Transcript

FOIA Advisory Committee Meeting (Virtual Event)

Thursday, March 2, 2023

10:00 a.m. (ET)

Michelle [producer]: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining today's Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee webinar. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the Webex participant and chat panels by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. Please note all audio connections are currently muted and this conference is being recorded.

To present a comment via Webex audio, please click the raise hand icon on your Webex screen, which is located above the chat panel on the right. This will place you in a comment queue. If you are connected to today's webinar via phone audio, please dial pound two on your telephone keypad to enter the comment queue.

If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer.

With that, I will turn the meeting over to Debra Steidel Wall, Acting Archivist of the United States. Debra, please go ahead.

Debra Wall: Thank you so much, Michelle. Good morning everybody and welcome to the fourth meeting of the fifth term of the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee.

Nearly seven decades ago, before FOIA existed, Congressman William L. Dawson of Illinois wrote a letter to a fellow congressman, and this is what he observed.

"An informed public makes the difference between mob rule and democratic government. If the pertinent and necessary information on government activities is denied to the public, the result is a weakening of the democratic process and the ultimate atrophy of our form of government."

That's just a fantastic quote and those words remain as true today as they were when Congressman Dawson wrote them in 1955, 11 years before Congress passed the bill establishing FOIA. And I know they were [not] written specifically about FOIA, but they really beautifully sum up why we do what we do here at the National Archives.

Now, as FOIA approaches the 56th anniversary of its enactment, you, FOIA Advisory Committee members, are committed to ensuring sound and reasoned advice to me on improvements to the administration of FOIA. Your important work helps ensure that the public receives in Congressman Dawson's words, "pertinent and necessary information on government activities," which in turn contributes to a sound democratic process. Nothing could be more important and I sincerely thank you for your work.

I invite you all, committee members and the public, to join me at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, March 13th when we kick off Sunshine Week, an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information. We're pleased to hold a virtual program on the important role FOIA plays in making access happen here at the National Archives. Our Chief FOIA Officer, Gary M. Stern, will moderate a discussion among our staff experts who will talk about how FOIA governs access to records held by the National Archives, as well as issues of presidential records and classified records, as well as those created by NARA and our employees in the process of carrying out our responsibilities, our operational records. Please join us on the National Archives YouTube channel, it's again, 1:00 PM Monday, March 13th, for this hopefully illuminating 90-minute program.

Also, please do keep an eye on that channel during Sunshine Week. We'll be releasing short videos of other ways the National Archives makes access happen.

Then finally, before I turn the meeting over to OGIS director and FOIA Advisory Committee Chairperson Alina Semo, I wanted to let everyone know that I'm looking forward to reviewing nominations and appointing a non-government representative to fill the current vacancy on the committee. So again, thank you very much and I'll hand the program over to Alina.

Alina M. Semo: Great, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Welcome everyone. I'm going to reiterate this is the fourth meeting of the fifth term. I can't believe it's already March, March 1st, or March 2nd rather. It's been a very busy year already.

I want to welcome our colleagues and friends from the FOIA community and elsewhere who are watching us today, either via Webex or with a slight delay on NARA's YouTube channel. Members' names and biographies are posted on our website, so we invite you to take a look at that, and also we've been featuring our members in our blog posts, so please sign up for that if you aren't already following it and you can learn a lot more. I'm learning a lot more about everyone on the committee, so it's been a treat.

So I have a few housekeeping notes before we launch into our pretty packed agenda today. First, I am advised that committee member Adam Marshall is unable to join us today. I'm also advised that committee member Gbemende Johnson has to sign off at 11:00 AM. We're going to miss you, but we know you have class. Also, committee member Luke Nichter must also sign off early.

I also want to state, following up on Ms. Wall's comments, that we recently had to say goodbye to committee member Ginger Quintero-McCall, who left her position at Demand Progress and took a position at a federal government agency, so we therefore have a vacancy. Last month we solicited nominations for Ginger's replacement via a Federal Register notice. The deadline for nominations ended earlier this week. I am very pleased to report that we received more than a dozen nominations that we will be presenting to Acting Archivist Wall for her consideration and final decision.

Okay, Kirsten, as the committee's Designated Federal Officer, I know you've taken a visual roll call, can you please confirm we have a quorum?

Kirsten Mitchell: I can indeed confirm we have a quorum, Alina.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, terrific. Great.

I want to remind everyone meeting materials for today's meeting and prior meetings are available on the committee's webpage. Click on the link for the 2022-2024 FOIA Advisory Committee on the OGIS website. We will upload a transcript and minutes of this meeting as soon as they are ready in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, FACA. Kirsten and I have certified the minutes from the December 1st meeting and those along with the transcript are posted on the OGIS website in accordance with FACA.

During today's meeting, this is a reminder to my fellow committee members, I will do my best to keep an eye out for any member who raises their hand or looks forward and definitely looks like they want to ask a question. Committee members are also encouraged to use the all panelists options from the dropdown menu in the chat function when you want to speak or ask a question, or you could chat me or Kirsten directly. It helps us line up a queue of folks and make sure we get everyone in order.

But in order to comply with the spirit and intent of FACA, I want to remind committee members to keep communications in the chat functions to administrative housekeeping and procedural matters only. No substantive comment should be made in the chat function as they will not be recorded in the transcript of the meeting.

I also want to just let everyone know we had originally planned to take a short break at approximately 11:30 today, but since I've mentioned we have a lot on our agenda today, we may very well skip it. We'll play it by ear and I'll exercise my discretion as chairperson to see how that goes.

If a committee member needs to take a break at any time, please do not disconnect from the WebEx event. Instead, mute your microphone by using the microphone icon and turn off your camera by using the camera icon. Please send either me or Kirsten or both of us a quick chat to let us know if you'll be gone for more than just a few minutes. Join us again as soon as you can.

A reminder to all committee members, please identify yourself by name and affiliation each time you speak today. This helps us tremendously down the road as we prepare the transcript of minutes, both of which are required under FACA.

So since the committee last met on December 1st, and I mention this quickly to keep moving, we have unveiled a new public comments form for submitting written comments. We have received and posted a number of written comments in advance of today's meeting so I invite everyone to go take a look there. We review all public comments and post them as soon as we are able if they comply with our public comments posting policy.

In addition to the written public comments we have already posted, we will have the opportunity for oral public comments at the end of today's meeting. As we noted in our February 13th, 2023 Federal Register notice announcing this meeting, public comments will be limited to three minutes per individual.

So any questions from our committee members now that I've finished my housekeeping notes? I'm just looking around. No one seems to have any questions. Everyone looks poised and ready to go.

Okay, so without further ado, we do have a very busy agenda today. I am very excited to tell you we're going to be joined by two IT professionals from EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] who will be providing updates to us regarding the sunset of FOIAonline. Committee members will also be able to ask questions.

Next we will hear from Brent Evitt from the Defense Intelligence Agency about the terrific efforts he and his team have undertaken in the last several years to reorganize and strengthen their FOIA and records management program.

Bobby Talebian, Director of OIP, has agreed to provide a brief report out on OIP's actions in response to the latest, the fifth Open Government National Action Plan, NAP 5.0.

After that are three subcommittees, Modernization, Resources, and Implementation will provide updates as to their work thus far, and we will close the meeting with a short public comment period.

So with that, I want to launch into our agenda. I am thrilled to welcome from the Environmental Protection Agency's FOIAonline staff Jeff Edwards and Laura Johnson. Jeff is the technical lead for the FOIAonline program and holds a computer science degree with over 20 years of experience working in software architecture, engineering, and systems integration. Prior to coming to the FOIAonline program, Jeff worked in EPAs ORD, perhaps he will tell us what that stands for, supporting scientists by designing, developing, and integrating custom API first and data-driven software solutions. Jeff has a long history of working with subject matter experts to understand their technical challenges and providing strategic business critical solutions while instigating innovation through transformational change to IT architectures, operations, and technology.

Laura Johnson has a master's of environmental science and has been with the EPA for over 22 years. She started first in the Oceans Coastal Protection Division within the Office of Water, and there she focused on regulation writing and development of technical and guidance documents pertaining to ocean dumping, vessel discharges, and the intentional sinking of vessels to create artificial reefs. Her following assignment was the team lead for the Trash Free Waters Program. It wasn't until 2018 that she became interested in FOIA, hopefully she'll stay interested. During a two year detail in the administrator's office as a special assistant, she volunteered for the Tiger Team tasked with reducing the FOIA backlog and has been active in the agency's FOIA community since that time. In 2021, she joined the FOIAonline program where she currently serves as the policy lead.

So with that introduction, I'm going to turn it over to Jeff and Laura. I'll let you both decide who's going to drive first, but the floor is yours. Thank you.

Laura Johnson: Great. Can you hear me? Good morning.

Alina M. Semo: Loud and clear.

Laura Johnson: Okay, great. So I will go ahead and present the information to you all today and then my colleague Jeff and I will be more than happy to answer any questions folks may have. So thank you so much, Alina, for inviting us to your meeting today and for allowing us to share information and details to you all pertaining to the decommissioning of FOIAonline. This obviously is the perfect venue for us to further inform those who will be most impacted, which is the FOIA community.

As I run through this briefing today, you're going to hear some important FOIAonline program commitments - maintaining daily FOIAonline operations up to and until the decommissioning date of September 30th, 2023; our ongoing support for our partners as they transition away from FOIA Online to a replacement FOIA case management solution; and continuous messaging to inform public requesters of the upcoming changes to the FOIAonline application.

For those who haven't used FOIAonline, it's a multi-agency web application run through the Environmental Protection Agency that allows the public and participating federal agencies, whom we refer to as partners, to execute a number of FOIA case management functions. The planning for this shared service first started in 2010 in response to drivers for open government with the aim of expanding public access to information requested under FOIA. FOIAonline filled a significant void that existed within the public and private sectors. At that time, EPA, the Department of Justice, and the National Archives and Records Administration worked together on the development of FOIA Online, and with the addition of several more thorough agencies, the web application was created in 2012.

Over time, the FOIAonline program grew. We regularly upgraded the system and provided a service for up to 20 participating federal agencies. For a decade we managed a successful, innovative, and widely used FOIA case management solution, and we were leading the way in the commercial sector. Our presence inspired the development of other FOIA case management solutions. How could EPA not be proud of that entrepreneurial venture?

So why would we decommission it? In the last few years, the system has been increasingly difficult to maintain. It has also accumulated some significant technical debt. Some of our most recent upgrades brought with them bugs that began to impact performance. There were several drivers for this. What hasn't been mentioned yet is a very unique element of FOIAonline that made this case management solution so attractive to our partners and users, but then drove significant and increasing complexity to the application. That element is individual partner customizations.

It eventually became clear that there wasn't a universal workflow through FOIAonline and more often the changes requested were partner specific and/or we're not simple fixes due to the complexity of our case management system. The bottom line is this, what was once a single integrated shared service morphed over time into 20 distinct partner specific systems with each needing individual attention. The resulting FOIAonline multiple architecture drove an increasingly buggy, clunky performance and led to our conclusion that over the longer term operations would simply be unsustainable.

