Committee report: 'FOIA process is broken'.

• Position: GOVERNMENT RECORDS - Freedom of Information Act

A recent majority staff report from the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee criticized the current administration and several government agencies for undermining the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

"The FOIA process is broken," the report states. "Hundreds of thousands of requests are made each year, and hundreds of thousands of requests are backlogged, marked with inappropriate redactions, or otherwise denied."

According to the report, many agencies are lacking transparency when it comes to the FOIA process by adopting an "unlawful presumption in favor of secrecy" when responding to requests. In some cases, huge sections of information that should have been made public--or were already publicly available--were inappropriately redacted, FCW.com reported.

The report cites an investigation by the State Department's inspector general that says the department did not search for e-mail records "as a matter of course." According to the report, "The periodic search for emails was only conducted if a request explicitly referred to 'emails' or 'all records.'"

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The 39-page report also says the Justice Department and other federal agencies are contributing to the backlog problem by subjecting requests for politically "problematic or embarrassing" records to an additional layer of review, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Some lawmakers criticized the report, blaming GOP budget cuts for the FOIA backlog and noted that previous administrations have not always been transparent.

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