Support the three Proposed FOIA Advisory Committee Recommendation

I strongly support the three Proposed FOIA Advisory Committee Recommendations:

Proposed Recommendation SR-1: Congress should amend FOIA to establish the FOIA Advisory Committee as a statutory federal advisory committee.

Proposed Recommendation SR-2: Congress should require executive branch departments and agencies to implement a funding model that requires them to allocate a portion of their operating budget to fund FOIA operations proportional to the size of the workforce served by the agency’s FOIA office.

Proposed Recommendation SR-3: Congress should amend FOIA to mandate regular publication of agency FOIA logs to contain 13 fields generally maintained in agency FOIA tracking systems. (A reporting chart regarding FOIA logs can be found here.)

On funding, I proposed a recommendation that each federal agency/department include a top-line budget item for records management and FOIA. Budgets are the one document that every Agency/Department Head reads. we would expect Department and Agency Heads to seek additional top-line funding for increased personnel, training and professional certifications, automation, and a central FOIA portal that supports all federal Agencies and Departments. We would expect Agency and Department Heads to cite their current FOIA statistics/deficiencies that would be improved with additional funding. In the following years' budgets, we would expect to see progress. There are many FOIA advocates in Congress.

Regarding Records Management, NARA has stopped accepting paper records, so funding is needed to collect source electronic records and to digitize current paper records. The latter is not easy or cheap, as sufficient metadata is required to properly schedule the records with key words so that they can be found later.

GREAT JOB FOIA ADVISORY COMMITTEE