E&E News has this on the EPA’s statements about its attempts to speed up releases of certain FOIA requests in which the agency has decided to involve high level senior, (often political appointed) officials. This procedure has been criticized as a way the agency “slow walks” the requests through the process often delaying the release of this sensitive and embarrassing information. The EPA’s decision to attempt to speed up the pace of this “review” was recently made known in a court filing.
I’ve written about the issue of involving high level agency officials in the FOIA process many times. Here’s my takeaway – there is nothing wrong with letting high level public facing officials of any agency know that a FOIA request is coming on a matter of public interest. However, the non-FOIA officials should have absolutely nothing to do with the decision to release or withhold the documents – this should only be done by those who are paid to make FOIA decisions. If this was the procedure set up, no delays would occur in the processing of the documents in the first place.