FOIA-request audit shows response to Obama transparency pledge is uneven

The Obama administration's first year of efforts to improve access to government information has yielded mixed results, according to an audit of Freedom of Information Act requests set to be released Monday.

The report by the National Security Archive at George Washington University comes at the start of Sunshine Week, the annual attempt by federal groups and news organizations to promote better access to government information. President Obama issued new guidelines on government transparency on his first full day of office, ordering agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of FOIA requests and laying the groundwork for the eventual release of reams of previously undisclosed government information on the Internet. But less than a third of the 90 federal agencies that process requests for information have significantly changed their practices since that initial order, the report said.

The departments of Agriculture and Justice, the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Administration earned especially high marks for completely or partly fulfilling more requests and denying fewer of them during fiscal 2009. The departments of State, Transportation and Treasury, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have fulfilled fewer requests and denied more of them in the same time period.