As a result of how our system grew, rather than directing resources to advance the FOIAonline program and application as a whole, we fractured our resources in order to address the creation, operation, and maintenance of each individual customization. We were focusing on updates rather than real upgrades. Meanwhile, the commercial market for FOIA case management applications experienced significant growth, producing impressive and novel off-the-shelf FOIA case management solutions now available to the government and at a reasonable price point. The overhaul necessary for FOIAonline to catch up to these technological capabilities currently available would require immediate large investments of both time and money. After such investments, FOIAonline would no longer be the lowest cost service.

We have a duty to the FOIA community and our partners to be transparent. FOIA Online as it currently exists is no longer a reliable or robust system. It is no longer a tenable system and has reached the end of its useful life. It was also our stewardship responsibility to work with our partners to develop a glide path to decommissioning the FOIAonline application, giving them sufficient time to identify and implement a successor solution. Additionally, we also felt that [the] government has no business using taxpayer money to compete with the private sector, especially when we think those commercial FOIA case management products and alternatives are better.

Therefore, in consultation with the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, EPA concluded in mid-November of 2021 that the FOIAonline shared service would be decommissioned by September 30th, 2023. That decision was shared with our partners on November the 18th, 2021. Since then, we've worked to provide continuous partner support to ensure [a] smooth transition away from FOIAonline and provide a successful data migration to the replacement FOIA case management solution. All the while, we will also maintain full functionality of FOIAonline for partners’ use until their departure or the September 30th, 2023 decommissioning date, whichever occurs first.

So what will happen on the decommissioning date of September 30th, 2023? If you notice, I keep mentioning that same date over and over again. This will be the last day that actively participating partners can work in the FOIAonline application, which means partners can still access their accounts, work open cases, and receive new FOIA cases if they're still active in our accounts. This is also the last day that the public will have access to the FOIAonline application, meaning it's the last day for requesters to submit a new request to participating partners, access their registered public user accounts, and view participating partners records.

I want to pause here just for a moment to provide a very important message. We encourage those with a registered public user account to download any data you wish to keep for ease of reference to these documents in the future, especially during this transition. Please know that your account containing partner’s data will not disappear. That data will be migrated, and I'll explain in a bit more where that partner's FOIA Online data will go.

So what happens once the application decommissions? What does the next day October 1st, 2023 look like? Well, both the public and partners will no longer have access to the FOIA Online application, with the exception of limited authorized partner representatives that we allow in the system as we provide support to complete year-end reporting.

How are we going to meet these decommissioning milestones? By supporting our partners and informing the public throughout the transition. So for partner support, since the decommissioning announcement we've hosted five partner meetings detailing the decommissioning process so partners could immediately begin taking steps to transition away from FOIAonline and identify a replacement FOIA case management solution and a new vendor. During these meetings, we facilitated discussions allowing for partners to share lessons learned. Additionally, these partner meetings allowed for us to identify the support partners needed.

For example, at the request of partners, we scheduled nine vendor demonstrations. Some additional support that was given beyond these larger partner meetings were shifting to one-on-one, meeting with each partner individually to help identify blockers to their transition endeavors and assist when we could to help partners continue on their path. We have completed four rounds of such one-on-one meetings with partners. Additionally, we incorporated specific language in our final MOU, our memorandum of agreements with partners, bringing attention to the decommissioning milestone dates as well as FOIAonline and partner data migration responsibilities.

Another effort underway is to support our partners successfully migrating partner data from FOIAonline to a vendor of their choice. From a high level view, the migration process involves our close coordination with our partners and their new vendors as soon as a partner notifies us that they've awarded a contract. Once we've had a planning meeting with the departing partner and subsequent meetings with the vendor and FOIAonline engineers and analysts, we wait for the vendor to confirm that data mapping is complete and the partner finishes validating migration of the data before we send the partner's final FOIAonline data export package. That package will include open cases.

This final data export triggers immediate actions that FOIAonline will take in order to avoid data divergence. The departing partner will be locked from their FOIAonline accounts and the departing partner's FOIAonline data will no longer be accessible for the public within FOIAonline, whether through advanced searches or in the registered public account.

So what happens to the data? Keep in mind that the partner is the custodian of their data. They give us the authority to migrate their data. That partner's data will live on at a different location. To close the loop on our responsibility of the partner's FOIAonline data, we will protect and secure our copy of the departing partner's data until its ultimate demise when we dismantle the FOIA Online platform.

I'm going to pause here again to inform folks of a potential lapse that may happen in service for some departing partners as their open cases are migrated. Based on a number of factors, the amount of time will vary from partner to partner for open cases to be imported to a replacement system. We've stressed this to the partners and have encouraged them to reach out to affected requesters as necessary. We have also discussed workarounds such as migrating data over the weekend to reduce the potential impact.

How are we informing the public of these changes? The FOIAonline communication strategy is focusing on messages displayed in our webpages and recommendations we've given partners during our one-on-one meetings. Upon the request of our partners, in late January of this year we initiated our decommissioning messaging on our webpages. Currently, we've taken a multi-pronged approach to notify the public of the decommissioning date and to encourage the public to read our related frequently asked questions for more information. At the FOIAonline homepage and registered public account user landing page we use pop-up windows displaying the decommissioning date and a hyperlink to these related FAQs.

Additional messages include a listing of partner status in FOIAonline, such as active or not active, near the top and center of the homepage. If a partner is active, we show them where they can go ahead and submit a FOIA request by pressing on the hyperlink. If a FOIAonline partner is inactive, we again provide a link of where they can submit a request to the inactive partner, which would be through foia.gov.

We also encourage the public to frequently check our website and FAQs for the most up to date partner status, we remind them that regardless of a partner's status in FOIAonline, the public can always submit a FOIA request via FOIA.gov, and we remind them of the decommissioning date of September 30th, 2023.

Next month, we will have a pop-up window at the registered public user account landing page to remind account holders to download data they wish to have with an immediate reach.

As for our one-on-one meetings with individual partners, we have discussed the importance of partners updating their agency FOIA webpages to reflect their transition to a new FOIA case management system, as well as highlighting how the public can submit to them new FOIA requests.

Lastly, we want to stress that our FAQs are a living document. This document will be enriched and refined over the next few months as we continue to interface with our partners, our help desk, and the public.

Before I close, I'm sure folks are curious as to how partners are doing? Where are they in the process of  transitioning away from FOIAonline? At the conclusion of fiscal year ‘22, EPA successfully supported the offboarding and data migration of three partners, NARA, NRC, and SBA. Of the 17 partners still active in FOIAonline, CBP is no longer receiving new requests via FOIAonline. Their data hasn't been fully migrated yet and therefore public users can still see CBP-related [information on] FOIAonline. Once they are fully migrated, that data will no longer be accessible in FOIAonline and our FAQs will be revised to reflect that.

Of those 17 remaining partners, 10 have awarded contracts to vendors. Of those 10 who have awarded the contracts, we anticipate one partner to depart by the end of March and another two to depart in July. The last seven partners are still navigating their agency's procurement and acquisition processes and we are in constant contact with those partners to continue to offer assistance when we can.

As I conclude for today we want to bring you back to some key messages. We are dedicated to ensuring successful data migration. If you have a registered public user account, please download any data you wish to keep for ease of reference to those documents in the future during this transition; frequently check FOIAonline's website for participating partner status; contact FOIAonline partners directly if you'd like to find out information regarding their new vendor and/or replacement FOIA case management solution; and the public is always encouraged to submit their FOIA requests to federal agencies through the DOJ's foia.gov site, which is the federal government's central website for FOIA and FOIA submissions.

Thank you, and we now invite questions.

Alina M. Semo: I just want to invite Jeff in case he has anything he wanted to add as folks are thinking about questions.

Jeff Edwards: Thank you, Alina. We really appreciate the opportunity to say a few things with the committee today. I thought Laura was very thorough and did a good job, there's a lot of information in there. And the only thing I could add is just [that] we are very happy to make ourselves available to the committee and answer any questions at any time.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, sounds good. So anyone have any questions on the committee? Not all at once.

Paul Chalmers: This is Paul Chalmers [from PBGC]. Yeah, I have a question.

Alina M. Semo: Great. Paul, go ahead.

Paul Chalmers: I was just wondering, Laura, was there a common theme in the types of customizations that agencies were making to FOIAonline?

Laura Johnson: Actually, they were actually quite unique, and it depended because as you can imagine each agency and sometimes even within an agency different program offices do a different workflow with regard to processing their documents. So it was because of those unique abilities throughout the workflows that we were trying to meet the needs of each agency and sometimes their sub-agencies. So when you've got 20 different agencies, yeah, there are a lot of different variations.

Jeff, can you recall? I think that I'm trying to-

Jeff Edwards: Well, we span the gamut in terms of partners utilizing the FOIAonline functionality to the fullest. Some use FOIAonline to send correspondences and others never use FOIAonline for those things and use their own email system. Some release documents and try to build an e-library of sorts, where others don't do that, they have a repository in the data center for their repository. Retention periods were different. Lots of additional information form fields and requirements were very different across the partners. Those are just a few things.

Laura Johnson: Yes. Thank you, Jeff, that helped bring a few others to mind. I know that some of the partners who used this thoroughly really wanted various types of customizations with regard to tasking when they were giving the tasks to various folks in their workflow. Another was advanced searches, people wanted to have, like Jeff mentioned, a library or a reading room or a repository where people could be able to have an opportunity to look up what was being released in responses in general from a particular partner. Another one was some folks, and we were hoping if FOIAonline had continued to perhaps implement some type of records management, which is not something that currently is available in FOIAonline.

Paul Chalmers: Were there specific types of features that were available in the private sector? You mentioned that the private sector was able to provide products that came in at a more reasonable level. What were the types of features that were popping up in the private sector that you couldn't match?

Jeff Edwards: Paul, one of the things that is key is the complex searching that folks want to be able to do. FOIAonline search capabilities are pretty simple, and the things that the enterprise folks are able to do with advanced search algorithms is very helpful for folks that only get a few days to respond and data sets continue to grow, right? Several of them are adding artificial intelligence algorithms, to help identify responsive documents for the FOIA officer or the user. There's a lot of conveniences like that that are out there that help in your day-to-day business critical activities, duties.

Laura Johnson: Right, and AI was just something that we haven't been able to catch up with yet.

Paul Chalmers: Thank you, that's interesting.

Laura Johnson: Thank you, for your questions.

Alina M. Semo: Alex, I think you have-

Patricia Weth: Alina, I have a question.

Alina M. Semo: Oh, I'm sorry. Patricia?

Patricia Weth: Yes, I have a question.

Alina M. Semo: Just identify yourself and agency.

Patricia Weth: This is Patricia Weth from EPA. Hi, Laura and Jeff. I know both these folks, worked with them for quite some time. My question is: if I remember correctly, at one point Regulations.gov was on the same server as FOIAonline.gov and then Regulations.gov went to GSA. Am I correct in understanding that EPA, at that time, had asked GSA if they would be interested in taking over FOIAonline?

Jeff Edwards: Patricia, I can tell you that's before Laura and our time. I don't know that I heard very specifically from a reliable source that that was in fact true. I had heard from years past where there was interest in others taking the program, maybe. So I apologize for not being able to answer that question.

Patricia Weth: Oh, no. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Alex, you're next. Thank you.

Alex Howard: Thank you so much, for taking this time to speak with us and, through us, speaking with the public about this. I'm grateful to you for taking this step, and also grateful to you for putting up that pop-up at FOIAonline. I think that people will find things more easily now, and that fact is useful. Have a couple of different questions.

One is just kind of strategic. You said, in terms of you're reaching out, that you're approaching a multi-pronged approach, but I haven't seen any messaging from the EPA's public-facing assets on social media, on websites, anything from your public staff. It's all on FOIAonline, so I just would encourage you, as part of the requester community and a representative from that, to do that and to consider reaching out to all of the active users directly, if you haven't already done so, to make sure people are hearing the exact same messages you said to us, to ensure that no one's records are lost and that they know what's happening; because, right now, I can say that as wonderful as it is that you put that pop-up and the FAQ on the website, it's still not really represented in the EPA's public-facing assets, in terms of social media.

It hasn't been something that there's been, say, a press conference about, which is something that I'd love to see when something is expressly an open government website. It's coming out of the open government world, and in the spirit of transparency, participation, collaboration, all of the aspects that are in the EPA's own open government plan, which the public can see at Epa.gov/open, that that would be meaningful to see. I can say that it came as news for many people who are in the requester community that this would be sunsetted, despite there being some discussion in this committee and before Congress. When Kevin Bogardus at E&E News published that piece, I saw that it was news to a lot of people, so I would just encourage you, as you do a multi-pronged effort, to make sure that the EPA’s considerable talented communications professionals are engaged in that process and that you use social media and direct messaging to reach out.

I want to ask two different questions beyond that. One is on the data migration side. As people know, FOIAonline is not just for case management, you also publish a great deal of responsive records there. There's a lot of concern that those records are going to go offline when the site goes offline, and that the partners you reference are not going to make sure they continue to be publicly accessible. Can you offer us some perspective on what those partner agencies are doing to transfer those records? The second is with respect to correspondence that requesters have. Is there a way to migrate the correspondence they have in these open records to case management systems? Is that something that you're enabling a tool for? How are you approaching that, to make sure that people's cases aren't lost in this migration? Because, as you mentioned, there are [a] great many agencies that still haven't acquired [the] next step and it's now March 2nd, so we're looking at six months, which in government time may not be that much. Again, thank you for taking this time.

Jeff Edwards: Let me start by thanking you for the suggestion on spreading our communications through EPA's other vehicles. It's been a real balance for us too, and hearing that is very important, because it's been a balance for us to view FOIAonline as supporting the agencies, that is a shared partnership. We would support them and coordinate and work closely and align with them, so that messaging is ending up on their site, as we're just the technical piece in the background for FOIAonline. We can definitely take that, thank you.

To your first question about the migration and all of the responsive documents, we have a very custom export algorithm that pulls all the data from the platform from multiple locations. You can imagine the relationships that exist between all the attributes and elements of a case, and it compiles that in a directory and a folder structure with all of those documents in their prospective homes. There's copious documentation, and we work again with engineers and analysts, project managers and whatnot, to understand the layout of that export and how they are to map that, to import every bit of it into the new case management system and make that data available to the public.

We have not seen any agency request that we build a filter to remove any documents or any element of the case or the request. It's actually been the opposite. There's been several meetings, a couple of hours, three times a week, going into detail on exactly how will every bit of the data in FOIAonline map to every bit of the form fields and the UI and the display of the new case management system. So there's a lot of effort to make sure that these things don't go away. Can you paraphrase your second question again for me, please?

Laura Johnson: I think it was pertaining to open cases being migrated.

Alex Howard: Yes, that's correct. The two aspects of this are with respect to the documents that have been disclosed, was responsive documents and data hosted on the site, which there's, I think, a fair bit of concern about them going offline and then not existing somewhere else. I'm curious whether you've heard from partner agencies whether they plan to post those documents on their FOIA reading rooms, the online reading rooms that were mandated in the 2007 Open Government Act. Then, the correspondence itself, you've mentioned downloading things. I think the question will be, say, if a partner agency hasn't acquired a new system or hasn't completed the migration when this goes offline, will that correspondence disappear, which is why I was nudging you all about whether you've directly engaged all of the different active users on the site to make sure that they know that that's a possibility. Although, I gathered you're trying to avoid it, to ensure that open cases aren't lost. As you know, requesters sometimes wait years to hear back, and occasionally agencies will use “still interested” letters. It would be unfortunate if requesters didn't get that, and then the case was closed.

Laura Johnson: Jeff, do you mind if I take this first? I think that what we can say is that of those remaining who have not awarded a contract yet, it doesn't mean that they're behind the eight-ball. They very well might be on the verge of awarding a contract any day now, which we know a handful are. Some of them might be going to existing technologies in-house, and they're still trying to work that out. We don't anticipate any of the partners not having a replacement solution up and running by the end of the time. If that were to happen, there's…things don't go away. Jeff and the various engineers are still bundling together that data, so that it'll be ready to be exported as soon as they do have a replacement. With that in mind, the data migration includes migrating the open cases, which means that correspondence that you just mentioned. All of the partners realize that this is going on. None of them have concerns, and we've brought it to their attention, whether they wanted us to or not, to make sure that they are in touch with their requesters in case they need to negotiate due dates or anything else of that matter.

I wanted to circle back, though, to the response and the suggestion that you had given us regarding reaching out to more of the requesters, especially those who go to the webpage and submit often. We have encouraged, and some of our partners are taking on their own messaging approach where they're sending it in newsletters. We do know of a partner agency who is sending an email to every person who's ever submitted them a request. Jeff and I have been looking into how we might be able to send a letter informing frequent requesters, which would be, essentially, somebody who might have requested or submitted a request, to request, within the last three years, that might qualify that person to get a message. We're trying to figure out right now how we would go about that and send out an email of that kind, so it sounds like that is something we should continue pursuing, especially since you've recommended it as well.

Alex Howard: I think that would be valuable. I'm conscious of taking up time. I would double down on Patricia's question, though. It was notable that Regulations.gov existed at the EPA and then it ended up at the Office of eRulemaking at the GSA, which has become, I think, a natural home for a lot of the US government's shared services. Was there ever any consideration to have that happen with this, in the same way that FOIA.gov is operated by OIP and with guidance funding from OMB (Office of Management and Budget), which we might hear about later, to have this site live on there?

Was there a negative impact from for instance, the Justice Department leaving along with its resources or consideration of whether getting intelligence community or Defense Department to start using it to bring in their considerable, greater resources to continue to operate the site? Because I know that if it goes offline along with the documents, those are dispersed to a lot of different places. It may be a lot more difficult for the requester community to find records that they're looking for along with the general American public, which I know was the express goal of setting this up 10 years ago when I was writing about it as a journalist.

Laura Johnson: Well, I can say that the problem with moving this program and FOIAonline, the application itself, to somebody else to continue to use, it's going to have the same problems that we're experiencing now. Again, the concept of being able to have all these different features, like we mentioned, would be something that we would encourage for maybe that to be something as FOIA.gov were to expand their platform or portal. That would make sense, but for us to hand this particular application over to someone else to continue use, we just don't see it. It wouldn't change anything.

Alex Howard: Thank you for that reflection. I would've been curious to see what would've happened if Justice had stayed, but that has long since moved on. I'm going to make sure other people get into the queue here to ask questions. We all have them.

Laura Johnson: Jeff Edwards, did you want to add anything more to that?

Jeff Edwards: No, I can't speak to the specifics of what was communicated of potential relationships and responsibilities back then.

Laura Johnson: One other thing, Howard, too. You made a good point about the publicly released information and how is that going to be displayed in the new systems. That is something that is up to the partners and the particular off-the-shelf product or customized product that they're getting from their new vendors. They will have the data. It's just how they're going to display it for the public is unknown to us right now, but we do know that some are interested very much in having a library. It helps reduce having to answer FOIA requests, because the information hopefully is already there if someone wants it.

Alina M. Semo: I want to interrupt, because we've got two other folks who have their hands raised. Michael Heise from EEOC and then Carmen Collins. If you guys could make it pretty quick, that would be great, because I want to make sure we're keeping close to our agenda time. Michael, please go ahead.

Michael Heise: Thank you. Yes, Michael Heise from Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I want to thank the presenters on this. I think what I heard in the beginning from Laura was a little bit of a [inaudible} and what I took from that was-

Alina M. Semo: Michael, I think we lost you for a couple of seconds.

Michael Heise: Can you hear me?

Laura Johnson: Yes.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, can you speak up a little bit though?

Michael Heise: What I heard at the outset from Laura was kind of like an after-action review of this 10-year FOIAonline process. What I took from that was, essentially, it evolved into a bespoke solution that matching the various agency workflows was one of the issues, which resulted in updates rather than upgrades, which I thought was an interesting way to put it. Also, which I found interesting was the utility, I suppose, or lack of utility, with respect to private versus government competition in this space. What I'd like to learn from both of you, since you're here presenting on this, over the last 10 years, has the EPA and its partners learned any other lessons? For example, is there any aspect of the FOIA process that would lend itself to a one-stop shop solution? If so, what might that be, or is it really the sense, do you think, that each agency across the federal government truly is kind of on its own, with respect to the FOIA processing, because of all the various ways that every agency handles its own equities?

Laura Johnson: That's a very good question, Michael, and I appreciate the fact that you've noticed the nuances of the workflows in each federal agency. I think what's also important to note is the type of requests that the different agencies get as well, and that makes it difficult, because for instance, Social Security Administration gets a lot with PII. Sometimes the parole board gets a lot that are mailed in rather than email. I think that that helps identify the differences, and it makes it difficult to understand the unification.

I think that one thing in particular that all the partners wanted was something that's able to generate the year end reports that they need to submit. That's something that's significant. Some partners are willing to do everything in-house. They just want someone to be able to run those year end reports for them and then they'd be satisfied. I think that it's going to take some partners, maybe, to get together or if there's a vendor that a number of partners are going to that they may be able to modify and meet their needs, but it'll be difficult, because if they modify too much, they're going to get into a similar situation as us; where before you know it, you don't have one universal product that's moving forward.

Alina M. Semo: Michael, great question, by the way. Thank you. It's something we're really talking a lot about during this committee term. Laura and Jeff, we might have to have you back in June, so we can continue this dialogue. Before we wrap up, I know Carmen had her hand raised. She's been very patient. Carmen Collins from Cyber Command at DOD. Carmen, over to you.

Carmen Collins: Good morning. Carmen Collins from US Cyber Command, the DOD. Not a question, just a comment. I thank you so much for speaking to us. It seems that the EPA has worked really hard on this for the past 10 years, and that you guys are, based on your presentation, taking thorough measures in order for that decommissioning process to occur seamlessly or smoothly, as smoothly as it can go. Thank you for really giving us a good understanding of how the decommissioning process is taking place. I can't imagine the amount of time, effort, resources, funds that EPA invested in trying to provide a solution for the various agencies that use your tool that you developed. It makes sense, right? Once you customize it, base it on their needs, it's tough.

Thank you so much. That's really all. I'm sure all the agencies are very grateful for the service you provided. It takes one agency to start the process going, and you guys seem to really give it a good try. Eventually, hopefully, we'll be able to take some lessons learned on what we could do, if we ever want to recreate something like you guys did. I think we would be very grateful for any type of information that would let us know. Like you said, the Social Security Administration, you did a lot of PII, so any type of information that could help us in the future would be greatly appreciated. Once again, Jeff and Laura, thank you so much. That's it.

Laura Johnson: Thank you, Carmen.

Jeff Edwards: Yeah, thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Again, Laura and Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. Please pencil in our next committee meeting, which is June 8th. We may have you back. Maybe you can give us an update at that time, and I love this idea of lessons learned. I think we're all very interested in those. Thank you again.

I'm going to pivot to the next stage of our agenda, and ask our colleague and friend, Brent Evitt, thank you, to come on camera. I want to introduce him, and I am very pleased to welcome back former FOIA Advisory Committee member, Brent Evitt. Brent currently directs the Information Management and Compliance Office, IMO, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, a new office that was created in October 2021, and he's going to be telling us all about that today.

Brent's responsibilities include records lifecycle management, FOIA compliance and litigation, pre-publication review, all types of agency declassification work, compliance with statutes, executive orders, regulations and policies, to govern conduct of intelligence activities, protection of privacy and civil liberties, and the conduct of human subject research. Brent also ensures that DIA provides the maximum level of transparency possible to the American people, with respect to its intelligence mission. He previously spent more than 11 years with DIA's Office of General Counsel, most recently as the Deputy General Counsel for Mission Services. Prior to joining the DIA's General Counsel's office, Brent served as the senior counsel and Chief of Administrative Appeal staff in OIP at DOJ.

I also want to share on a personal note, Brent has taught me everything I know about FOIA Exemption 1, Glomars, and exclusions, whether he likes to hear that or not. Brent is a former Army Reserve officer in the US Army Judge Advocate General Corps and is a military graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, with certification as a Russian linguist. He is a graduate of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, and he received his law degree from Oklahoma City University and his masters of law degree from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Brent, it's great to have you with us today. I know the committee will be very interested to hear about all the exciting developments going on at DIA, so the floor is yours.

Brentin Evitt: All right. Thank you very much. It's great to be here, and it's great to see Alina and Bobby again, particularly, because twice in a week now, I've seen you guys. That's awesome. It's terrific to have this opportunity to come and speak to the committee. It is a little strange for me to be speaking to you from my cold basement. In the intelligence community, we do a lot of virtual meetings, but we rarely do them from home. I'm discovering what it's like to be doing this from home, so hopefully I won't mess this up too much.

Before we jump in here, I want to tell you a little bit about DIA, because knowing a little bit about who we are helps you understand the challenges that our FOIA programs have. Alina mentioned all the things that our office is responsible for, and I'm going to talk to you today about how I think all of those things are connected together. They're interdependent. If you understand what DIA does for a living, I think it helps understand why I think they're so interconnected. As an agency, we're 62 years old, so that makes us five years older than the FOIA but actually pretty young for a federal agency.

We are a military intelligence organization. We do collection and analysis, as we say, all source collection and analysis, and we provide advice to, we say, war fighters and defense decision makers, so military and civilian leaders who are making decisions about military matters. We are 1 of 18 members of the intelligence community, but we are unique in our size and our mission. It's not that we have a piece of our agency that does intelligence, all of our agency does intelligence, and we do a very general type of intelligence. What makes us unique is that we are very general, if that makes any sense. We sometimes joke that DIA could easily stand for 'do it all', because as an all source agency, we do foreign intelligence and counterintelligence that can advise people on military matters, political matters overseas, economic matters, industrial matters, health matters, geographic matters. We have a very broad mandate here at DIA, a very broad mission.

We are a national level organization. We report up to the Secretary of Defense and to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. We have about 16,000 people around the world. When I say around the world, in 140 different countries, and that's a pretty broad span of people to try to control. We run the Defense Attache Program, so we do a type of in defense intelligence diplomacy in how we connect with militaries all around the world. That's a very important job the DIA has. We have about 30% active duty military members and about 70% civilians. It's lots of mission and lots of geography to cover, so when we're running the programs that my office runs, we have to recognize the challenges and the opportunities that come with that.

Let me update you a little bit on our FOIA program in the office that we created that includes that program. I worked as an attorney, as Alina said, for the agency for many years. I came over from DOJ to be a FOIA attorney for DIA, and we recognized very quickly that DIA, like a lot of agencies, suffered from the fact that the FOIA program was often an end of the train consideration. It was viewed as an administrative function, and its alignment was definitely off. It did not get the assistance that it needed to be successful. A few years back, a process began between the General Counsel's office and the leaders of that organization to talk about how we could improve it, how we could make things better, and that led to a white paper. Those of you who are affiliated with DOD know we always like to write white papers when we come up with a good idea. That developed over a few years into the proposal to create the Information Management and Compliance Office.

The pandemic intervened and that slowed us down a bit. During the pandemic, the General Counsel's office picked up the challenge. Of course, being DOD, we wrote a second white paper, and we proposed how we could fix things. What we put together was the structure that we have today, and to get to that, we had to explain our case to the agency. We wanted to show the agency how important the missions are based upon what we do for a living. Our motto at DIA is, "Committed to excellence in defense of the nation," so we do military intelligence and we try to do it the best way we can.

At the very highest levels, we really have three missions in DIA. I would say that every agency really has three missions. One of ours, of course, I call it critical mission number one, is to protect Americans from external threat, to protect the national security of the United States, but people often overlook that we have two additional missions that are equally important. Critical mission number two is to protect the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens from or to prevent internal threats. So number one is external threat. Number two is internal threat. It always shocks new employees to DIA when we say, Look, part of our mission is to protect American citizens from the  government impacting their privacy and civil liberties.  Critical mission number three is our public trust mission. We have to get up every day and recognize that everything we do must preserve democracy by building that public trust.

Articulating our missions this way helps us explain to leaders across the government why FOIA is important and why these other missions we do are important. It reframes the respect for each mission. It helps with leaders. It helps with our mission partners. It helps FOIA professionals understand what  they do. It also leads us to an understanding of the importance of the alignment of the organizations, where they fit in the agency's organizational chart, what kind of support they get from leadership. I call them these two things together, the alignment for emphasis. So I work for the command element of DIA. I work for the chief of staff of DIA. Nothing sends a stronger message about the FOIA program than the fact that I am sitting in meetings with the chief of staff of DIA. Leaders across the agency then recognize easily how important the mission is. It's also important though, that we understand how we need to integrate with all of our partners, horizontally, vertically, people who do FOIA at DIA, people who do FOIA within the directorates we support, with the Department of Defense, FOIA folks who give us excellent support. And we also have to recognize, as I've already said, that these missions are interconnected or interdependent, and the importance of building professionals in this area, having people who recognize that there is a lot of brain power and learning that goes into being a FOIA analyst.

And we have to constantly be building a supply of these people coming up through the system at every pay grade, at the leadership level, right down to the people we hire, oftentimes just days out of college. And it is also important in an intelligence agency that you link everything you do with information management and compliance, in our case, to the intelligence mission of the agency. So you can show that what we do is not an afterthought. It is actually a very important part of what the agency does, writ large, the entire mission. As an example here, I always talk about information as a tool. In other agencies, information is very important to getting the job done. But in the intelligence community, information is the job. It is our ammunition that we use to defend the country. And so when the agency understands that, it's a lot easier for the agency to understand FOIA, records management, transparency, pre-public review, privacy, civil liberties, how all these things are interconnected in the broader scheme, the broader plan to get the agency's mission done. So let's talk about integration again, just quickly.

One of the challenges that I think every FOIA office experiences is getting your mission partners to appreciate the importance of the mission, getting them to act in a timely fashion, to consider it as a tasking that is equal to other taskings, and getting senior level support with mission partners. One of the things that we recognized is that to do this, we had to overcome that response. We're busy with the mission. We won't be able to get to it right now, or we just don't know how to do it and we need someone to come in and teach us how to do it. So we needed to teach the mission partners how to support what we are doing, and we had to get leadership support at their level too for helping us out. And that involved a lot of training. So we've had a significant training program over the last year and a half.

We train internally, we train externally, and we have used a lot of our... We've developed the communications program to help get the word out and it’s been a very interesting journey that communications program because I have a lot of teammates who are very good at this. And sometimes even I don't recognize when something is going to be successful in communicating the word about FOIA, for example. 

Our FOIA staff, not long ago, convinced me that we should do a FOIA comic book so that people in the agency would understand what the FOIA was all about. And when they pitched it to me, I was supportive, but admittedly a little skeptical. I thought a comic book, I don't know that a comic book is the best way to get the word across about FOIA. And it turns out a few months down the road, I was wrong. The comic book has been quite popular. It's well received. People look at it, they laugh at it, but they also understand a little bit more about FOIA. And that helps us when we knock on their door a week later and say, "We got a FOIA request, and we need your help with this." And you just never know how our communications product is going to be received. We've tried posters, all sorts of messages. It all helps. It's all part of a process of educating the agency about the Freedom of Information Act. 

Now, understanding interdependency, that's something that academically, we really had to get our arms around, and I think that's something that we probably don't fully understand across the federal government. That would be my opinion. We don't understand that every mission is linked to the others in some way. None are actually secondary, and few of them actually operate in isolation. So for example, when I think about FOIA, I think about records management, or as we call it, records lifecycle.

If you know where your information is and you can access it, your FOIA program's going to work a lot better. If you can control the search process, which in some agencies seems quite simple. In an intelligence community agency, it's actually quite complex. If you can control the search process, you're going to be more successful. If you can control the declassification process, if you can energize that declassification effort, the FOIA office wins. If you have influence in connection with the subject matter experts who are looking at the equities in the information that you're looking at, then the FOIA program does better. If you can control the IT systems, if you can control, as I mentioned already, the training, all these things are linked together, and each of our programs that we brought into IMO contribute in some way to the success of the others.

Sometimes it's in a smaller way. Sometimes it's in a very significant way, but they all contribute to the success. And all of them, as I've said, we try to link to the actual intelligence mission and make it not the end of the train consideration, but woven into the fabric of what the agency does. And so how we did this when we stood up in one October of 2021 is with four divisions. We have a Records Lifecycle Division. They're tasked with figuring out, where is our data, how do we find it, how do we curate it, how do we keep it fresh and current for the people doing collection and analysis, the people doing FOIA, the people doing every mission that we do? How do we handle our data? We have our Open Government Division. This is the second one. They administer the Freedom of Information Act for DIA, appeals litigation, the whole thing in that division. There are connected missions to that too, the pre-publication review mission that helps get mostly academic pieces out there for the public to digest, and the transparency mission, which is like the proactive disclosure mission.

Then we have started a new Declassification Services Division to take a look at how we handle declassification. Declassification is definitely an end of life cycle consideration. It is a challenge for all agencies that have classified information, and we struggle to figure out how to do it effectively. And so we are still building that, but we're trying to take a new look at how we do declassification. Because the more we clean out the refrigerator, the easier it is to see what is fresh and useful today. And so that is something that we are really taking a hard look at. We have about five different types of declassification that we do already. So that is still a work in progress, but I do believe... We were talking about interdependency. Everything we do with declassification is going to help all of the other missions of IMO. To me, when we talk about interdependency, it's like if you're going to build a factory, and you're going to, let's say make ice cream, you're going to want to also build a dairy farm and make your own milk.

You're going to want to control basically the raw materials for your factory. And so in the IMO structure, that's what we're trying to do, is have a bunch of interdependent missions that can help each other out. So our fourth division is called the Oversight and Compliance Division, and it has a slightly different viewpoint. It does intelligence oversight, which is a huge thing in the intelligence community, regulating the intelligence community and making sure it's staying within the left and right boundaries of its mission. We have the privacy and civil liberties mission, we have the human subject research compliance mission, which is a compliance mission, just to make sure that we always have a good idea of what the agency can and cannot do. And all of the oversight and compliance missions feed off the first three divisions in order to successfully accomplish their goals. So that's what we set up, four divisions with about eight missions. But like I said, there are variations within each mission.

And the new structure helped us with respect for the mission, support from our partners professional development because now we're building a broader category of analyst in the IMO. So you can do declassification analysis for a couple of years. Maybe you'll want to do FOIA for a couple of years. Maybe you'll want to do records lifecycle for a couple of years. We can build broader people in this professional career field. I think it helps with morale and esprit de corps because you're with people doing similar missions and it's easier to share experiences and to assist one another. It definitely helps with officer retention, all of this, because we can take people from a lower pay grade and work them up through the system to a higher pay grade.

In the intelligence community, you may not be aware, we tend to favor people changing jobs quite a lot in developing a general level of knowledge. So you don't tend to specialize and stay in a specialization for your career. Having a larger organization helps us with that. So like I said earlier, we can give people some broader skills. And then it helps with the resource argument. Look, money doesn't grow on trees at DIA either. When I set up the organization, when I was asked to set up the organization, no one gave me a checkbook and said, "Take what you need." We still have resource issues, and I think that's always going to be the case with every government office, and certainly with the offices that I lead. But our alignment is good for making resource arguments. We can talk to the leadership of the agency and say, "This is what we're trying to do."

I joke with our team, "Hey, the good news is we work for the chief of staff of DIA. But guess what? The bad news is we work for the chief of staff of DIA. The expectations are greater. We have to keep moving forward. We have to keep improving." It has been a very positive experience for us. I think we were lucky, in a sense, that the stars kind of aligned for us. We get a lot of support from the Department of Defense level, from the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for privacy, civil liberties, transparency FOIA. They are supportive. We get support from the command element of DIA. We get support from the other senior leaders that I work with.

It was just a great opportunity to try something different and see what we could do with it. Now, having said that, we've had some terrific successes, but there still is no magic box when it comes to FOIA. FOIA still requires us to do a lot of very, very difficult work. It's a lot of searching for records, analyzing records. There's no easy way to do it we all know. The changes that we put in place, they certainly don't fix everything. They just help us to succeed. And we recognize we’re still 17 months in now. We've seen backlog reduction, we've seen tremendous professionalization of the workforce, we've got great new leaders who've come up through the ranks to help us keep moving this forward, but we're always going to have to keep evolving. I don't think we've discovered everything that could help. I think we just have to keep watching it, keep studying it, and keep trying to make it better.

Our biggest challenge is, still today, our classification inequity review. We deal with a lot of classified information, and we deal with a lot of different subject areas. That's a problem of being a very broad agency. You can have one document that deals with 10 different countries' equities, and deals with collection and analysis and human intelligence, and measures and signals intelligence, and it just is a very difficult thing to identify all the equity holders. And then when you do, you have to go out and you have to reach out to all those equity holders and get their professional level review before you can make a decision. So you can have one page that involves 10 different referrals to different agencies. And that was a shock to me when I came back to the intelligence community from DOJ. I was accustomed to...for example, the FBI as a client, the FBI has a very challenging mission, no doubt, but they have fewer areas that they are fewer subjects, that they are involved in fewer topics.

So it would be easier for them to say, "Oh, this is," for example, "a bank robbery case. We've seen a bunch of those, so how would we handle those?" But in an intelligence agency like DIA where we do all sorts analysis this is a huge challenge for us is identifying the equities and contacting all of those subject matter experts, the SMEs, and getting their comments across the...it can be across the entire world. So that is still our number one challenge. We continue to work on that, and we continue to try to find ways to improve it. Searching for records is still a challenge for us. It seems like we should, in any agency, have a way to just press a button and search everywhere.

But when you're separated into 140 plus locations, it's not always that easy. We also have the challenge of having three different information technology systems. We have information technology systems at different classification levels. They do not connect with one another. That is just a necessity of operating in the world that we operate in. Most of our work is done on the highest level classification system. And when I say most of it, I mean almost all of it. So it is a challenge for us to be able to work between systems, and then of course, our engagement with the public is done on our unclassified system, which is the one we use least of all. So we still are working on that problem. The pandemic has caused us some problems still to this day, we work in a SCIF. We have always worked in a SCIF. And that's an intelligence facility building where you store classified information.

This is just the way we work, but a lot of our partners don’t. And a lot of our partners across the government don't work in a SCIF, and they're working still from home. They're teleworking. Well, if we're sending them a classified referral or consultation for them to review and they're not coming into the office, that's going to sit for a long time until someone comes into the office. So those kind of problems will clear themselves up, I think, over time, but that is still a challenge to this day. And just generally, we still deal with the lingering IC tendencies that take us towards secrecy. And I'm lucky we have a leadership structure that really understands that that is a problem we have to deal with, but it's something that you see all the time in the IC. It gives us fewer natural engagements with requesters in the public because we work in buildings with big fences around them and fewer opportunities to network with FOIA colleagues elsewhere.

But we have to overcome that. We have to make our opportunities and make sure we're out there. And with respect to our critical mission number three, the public trust mission, we have an opportunity to be more aggressive in how we provide the opportunity for scrutiny from the public, from overseers, how we make ourselves as open as you can possibly be as a defense intelligence agency. So we keep working to deal with that. But we've got good support in that regard, and we're always looking for ways to make it better. So what is new about what we're doing? I've talked about the structure, alignment for emphasis, et cetera. One of the things I think that has made the biggest difference though is just having a senior champion, having leadership support for what we're doing. And that really does get people's attention. And the fact that we provide routine updates to the director, to the deputy director, to the chief of staff, the chief of staff updates can be daily, if they need to be, that sends a big message. It builds morale. It improves efficiency.

I mentioned that we were trying to communicate for mission success. We were trying to integrate. It's like when we first set up the organization, I felt like we were an Olympic runner who was still several years away from being able to compete. We were cutting time by essentially... In this analogy, we were cutting 20 minutes, 30 minutes every time we made an improvement out of our times. Now we're down to cutting minutes out of our time. And I think that shows that we're becoming more efficient, the runner analogy here. But I think as we get better, we're going to even be trying to improve by seconds and even shorter time periods, because every little thing we do makes it more efficient and cuts our response time to FOIA requesters and makes us a little bit more open. But it's not going to be just one thing. It's going to be lots and lots of things that we do.

And I find that what we're doing isn't everybody’s cup of tea. It's not going to work at everybody's agency. We just had our symposium last week that we were delighted to have Bobby and Alina visit. And when I talk about what we've done, people will come up to me from other defense agencies and say, "Well, some of what you're talking about could help us, and other things wouldn't help us at all.” So I expect that that is truly the case. And one of the reasons we integrate with all these folks is because I'm fully planning to steal any good ideas they have to help our organization too. So we are lucky to have good legal support. We have an embedded attorney in our organization who is a third member, essentially, of our leadership team, and helps us get faster, better in how we respond to FOIA requests.

We've also come up with our own type of internal policy guidance on FOIA matters that we call FOIA Operational Guidance Documents or the FOGs. I don't know if that actually is a great acronym, but we came up with it. We're going with it. So essentially, if you think about the DOJ FOIA guide, it's a broader work that speaks in great detail about what court cases have taught us about the implementation of the statute. But down at the individual FOIA office level, we find that there are perennial problems that we see that have never been resolved by a specific policy determination for DIA. So for example, how are we going to respond? How do we handle neither confirm nor deny responses, the traditional, what are often called Glomar responses. The way we handle them is going to be different than the way our partners, like the National Security Agency, the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], or the National Reconnaissance Office handle them, or the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency handles them, because we're a very general agency.

We do not encounter neither confirm nor deny situations that often because we have such a broad mission mandate. So you can write a FOIA operational guidance piece on that and explain, "Look, in this situation when you see this, we will assert the Glomar response." Other than that, we don't need to. If you see something special, go see your supervisor, and we're going to talk it through with your supervisor and our counsel. We've also developed a FOIA officer handbook, which is designed to be sort of an operational guide for our young analysts as they're coming up through the system to help them understand what their job is and how we expect them to do it. And we're working on some of the challenges that come with the intelligence community structure. How do we do consultations and referrals in a more efficient way? Could we design a system that would allow us to do them beyond just sending an email to a colleague and saying, "Can you put this in your queue and let me know when you're done?" We're saying, is there a more efficient way of doing that?

Is there a more efficient FOIA case management system that the IC would want to talk about? That's going to be a much bigger topic beyond my office, but it's one that has come up quite a bit, of course, everywhere, and something that we continue to discuss. 

But where we stand today, we've done a lot to…we’ve had a great backlog reduction in year one, but I don't think backlog reduction itself is our goal, of course. We want to speed up how we respond. We want to get more information out there into the public. It's more than just the backlog, although that is certainly one marker of success. We have made some real gains in professionalizing the workforce and creating a long-term cadre of people who do this as a career. The integration piece has worked very well, and we have a very active leadership team at IMO, people who, for example, have become FOIA technical specialists, and then gone off to other assignments and built leadership skills, and then have come back to the FOIA office to lead now that they have a broader set of skills. 

So that is really a very quick rundown of what we are trying to do at the Information Management Compliance office. I could talk to you for hours and hours about records, lifecycle intelligence oversight, privacy, civil liberties, human subject to research and declassification, but this is the FOIA Federal Advisory Committee, so I will not do that. I would be glad to take questions if you have any.

Alina M. Semo: Right. Thank you so much. I already have a question that's been posed. At least one committee member wants to know if you'll share the comic book, or is it classified?

Brentin Evitt: Yeah. It's funny how... This is one of my favorite jokes when people ask that question. When you do open government for a living, it's usually a pretty safe bet that you can share what you put together to support open government. So we have it printed. I know we have electronic copies. I will go back to my office and raise that, but we had that at the symposium last week. Someone said, "Can you share your FOIA slides, or your FOIA materials." And I'm just like, "We can always share our FOIA materials. Don't worry about that."

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I think Michael Heise has his hand up. And Carmen, is your hand up from last time or currently?

Carmen Collins: Sorry, I didn't take it down.

Alina M. Semo: Okay.

Brentin Evitt: I see the comment that the comic book is online, and that does sound like what my people would have done. [crosstalk]

Alina M. Semo: Oh, great.

Michael Heise: This is Michael Heise for the EEOC. I love the idea of the comic book. While you were talking, I was multitasking and trying to Google that comic book. The only thing I found online was kapow, which is a DIA comic book in November '21, which had to do with operational stuff, tanks or something like that. So I didn't see the FOIA one. So I echo whoever thought getting the FOIA comic book would be great. It also, when I was searching, looks like City University of New York has a FOIA comic book about something in particular for them. And interestingly enough, the DOJ, I think a long time ago, had something called foibles, which was...it looked almost like The New Yorker kind of single pictures. But if you can, if you are amenable to sharing the FOIA comic book, I know here at EEOC, I would love to look at it.

We have some of the same dynamics of trying to get FOIA out from the end of the train, and I think having a comic book is a fun way to bring the message across. I really do appreciate if you can share that. Thank you.

Brentin Evitt: Okay, will do. Look, hey, I have been a FOIA attorney for a long, long time. I will use sock puppets, interpretive dance, or beatnik poetry if it takes that to get the word across about FOIA.

Alina M. Semo: Love it. All right. I think we have two other folks who've had their hands raised. I don't know who had their hands raised first. I'm going to go with Alex Howard first, and then Gorka, if that's okay. Alex, the floor is yours.

Alex Howard: So I posed a couple of these in the chat. I wasn't sure if you could see them, so I'll just read them out. The first one is that it appears that the public can submit a FOIA request to DIA from foia.gov as mandated by law. When I went there, it gives me a form. When I went to DIA, I found that there's also a form there. Can you confirm that? What's DIA using for case management? And is it interoperable with a foia.gov API? So that's the first one. And then the second is you mentioned open government at DIA and DOD. I will say that everyone who works in open government is not necessarily proactively open by default. And I'm curious if you're going to be doing anything to celebrate Sunshine Week in the role of freedom [of] information, including restoring defense.gov/open, which is described in the open government dashboard you can find at defense.gov/transparency/dashboard.

And if you'll be in keeping with the administration's renewed commitment to open government under the new National Action Plan for open government, which OIP is going to talk about, the increasing investment in declassification capacity, which is something that I can see there's immense challenges across the US government. I heard from folks at NARA and the PIDB [Public Interest Declassification Board], and Austin at the LBJ library of these challenges, and it is fair to say that the Defense Department is well resourced in ways that other agencies are not. So I'm curious about whether that's something that you all are going to be doing. And if so, if you can be open and transparent in an ongoing way with a restored/open about what you're doing, what you're spending on, and whether some of the emerging technologies we're seeing around AI and machine learning are things that you'll be collaborating with ISU and DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] on.

Brentin Evitt: Okay, thank you, Alex. That is a lot of questions. Let me see if I can break it down. And if I forget parts of it, I'm not ignoring it, I'm-

Alex Howard: It's all in the chat if you want to check.

Brentin Evitt: Okay-

Alex Howard: Pull the chat if you want to check.

Brentin Evitt: I'm just, okay. I will try to pull up the chat.

Alina M. Semo: Alex, I just want to, Brent, I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just want to say to Alex, I don't see anything in the chat. So Brent, there's-

Brentin Evitt: Well, let me take a swing at it. We can-

Alina M. Semo: Absolutely. Go ahead, please.

Brentin Evitt: We'll get there. So your first question about the connection between our request system that is on our website and going through foia.gov. I need to check on that and see how that links up. I think that that is set up properly. We believe it is, but I will double check that. So we do have a separate way of doing it on our website. So I may be jumping around a bit, but with your question about declassification, this is a big mission for us. This is a big project for us. A lot of people have tried to tackle declassification. It's a thorny one. It's a tough one. We are going to increase our emphasis and that does mean increasing resources spent on declassification, and how we get there right now is, like I said, it's still a work in progress. We're creating a new branch of this, the Declassification Services Division itself is new, but we're creating a new branch within the division to be called the Declass Coordination Branch.

And its goal will be to do declassification as a service within the agency to be able to go around and say, what are your declassification needs? Tell us how we can help you get to the finish line for all the collectors and analysts out there. So I expect this is going to be a dynamic mission, but I think it's going to be a challenge equal to setting up IMO and making it run the way we've wanted it to run. But I think the payoff is pretty significant. We have a lot of, because information is our primary mission, we tend to keep stuff for a long, long time. And as a result it gets very difficult to tell what is the right stuff. And so I think one of our teaching points here is that if we can do declassification the right way, it helps open the government, but it also helps us internally as we go and stuff out something we can go to the stuff that is the information that we truly need. Now what parts of your question did I forget already?

Alex Howard: Well, I think you didn't forget anything. I think I was interested in whether the DIA’s case management is interoperable. And then I had a follow-up question. I did see under your reading room that you referenced a spreadsheet regarding open requests. When I click on that, it's a PDF though, not a spreadsheet. And it's a 404. So it'd be great if you could go back to your staff and actually start posting maybe structured data on the status of open requests. And I asked about case management because if you had a two-sided system, then requesters in the public and you all could see the status of requests because right now, if you look in the reading room, you can't see any of that.

Brentin Evitt: Okay, thanks. I will definitely take that one back. We are going to ramp up our reading room alongside a new transparency website with the idea that transparency allows us to get information out there for the public in a more rapid fashion. And it's usually things that the agency says, okay, well we've got this mission going on right now. Maybe the public ought to know what's going on here. Or sometimes it's about the operation of the agency, just more generally. But our plan is to really juice that website in the future. But I definitely will take back that some of it is not functioning right now.

Alex Howard: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Gorka, over to you from NIH.

Gorka Garcia-Malene: Good morning, Brentin. That's right. My name is Gorka Garcia-Malene. I'm the FOIA officer at the National Institutes of Health. You mentioned during your presentation how if you can control the search process, you're going to be more successful. Can you speak to the degree of control that you enjoy over FOIA searches at DIA and how you navigated concerns about the extent of your control from internal stakeholders?

Brentin Evitt: Yeah, so certainly I can address that because we are so spread out and because we have so many different missions, we do not have one system, one mass... You would think, especially if you watch television movies, that there must be some giant computer that operates with a whole bunch of blinking lights in a secret underground bunker, and you just go in and you say to it, "I want this." And it says, "Here it is." The reality of course is very different. And so we have to rely on our partners to go and do searches, do their reasonable searches in their systems, in their offices. Sometimes that office can be 10,000 miles away, but we have to rely on our partners to help us with those searches.

Now we stand by as technical advisors to help them understand what they need to do, but we just do not control that process. And it adds time and it adds some degree of uncertainty because we're not looking at the information ourselves right at that moment of search. So our goal, long term is to, I don't think we're ever going to have that one system, but to have a way of doing the searches ourselves and knowing that we can manipulate the search if we're not getting what we think we need, we can expand, we can explore. And we don't have that right now, but we're a strategic goal of ours.

Gorka Garcia-Malene: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Allyson Deitrick, you have your hand up.

Allyson Deitrick: Thanks. So Allyson Deitrick Commerce Department, so the records, life cycles that just a lot of knowing what records DIA has, how long they're being retained for or how do they interact with the FOIA aspect of your office?

Brentin Evitt: Yeah, so thank you. Records lifecycle, think of it as the cradle to grave, how we handle our information. And what we tend to do as an agency is talk about how we store it, during its immediate period of need, but we never, but we don’t pay as much attention to how we retire it. What information is destroyed pursuant to NARA's routine destruction schedules. And our position is if you pay more attention to that process, then you're actually saving money because the records from 62 years ago that you no longer need have either been sent for permanent storage at NARA or they have been destroyed according to NARA's rules. And so we think when you don't pay attention to the records lifecycle, you end up with a whole lot of stuff and no one can make sense of it. And just you spend a lot of money maintaining information you do not need and you cannot efficiently use.

Allyson Deitrick: Okay, thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I don't see anyone else's hands up. Did anyone else have any other questions for Brent? I actually have a question, Brent, if I could ask, because I think we wanted to loop back a little bit to the panel of requesters that we had back in December in our FOIA Advisory Committee meeting where the requester panel, Anne Weismann, who I'm sure you know, and Ryan Mulvey and Katie Townsend all talked about the need to address cultural changes within agencies, that culture change needs to really happen in order to really make progress. And I'm just wondering if you could address that because I imagine culture change is definitely a much harder topic in the intelligence community.

Brentin Evitt: So I think I anticipated that culture change would be harder than it actually has been. I think there's still some significant challenges, but I do think the stars, like I said, have aligned for us right now with the understanding of the importance of FOIA and the emphasis on FOIA. But we still have Department of Defense people doing very, very serious missions every day. And so there's things that we're going to try to do to influence the culture at that level. For example, I'd like in this year, the second year of our existence, I'd like to bring in a panel of requesters to come and talk to our people and just let our folks who are specialists in one country or one issue or one conflict, see who it is that's interested in this information and see a little bit more clearly what happens with the information that they may have reviewed under the Freedom of Information Act.

And then I'd like to get our people out there in the community teaching FOIA at various different training venues that the government is involved in going to meet with people who are frequent requesters. Just like I said, it's so hard  when you're an intelligence agency, it's hard to have those opportunities, harder to have those opportunities. And so I think we have to get ourselves out there and we have to welcome people into our organization. And Alina, you know what it's like to try to come into an intelligence building, you plan it, it takes some time, but we can do it. And I think all of this would help and it makes us a little bit more efficient every time we do it.

Alina M. Semo: So Alex Howard asked a question in chat, which again, I just want to remind everyone, please don't put any substantive questions or comments in chat, only housekeeping or procedural items. Alex would like to know if DOD had released proactively civilian casualty data, if a journalist had not filed suit under FOIA. Is DIA proactively doing so now? That's the question.

Brentin Evitt: So I really can't speak to what DOD broadly might do about something. I think we should be constantly trolling our data sets to determine what information we could proactively disclose. At DIA would that one have come to the top? I don't know. Definitely when we're in litigation, sometimes that brings it to everyone's attention. When there's a FOIA request, it brings it to everyone's attention. But we do look at this and we do try to figure out what information could we make available to the public that would be useful to the American public in knowing how to regulate its government. We have a lot of it though, and it's not always clear what should be at the top of the list.

Alex Howard: Do you track whether certain kinds of data are frequently requested using your FOIA logs and then prioritize that for disclosure?

Brentin Evitt: We do. We definitely, we have lots of meetings with the FOIA leadership. We know what the hot topics are based on the requests that come in the door and that helps guide us.

Alex Howard: Okay. So I know that one of the committee members worked on this particular story with respect to trying to get casualty data. He's not here today, Adam Marshall for the Reporter's Committee. So I wanted to bring this up. If there was an opportunity, not to rake you over the coals, but to ask what you're thinking on it is in terms of how proactively DIA can inform us about things like how many people are dying as a result of US military action. Whether it's our service members or other people because that unfortunately has not been, let's say, as transparent as could be, particularly in the last five years. And the concern I often hear from FOIA requesters is that getting that kind of information out into the public sphere only happens through filing suit as opposed to simple requests. So I was curious of what you're thinking on with that.

Brentin Evitt: Yeah, and Alex, I definitely understand the question and of course, as a former soldier for many years myself, I would certainly agree that the loss of military lives, the loss of human lives is of utmost importance to the government and to the public. I do think it is a challenge for any FOIA program to identify the highest topics and then to tackle the idea of proactively disclosing that information to the public. And it is not, I have never seen it be the case that the agency says, well, we just don't want to do that. It's often that proactive disclosures and the operation of the transparency program, it's a very dynamic thing to try to do in certain topics, don't hit the transparency portal. And that's not because the agency doesn't wish to disclose it, it’s that it's hard to get information out there that is always right…for exactly what the public wants to know. It's a guess sometimes.

Alex Howard: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo All right. I think we have one more question from Michael Heise at EEOC and then we're going to wrap up because we've got to keep going with our agenda. Michael, over to you. Michael, you're on mute.

Michael Heise: Sorry. I was reminded from Alina's question about the December meeting that there was discussion between the committee and the presenters, at least in brief, about how FOIA litigation might impact the agency's backlog and resources in the particular context of essentially are the same people that are processing requests, the same people that essentially have to process the litigations. And can you speak about, I know everything [at] agencies [are] different, but to the extent that you know and can speak to how does FOIA litigation impact your agency in terms of the people who are actually processing the litigations and the people processing the request and or appeals?

Brentin Evitt: Okay, thank you, Michael. The request process, the appeal process and the litigation process are all part of our second division, the Open Government Division, but they're separate teams within that division. So certainly if the litigation team is struggling to respond to a case in litigation, they could solicit assistance from the rest of the division or from my headquarters or from other divisions. But they do operate with a separate team of people. So in general, the litigation team does not tax the request team or the appeal team.

Michael Heise: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I don't see anyone else's hands up. Brent, I think that means we can ask you to go back to your SCIF if you want to do that.

Brentin Evitt: Yes.

Alina M. Semo: Stay for the rest of the meeting though.

Brentin Evitt: I have to tell you, I'm looking forward to it. This cold basement is…I'm looking forward to getting back to my warm office and away from the cold down here, so, all right.

Alina M. Semo: You're welcome to stay if you want to stay for the rest of the meeting. Otherwise, you can watch us later on the NARA YouTube channel.

Brentin Evitt: Okay. Thank you all very much. Thank you. And I look forward to speaking to you again in the future.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you. Take care, Brent.

Brentin Evitt: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, so we're running just a little behind schedule. I'm very proud of us. I want to pivot next to Bobby Talebian, who is going to provide a report out on OIP's actions in response to the fifth open government National Action Plan, the NAP 5.0. Bobby has agreed to take a few minutes to let us know how everything is going. So Bobby, the floor is yours.

Bobby Talebian: Thank you, Alina. And good morning everyone. Still have 90 minutes in the morning. I'm so happy to talk about the commitments that we have in the fifth National Action Plan as part of the open government partnership.

Alina M. Semo: Hey, Bobby?

Bobby Talebian: Yes?

Alina M. Semo: Can you speak up just a little bit? I don't know if anyone else is having trouble hearing you. You're kind of soft.

Bobby Talebian: Can you hear me better now?

Alina M. Semo A little bit. Just shout.

Bobby Talebian: All right. Can you hear me better now?

Alina M. Semo: Tiny bit.

Bobby Talebian: All right. I'll try to speak as loud as I can into the mic.

Alina M. Semo: Awesome. Thank you.

Bobby Talebian: So thank you again. Good morning everyone. Happy to talk about our commitments in the National Action Plan with regard to FOIA. [I] was very happy that FOIA was part of the National Action Plan. Of course, it's key to transparency and also as well as accountability and inclusion. And in the National Action Plan, we took note of the AG’s FOIA guidelines and committed to strengthening FOIA, describing some of the work we're very done, but also making three specific commitments. So I'm happy to talk about those and provide some updates. And then I'm happy to answer questions. 

First was to develop or update our FOIA self-assessment toolkit, which was issued in 2017. The self-assessment toolkit provides agencies a detailed way to objectively analyze their FOIA programs and to see if there needs to be any corrective action and have a central place for guidance to improve things, all the way from FOIA intake to search, review response and so forth.

And so in this update, which we're finalizing and issuing soon, we are adding new modules to address proactive disclosures to address administrative FOIA appeals. And then throughout the modules, we've incorporated milestones for the use of technology by agencies to support their FOIA programs because it's been a key part of discussion today. And of course, technology is an important resource for agencies as well as incorporating the principles and requirements of the Attorney General's new 2022 FOIA guidelines. So we'll be looking forward to issuing that soon. We're also going to provide agencies a new easier way to use the assessment where they will have fillables, essentially spreadsheets, which will, as they fill them out, score for the agency based off of each module.

The second initiative that we've committed to..OIP is leading, working with the Chief FOIA Officers Council, GSA and OGIS, we're leading an effort to develop shared business FOIA business standards for technology. And this is to make it easier for agencies to acquire FOIA technology and in turn, improve efficiency and the consistency of processing requests relevant to the discussions this morning. And we believe having these standards will also help industry to continue to innovate around the needs of the common needs of the request, the agencies in the requester community. At this time, we kicked off this initiative about a month ago, we developed a really great group of agency representatives through the CFO Council to be our working group to develop as an initial action key functional areas that we'd want to focus on at FOIA case management systems, the activities and its business capabilities that would be included in the business standards.

And once we've completed the work with the working group, we would then publicly share those standards and invite public feedback, which would then incorporate, so this is our overall process here, and continue to develop the business standards, including developing use cases and standard elements. If you're interested, as I said, we're working with GSA and under the Federal Integrated Business Framework, if you're interested, I'm putting it in the chat or I'll do, as soon as I'm done. They have a great amount of detail about the process and other shared business initiatives on their website. 

And then finally, the third National Action Plan commitment for FOIA that we've committed to is enhancing the user experience on foia.gov. We'll continue to improve foia.gov since its initial development in 2011 and also since launching the National FOIA Portal. This project specifically is looking to enhance the user experience by developing an interactive tool to help members of the public, either to more easily find the information they're looking for online or to find the right agency to submit their requests when the information is not easy to find online or is not online.

So the idea here, we're in the very initial stages of this project, we've done some really good discovery work getting agency and public user feedback. But the idea here, the vision here is to have a conversational interface on foia.gov as a tool that allows users to be able to go to the right place to access information or find the right agency to make a request. And there's two ways we're thinking of how this would be accomplished. We would have developed some defined user journeys based off of some very common types of requests or records that we're familiar with and where to go and where to find those. So things like veterans records, immigration records and so forth. But then also are working to have machine learning capabilities that power the search functionality that will also help by looking at the information the agencies have on their website about their missions and the types of records they have, FOIA logs, FOIA reading rooms, and so forth.

Like I said, we started the project several weeks ago, but we're now in the model type, prototype phase where we're trying to refine and iterate and then we'll get more user experience. But we plan to have an initial release hopefully this year, which will not be perfect, but it'll be a release that then we can continue to work and refine on and build to make this a powerful tool to improve user experience on the front face of foia.gov. 

So those are in a nutshell, a recap of our current three commitments under the open government partnership National Action Plan that was released earlier this year. I'm, of course, always happy to answer questions and happy to talk about our work.

Kirsten Mitchell: Hey Bobby, this is Kirsten. I don't have a question, but I just wanted to let you know I pasted in the chat the link. I think that was the one.

Bobby Talebian: That is the one.

Kirsten Mitchell: Awesome.

Alina M. Semo: Alex, do you have your hand up from before or now?

Alex Howard: I have it up from now.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, Alex, go ahead.

Alex Howard: Sure. Bobby, thank you for taking the time to speak with us about this and as someone who specifically asked for FOIA to be included in the National Action Plan, I'm glad that it is, and I'm glad that this is giving you hopefully more ability to drive some change because of the inclusion. I guess the question I would ask is pretty straightforward. You announced all of the things you just discussed at the Chief FOIA Officers meeting in November of last year. The National Action Plan came out in December. These are the same things that were pre-existing. The open government National Action Plan was supposed to be co-created with the American people. In this case, can we say that happened if the commitments are the same as existed before the plan in past open government plans from the Justice Department? For instance, there was a release to one release to all FOIA policy or commitment to work on the national portal or commitment to otherwise improve the administration of the FOIA through something that you could go list if you look at justice.gov/open in its previous iteration. Were you able to co-create new commitments or did you have to choose things you were already doing?

Bobby Talebian: So Alex, thanks for the question. I know you and I have also had several conversations about this, but so what I'll say too is that these commitments were informed. So I did have a listening session of with, as part of the NAP process, and while these were commitments that we had begun working on or had visions of, for example, the shared business standard really didn't get kicked off until just recently, and the user, the foia.gov enhancements is newer, too. It was really informed too by the discussions. So our approach, our visions were impacted by the discussions that we had through the NAP process. And of course, I took all of the input that we got through the NAP process and our things that I'm also considering [in the] future as far as the different things that were raised. Both in materials that were given after that listening session and during that listening session. So I get what you're saying, where these were commitments that already were talked to or these were initiatives that were talked to. But I think one, as having them as part of the National Action Plan obviously definitely elevates those commitments. And two, we're really informed of the vision that we had for all three of these through some of the discussions and recommendations that were given through the material that was given after, as part of the NAP process and the listening session that I had.

Alex Howard: Would you be willing to add a new commitment to implement recommendations from this committee because there is space to add new commitments? There's a precedent from 2015 where the US added more to the third NAP. And for people who are watching who don't know, this committee is a successful outcome of the second National Action Plan. The fact that this committee happens and we're talking is the result of a National Action Plan commitment, which is great. The archivists have really followed through on that. Would DOJ be willing to add new commitments to that, starting with one for the Summit for Democracy and then adding, leading up to the OGP (Open Government Partnership) Summit this fall?

Bobby Talebian: So I can't speak for the administration on what they're going to issue in a new NAP or subsequent NAP. Obviously the Department of Justice has shown that it's fully committed to strengthening FOIA. So we'll continue to work with everyone, public, other agencies, the administration on those types of initiatives that are going to strengthen Freedom Information Act administration.

Alex Howard: Okay. Thank you Bobby. I look forward to seeing you in person at Sunshine Week.

Bobby Talebian: Oh, thank you. I'm glad you'll be there.

Alex Howard: Yep, every year.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, Bobby, thanks again for that report out. Really appreciate it. I want to pivot to subcommittee reports because I'm hoping we can still end on time today. So up first is the Modernization Subcommittee, co-chairs Jason R. Baron and Gorka Garcia-Malene. Gorka and Jason, I don't know who is going to give the report out, so I'll turn the floor over to both of you and feel free to pick amongst yourselves.

Gorka Garcia-Malene: Thank you, Alina. As you mentioned, my name is Gorka Garcia-Malene. I'm the FOIA Officer for the National Institutes of Health, and I co-chair the Modernization Subcommittee with Jason Baron, who is also here today. The subcommittee continues to meet regularly. We've met five times since the December 1st Advisory Committee meeting to continue to develop our ideas and maintain our momentum. I should add that working groups within our subcommittee have held additional meetings and that Jason and I are immensely grateful for their dedication and time. We continue to organize our efforts around two working groups, a process working group, and a technology working group. As a first project, our subcommittee has honed in on determination letters. For the past two months, Adam Marshall of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has led the way in examining issues regarding agency determination letters to see where improvements can be made that would assist both requesters and agencies. The intended output of this work is to develop a model determination letter for this Advisory Committee's consideration. We also have plans at the intersection of FOIA and technology where Ben Tingo of OPEXUS, who is also here today, leads the charge.

Of course, we know that there are other groups that are interested in employing technology, and so, in an effort to avoid duplication, our subcommittee is receiving updates on some of the work already underway in the Chief FOIA Officers Council's Technology Committee, and I believe we have one more update pending on their work. And then, at that point, we'll take what we have learned from those updates to evaluate and refine our future projects in the field of technology and FOIA. Concurrently, our subcommittee is exploring other initiatives to improve FOIA and, for more on that, I would like to take a moment to invite Jason Baron, who co-chairs the Modernization Subcommittee with me to comment on our subcommittee's good work on community engagement. Jason?

Jason R. Baron: Thanks, Gorka. That was a great summary and I also applaud the work of every member of our subcommittee. We do have another item on our agenda going forward, which is to recognize the importance of having civic engagement between FOIA agencies and the various FOIA communities that are out there. And so, we are looking at various ways that agencies can engage more actively and that this committee can commit to fostering that through our own outreach. And so, we will be continuing to talk about that and giving reports at future public meetings.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thanks very much for that report. Does any other committee member have any questions for the Modernization Subcommittee? Seeing any hands. Alex, is that an old hand or a new hand?

Alex Howard: That is an old hand. I'm not an old hand, but I have one.

Alina M. Semo: All right. Just wanted to double check. Okay. Thank you so much. Let's move on. Michelle, next slide please. I'm going to invite Paul Chalmers as the subcommittee co-chair for the Resources Subcommittee. We know Professor Johnson had to leave early. So Paul, it's all up to you now. No pressure. Floor is yours.

Paul Chalmers: If you can put up the slide on the mission statement, I'd appreciate it. We didn't have this slide up in the last meeting that we had, but here's the mission statement for the subcommittee devoted to resources. I won't read it all. It'll be available on the site, but the gist of it is that we are looking into ways to figure out if agencies require additional resources to devote to their FOIA programs, and if so, what's the best way of going about helping them get those resources that they need and what those resources might be specifically. To that end, we've started as the subcommittee to talk to FOIA officials across the government. Our goal is to speak to a mix of agencies, large ones, small ones, some that have PII as their primary issue that they have to deal with, some that have to deal with classified information.

So far, we've spoken to about a half a dozen folks that may be on the low side in terms of where we stand at the moment. It's too early to talk about trends that we're seeing, but at a high level, it's not a surprise, but what we're seeing is confirming a suspicion that I think many of us have in this regard, which is, this is a complicated issue. Some agencies don't have a large program as we start, some have very large programs, some agencies are larger than others. They have different needs, different mixes of questions that they receive, different mixes of documents that they have to deal with and different abilities to retain staff. So it's differences in the way they're organized and so on. So, it's a complex matter. There's not really a one size fits all answer I think that we're going to come down on, but as we go, we're going to try to formulate suggestions for how to help out on this issue. It is bracing, I think, to begin these kinds of conversations and talk to agencies about the different types of challenges that they have.

Another issue that we're talking about, and I'm glad Alina didn't spoil this earlier, was whether there is a way for the federal government to offer a processing system for use by agencies across the government. You've probably heard a bunch of questions coming from subcommittee members to the EPA folks who were here earlier talking about FOIAonline and the challenges that they've run into with respect to that system. We're trying to explore whether there is a way to make something similar, but better, available across the government, especially for smaller agencies that don't necessarily have the resources to go out and procure the services for one of the private sector vendors. Again, it's a complex endeavor. I think you've heard it again and again today given the nature of documents, the nature of confidentiality issues that agencies run into and how those differ from agency to agency.

But again, we're going to take a stab at seeing whether there's something that can be made available, whether it has the flexibilities that agencies can take advantage of, what it would look like, whether it's something that can be developed internally in the federal government or whether it's something that needs to be procured and how it would be paid for.

So, we've bitten off a lot and now we're attempting to work our way through these questions and see what we can find out. And once we've conducted these interviews that we're doing now, we'll take a moment to process what we've learned and see if there's other information gathering that we need to do. So, that's where we are.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thanks very much, Paul. I really appreciate it. I'm going to pause for a second, ask if any other committee members have questions for Paul and members of the Resources Subcommittee.

Alex Howard: I do.

Alina M. Semo: Alex, do you want to go ahead? Alex Howard.

Alex Howard: Thank you. Yeah, Alex Howard here. So, there's two ways to talk about resources. One is in terms of the funding and one is in terms of human capital. And I'm curious, have you gotten any preliminary sense of whether the federal government is able to successfully retain existing FOIA staff or whether they're able to recruit or are we facing a personnel challenge? I know that this is a pretty tough set of requirements that exist for many agencies. Do you have any first takeaways on that?

And the second, earlier on, we heard from EPA that if you consider the cost of upgrades and maintenance, then FOIAonline would be more expensive than commercial platforms, but as things stand, it certainly appears to be less expensive in terms of total cost. Have you been able to get line items from any agencies in terms of how much they're spending and on what, which is to say, is it within scope for the Resources [Sub]committee to put together a sense of what people are spending on FOIA each year, breaking out personnel and whatever they're spending on software to understand whether those resources are static, increasing, or whether they're decreasing? I ask this because I'm not on this subcommittee, so I'm very curious what you learned.

Alina M. Semo: But you can be. You can be on this subcommittee, Alex. We need some non-government folks on this subcommittee, So, I think you might have just volunteered yourself. Okay.

Paul Chalmers: Wow.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Paul, over to you.

Paul Chalmers: Yeah. I'll start with the second question first. We're trying to figure that information out, Alex, in terms of how much people are spending on technology. It would be very useful to know that as we start thinking about whether it would make fiscal sense for an agency to host a system that's available to a bunch of other agencies. We're in the midst at PBGC (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) ourselves of implementing a new system that we're putting in place. It's too soon, as far as I can tell, to know whether it's going to be more expensive or less expensive over the long run than FOIAXpress. Government IT projects take on a life of their own as you do them, and we've been undertaking a lot of modernization at the PBGC, so we know that firsthand. But that is an issue that I really would like to delve into.

We don't have a sense yet as to overall. I think you heard from the EPA folks earlier, for instance, that not all of the partners have either procured their systems or fully developed them or implemented them. So, we're still trying to find that out, but that is something that we do want to know.

On the human question that again, I mean, I hate to use the word complex, but it is complex. I've talked to a number of places, and again, I have a FOIA shop that I oversee myself. It's challenging in that I think, in my opinion, I don't want to speak for the entire government, but I think we have begun the great resignation. Certainly at my agency as we've moved buildings, we knew it was coming. We were going to have some people retire rather than relocate to a new operation. And that's hit all across the agency.

It's been, with the labor market the way it is, it is challenging for the government to recruit people at this point. And I think you've heard recently in just the news coverage, generally the government OPM (Office of Personnel Management) in particular expressing a concern that it's having difficulty recruiting younger employees. So, there's a bevy of issues that go into this. I think some agencies are doing better than other agencies in terms of retention. If you've got a cap on your government information specialist that maxes out at a GS-12 and somebody else has one that maxes out of a GS-13, then it's going to be difficult for you to hang on to your folks because they can jump to the one that's got the 13. GS-13 is what I'm referring to for folks who don't necessarily speak government jargon shorthand.

So, you have all those issues. You have agencies that have pay scales that are better than certain other agencies. So, those are all challenges that we're taking on. But yeah, it's trying to recruit and retain people is one of our core issues that we're having a look at. And we've talked to a couple of agencies who've done a really good job of thinking it through and trying to put together…I think you heard from DIA today they've put together a career ladder to try to retain people and keep them there for the long haul. And if you have stability, it does make your performance a lot better. Does that answer your question, Alex?

Alex Howard: Yeah, it is a pretty great first swing at it. I think that having a sense of what's happening across government is an area that could be relevant to the committee's work, and I'm grateful to you for looking at that. I'd also just to note, one of the things that the EPA did develop is a market analysis of FOIA case management products and alternatives that informed its decision to sunset it. Vaughn Noga at the EPA, the CIO there, has developed that. It hasn't been something that they've posted, but I think that it might be a really good framework to start in terms of creating the matrix and then providing not just the agencies that are looking at transitioning from FOIAonline, but across the board, some understanding of what the market is and what the cost points are in terms of who's spending what to do what, and then what the alternatives are.

And that might also inform whether Congress or OMB considers replacing FOIAonline with something or augmenting FOIA.gov or building something new in terms of the next steps. And I'm really very grateful to you and the committee for doing that work because it is hard work and I'm looking forward to hearing more about it. I'm not sure if I'll volunteer, Alina, but I'll think about it.

Alina M. Semo: We're going to send you the calendar invite. That's all I have to say.

Alex Howard: All right.

Alina M. Semo: Okay.

Paul Chalmers: Thanks, Alex.

Alina M. