Transparency should begin at the top, in President Obama’s own office. Public access to information about the functioning of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and many of its components plays a critical role in meeting the president’s commitment to creating “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” Accordingly, the administration should, to the extent possible, make the records of non-agency components of the EOP publicly available.
As part of this effort, the administration should go back to the practice of all prior administrations -- except that of George W. Bush -- of treating the Office of Administration (OA) as an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). From its inception in 1977 until August 2007, this EOP component functioned consistently as an agency subject to the FOIA, adopting comprehensive FOIA regulations and processing hundreds of FOIA requests. In August 2007, the Bush administration abruptly changed course and declared OA is not an agency and therefore need not comply with information requests under FOIA, a decision recently upheld by a federal appeals court. As part of the president’s commitment to transparency and accountability, the White House should return to the policies and practices of all prior administrations and treat OA records as subject to the FOIA.
Similarly, the administration should abandon the previous administration’s practice of treating White House visitor logs as presidential records, allowing them to be processed under the FOIA by the Secret Service, the agency that creates and maintains the records.
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