When he took office over a year ago, President Barack Obama announced that “openness and transparency” would be very important to his administration. As such, he gave an order to all federal agencies to let the public have easier access to information.
As a result of this, classified memos on torture policies from the previous administration have been made public as well as White House Visitor logs. But according to a recent report by the National Security Archive (a private research group), the push for transparency has been very slow, mixed and erratic across federal agencies.
The report finds that many agencies simply have not made any significant changes. It also found that the agencies had not increased nor decreased the release of information after the presidential directive. According to the director of the National Security Archive, Thomas S. Blanton, the agencies merely are making the right noises to show that they were complying with the directive but in actuality they were doing very little to put it into effect.
The White House however, is standing by the agencies and claims that progress is indeed being made. They contend that the changes cannot be fully experienced for another year, comparing the system to a battleship that needed to be turned around. The Obama administration wants the system to be cleaned up so that it can accommodate the 600,000 Freedom of Information requests it receives every year. Most of these requests get processed very slowly, leading to enormous backlogs. The oldest pending request currently is 18 years old.