by fees, so turning to copy fees as a solution, it probably isn't going to ever work, unless we're fine with fees of thousands of dollars per request to actually cover. 

And the other thing is. You know, sometimes we forget, I think. We think of…request is selfish, like, why should I subsidize someone else's request for a record? And so we apply a fee. We think of it as a fee, like a park fee, or a toll road. And I think we have to look at public records differently and see it as just built into the system of civic engagement. Because we don't charge people to attend city council meetings. We don't have a cover charge, even though that's costly, and those people who attend are getting, you know, some service that I don't if I don't attend. But we don't charge fees to do that. We don't charge people to vote anymore. We don't have poll taxes, thank god. So you know, that's our interaction with the government and the whole premise is we have to know what's going on if we're going to be informed citizens and voters. And that includes looking at what information that the government's doing. 

So, we talk about this a lot with this committee. I think these are really important issues, and from agencies' perspectives, you know, they're underfunded. The records management is not funded adequately, and we have to figure out solutions to that. But, I think that…people immediately sometimes turn to fees as the solution, and I'm not sure that's gonna make it. We have to figure out something else. Not easy, a lot of other possibilities, and these are…certainly helpful for forcing requesters to hone their requests, that's pretty much what they're used for. But, anyway, that's my soapbox. And I… I wouldn't chime in, but…It looks like we're pretty good on time, so I just wanted to throw that in. And of course, open to rebuttal or other thoughts.

Alina M. Semo: David, thank you.

Kirsten Mitchell: Okay, so before I open it up for oral public comment, just checking… See if there are any other hands up. I don't see any…So, at this point, we will be turning… we will be opening it up for oral public comment. If you wish to make a public comment, please raise your hand so that we can unmute you. If you are dialed in through telephone audio, you can press star 9 on your telephone to raise your hand and join the comment queue. Once you are unmuted, please state your name and affiliation. And you will be given 3 minutes to speak.

Alina M. Semo: So, Kirsten, do we have anyone waiting to be recognized?

Kirsten Mitchell: It doesn't look like we do. Okay…

Frank LoMonte: Kirsten, I'm looking at the chat bar, and I see two attendees with hands up. If you look at the attendee section in the chat bar.

Kirsten Mitchell: Okay, I may need some assistance from my,… from, Kristin. Here, because I understand there are two hands that are up.

NARA Communications: There are two hands raised. You are the designee, though, and can…

Kirsten Mitchell: I've got it, okay. I see that Sean Glendening, I believe, has his… no. I've got it here. Alexander Howard has his hand up. And I am going to unmute you, Alex. Okay, Alex, can you hear us? Are you able to speak? Okay, Alex, are you able to speak? Can you hear us?

Alexander Howard: I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?

Kirsten Mitchell: I can, and you have 3 minutes.

Alexander Howard: Thank you so much for the opportunity to comment. This is not my first rodeo. I've been coming to these meetings since the FOIA Advisory Committee was created back in NARA, back when you met in person, and I really hope you come back and do that again, particularly now that you've adopted Zoom, because it enables hybrid meetings. I think it's…

absolutely in the public interest for you to do so. I think it'll improve the operations of the committee, and I think it'll allow for more fulsome discussion and debate, like the one that almost broke out just now and for ongoing dialogue. I think it would make a lot of sense for you to take public comment after each recommendation is brought forward to make them more substantive and more directed, as well as batching it all at the end. And I want you to seriously consider not limiting public comments to 3 minutes per person. I do not think that's in the interest of openness or engagement, or the fulsome engagement around civics and the FOIA that we should be expecting from this committee and from NARA. You do a great job answering questions in the chat, offering links, adding context during these meetings. Let's do that formally. Let's not act like you're not reading these and limiting the members from responding as we go. That makes these meetings better.

I still have received no follow-up from the questions I posed at the annual Chief FOIA Officers meeting last year. How has the headcount of FOIA officers across the federal government changed? How has this affected the capacity of agencies to meet their statutory obligations under the FOIA and backlogs? And how many agencies submitted this performance data from 2025 to OIP so far? You added a link. Well, I would please ask OIP post the answers at FOIA.gov. Cross-post at OIP. Promote at FOIA post, which still hasn't tweeted since 2023. Today would be a great day, a wonderful day, to remind Americans that FOIA does not apply to the legislative branch without taking a position on whether it should. As is the case for legislatures in 46 states and DC, and for the DOJ to amplify this recording and the meeting materials at today's public meeting through the Justice Department's primary channels.

The lack of public awareness of the committee and the recommendations it's made is the direct result of neglect by this administration, the preceding administrations as well. And it's the obligation of agencies to be promoting and engaging the American public about the committees and recs [recommendations], not these members, including through the partnerships between new media and tech companies we can see across social media and internet platforms that are raising awareness and understanding of missions, policies, programs and potential reforms to statutes or limitations through them. For instance, in the mass deportation we're seeing. And in the widespread unconstitutional policing by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] which is, at the moment, stonewalling FOIA requests. 

One could argue that upholding and enforcing the FOIA is the mission of the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy. Is it the recommendation of the committee that Congress should create a cabinet-level position, like an information commissioner, in an independent agency? Should there be a U.S. Chief Ethics Officer? What impact has the updates that the AI at FOIA.gov that Bobby Talebian helped set up, had on agency FOIA logs to date? We learned at last Sunshine Week that dog food in the data has had a positive impact on data standardization and timelines. Does the Office of Information Policy have any updates?

