Why we still need Sunshine Week
From long-lost Freedom of Information Act requests to the old fashioned “no comment”, here are some of the many ways government officials can withhold information.
Center for Public Integrity senior reporter Fred Schulte filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in May of 2013 with the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. He asked for a wide range of Medicare Advantage records, including copies of program audits, billing data, emails and other documents that identified any private insurance plans suspected of overcharging the government.
Related: FOIA'd CMS emails
After getting no response for a year, the Center for Public Integrity filed suit in federal court in May of 2014 to force the government to release the records. Earlier this month, officials sent a batch of records, including dozens of emails. Almost everything said in the emails was blacked out.
Managing editor for politics and finance Alison Fitzgerald filed a series of FOIA requests to the Department of Justice when she first arrived at the Center for Public Integrity in 2013. The department's response, a year and a half later in one case, included redirecting the request to another department within the DOJ. (Note: The subject of the FOIAs has been removed because they are part of an ongoing investigation.)
Related: Runaround: Three months of correspondence with the EPA
In 2014, the Center for Public Integrity launched a Tumblr to collect the many ways government officials say the same thing: "no comment."
We've also published some of those instances, like this 3 month exchange with the Environmental Protection Agency as part of our "Big Oil, Bad Air" investigation. Since publishing this exchange, the Center for Public Integrity conducted an on-the-record interview with Ron Curry, EPA regional administrator in Dallas, Texas, about the environmental issues associated with oil and gas production.
Related: FOIA response
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
