STATUS REPORT
mentioned, not all expertise—including expertise about open government—resides within government. It is not surprising, then, that promoting public participation and collaboration about open government is one aim of open government.
Analyses and critiques of the Administration's efforts are especially valuable. For one thing, they hold those within government accountable for the efficacy of their efforts to foster open government. Critical assessments of the Administration's efforts also can reveal better ways to promote open government. The Administration will therefore continue to solicit participation and collaboration in its open government initiatives.
Some critics have alleged that the Administration has not done enough to create a more open government, and that much work remains. They are right; notwithstanding the measurable and undeniable progress made on all of the Administration's major initiatives, still more work is necessary. Others, however, underestimate the progress made over the past two years towards creating a more open government.
With respect to FOIA, for example, some have measured progress towards achieving greater transparency by looking at the volume of agency responses to FOIA requests. Such a metric by itself can be misleading, however, given that the President has directed agencies to consider releasing partial information in response to FOIA requests even where they cannot release all requested information. As noted, identifying what information can and cannot be disclosed in response to FOIA requests—as opposed to denying requests outright under the previous presumption against disclosure—can take time. In other words, processing FOIA requests with an eye to making partial disclosures where full disclosures are not possible is often more time consuming than denying a request altogether any time the request implicates some information that cannot be disclosed. Likewise, agencies' focus on resolving backlogged FOIA requests, as specifically instructed by the Open Government Directive, also requires greater agency efforts given that backlogged requests can involve the most complex or intractable requests. In this light, processing fewer requests is an expected consequence of examining each FOIA request more carefully and addressing difficult requests.
Nor do the percentage of agencies' full disclosures, or the proximity of agencies' partial disclosures to 100%, constitute conclusive measures of FOIA transparency. For again some FOIA requests are properly denied, and some under law must be denied. Given that even agencies focused on providing as much transparency under FOIA as possible will deny some FOIA requests, not all FOIA denials are properly viewed as failures to promote transparency, notwithstanding an understandable tendency by some observers to treat the percentage of requests for which agencies provide requested information as a decisive indicator of progress on FOIA transparency.
In fact, as agencies do more and more to disclose information to the public proactively by releasing information before receiving FOIA requests, it is to be expected that they will deny or partially deny a larger percentage of their FOIA requests over time. This is true because by affirmatively disclosing information, agencies in effect preempt the most straightforward FOIA requests. That is, agencies will proactively disclose only information that, had the information been the subject of ordinary FOIA requests, they would have fully disclosed anyway, requests to which no FOIA exemptions would have applied. This means that proactive agencies disclosures
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