Has OIP collaborated with OMP to issue procurement guidelines for FOIA vendors to standardize how software is being used for the portals across government in a schema? Would that have an impact without requiring new investment? Has OIP requested assistance from the tech force and technologists entering government to use modern tools to generate and automate FOIA laws? Should the committee.

Kirsten Mitchell: Alex, pardon me…excuse my interruption, but your 3 minutes are up, and as I've noted before, you are more than welcome to, you know, send any public comments you have to our public comments portal.

Alexander Howard: I appreciate that very much, and I appreciate your efforts to respond to the questions posed in the chat. I would say, for efficiency's sake, posting them there, and then posting an ongoing living FAQ of questions put to the committee and to its members on the OGIS website and cross-posting at FOIA.gov might incent other people to comment as opposed to frequent listeners and participants like me.

Kirsten Mitchell: Well, thank you. We will take that under advisement, and, thank you for your comment. Okay, we have one other attendee who has raised a hand. And that is Julie Lee. Julie, I have unmuted you, and you may… you may begin speaking. You have 3 minutes. Julie, if you are speaking, we cannot hear you.

Julie Lee: I'm so sorry, good morning. I did not read…

Kirsten Mitchell: the burning.

Julie Lee: But I don't have a comment for the larger group. I apologize.

Kirsten Mitchell: No worries.

Sean Glendening: On to the questions that were posed to OIP.

Kirsten Mitchell: Okay, great. Yeah, I was gonna ask you, Sean, if you had anything that you, you know, wanted to say in response, over to you.

Sean Glendening: Well, there's a lot of questions. They're not all directed at OIP. First off, a lot of those questions, I think they will be answered in the annual reports that will be posted. We are still collecting Fiscal Year 25, still finalizing those. So many of the questions raised will be answered in those reports.

The second part, really focused on technology. Standardizing technology is a huge priority for us, and it's a huge priority, I think, for all of the government folks on here, is better technology, standardized technology. And kind of a plug that Alina might want to follow up on, but there's the NexGen FOIA Technology Showcase coming up where vendors can demonstrate their FOIA processing technology. And, so I think that's… that's completely right when we talk about, getting things standardized, when we talk about, using technology to pull out useful statistics, I think the way forward with a lot of this stuff is with technology. 

Now, every agency has the ability to independently procure technology, but collaboration amongst groups like this advisory committee and the working groups, will help us to standardize that FOIA technology, in terms of what all agencies are using. So I think that that kind of gets at the bulk of the questions. Appreciate those issues being raised, and I turn back over to any other analysts to follow up on anything that was asked.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Sean. Much appreciated.

Kirsten Mitchell: Yeah, thank you for that, and for those of you who are in the Zoom, I pasted a link to, again, to OIP and the annual reports, which are posted when they're ready. And also, just a reminder to everyone that the data from these reports also becomes available on FOIA.gov. So, it is… it is… will become available for everyone to look at.

I wanted to address a question that came up, and that was about, in-person meetings. Before the pandemic, as long-time watchers know, we often met in… in fact, we only met in person. That moved to the virtual space out of necessity, and we have continued to do that, meet virtually, having a couple of meetings in person. I just want to let everyone know who's listening that in December, the General Services Administration published updates to the regulation that governs federal advisory committee management. The new rule states that agencies should explore having virtual meetings instead of in-person meetings as a cost-saving measure. The good news for us is that we don't need to explore it, because we're already doing it, so I just wanted to note that. And we have four meetings coming up in the next several months on April 2nd, May 7th, June 11th, and July 16th. And they will all be virtual, as noted in the Federal Register notice.

Okay, I'm just gonna pause here to see if anyone else has raised their hands. I don't see anyone in the public comment queue. So I think I can hand it back over to you, Alina.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you. So I wanted to pick up on Sean's cue, before we wrap up, to announce that the Technology Committee of the Chief FOIA Officers Council, in conjunction with OIP and OGIS, will be hosting NexGen FOIA Tech Showcase 3.0, May 12th through the 14th of this year, we have published an RFI request for information on SAM.gov. And we look forward to receiving submissions from interested vendors who would like to participate. The deadline for initial submissions is fast approaching, March 12th, so we hope that vendors are working on their initial submissions, and we'll get them in by next week. And we look forward to hearing from everyone that wants to participate.

I'm also going to pause again just to make sure no committee member has any other thoughts or questions or comments that they want to share before we wrap up. Okay, I don't see anyone jumping up and down. So I just want to thank all the committee members for participating in our meeting so far this term. A big thank you for all the creative discussions among and between subcommittee members and working groups, everyone has been working very hard, as evidenced by the great discussions that we had today, and the great presentations. We're all definitely determined to improve the FOIA process.

A big thank you to the six co-chairs of our three subcommittees. I want to thank all of you today for joining us. I hope everyone and their families remain safe, healthy, and resilient. Our next full committee meeting is scheduled virtually for Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. Are there any questions or comments from anyone on the committee? Okay, hearing none...

Marianne Manheim: I'm just gonna add that that is during spring break week, so I don't know if everyone could actually… maybe I'm the only one who's affected by that.

Alina M. Semo: I'm not sure we necessarily took that into consideration, Marianne, so if you can try to make it, it would be great to have you. But hopefully we can…see you again in May, if you're not able to make April 2nd. 

Okay, well, I don't hear or see any other hands, or anyone jumping up and down or calling out, so, we stand adjourned. Thank you, everyone. Have a great afternoon.