STATUS REPORT
For another example, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration now posts 500 to 10000 pages of grant documents on its website daily, documents that used to be the frequent object of FOIA requests. Other agencies have likewise increased their affirmative disclosure of information. For instance, the Department of Transportation launched a new interactive website which not only provides detailed grant and project information for programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, but also makes the information more usable.
In some circumstances, agencies have made new information available to the public proactively not because such information has been traditionally sought under FOIA, but rather in anticipation of many FOIA requests prompted by some external event. The federal government's response to the BP oil spill is a case in point. Shortly after the spill, the EPA undertook to inform the public about its environmental impacts. The agency posted contemporaneous information it collected on air quality and the effects of the spill on coastal waters. Several federal agencies also jointly developed an oil spill response database to inform the public—in real time and with maps—of the movement of the oil spill, its effects on fisheries, shipping information, and cleanup progress. Those agencies continue to provide information about the spill's consequences. The Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also maintains a searchable web reading room housing its responses to spill-related FOIA requests that contains voluminous information, and the inter-agency spill Unified Command maintains voluminous oil spill FOIA materials as well. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration likewise maintains an oil spill archive, and continues to provide new information about the spill's ongoing effects.
Finally, many agencies make voluminous information available to the public proactively neither because that information has traditionally been requested under the FOIA, nor because they anticipate many new FOIA requests as the result of some external event, but rather because open government entails a commitment to disclosure quite apart from what the Freedom of Information Act requires. Again, greater transparency is a primary mechanism for creating a more open government. Agency responses to FOIA requests are one way to promote transparency and openness, but not the only way.
Agencies' Open Government plans provide another. In fact, most agencies' Open Government Plans emphasize agency efforts to provide the public with more information about what agencies have done, what they are doing, and what they intend to do—part of agency efforts to solicit public feedback and participation in agency decision-making. Here, the distinction between changing agencies' FOIA practices by emphasizing affirmative disclosures, on the one hand, and the Administration's Open Government initiative, on the other hand, fades. For viewed through either the lens of FOIA or the lens of Open Government, agencies are doing the same thing—proactively making more information available to the public.
III. THE OPEN GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE
The Administration's open government efforts have begun to institutionalize a more accessible and accountable government far beyond agencies' efforts to disclose more
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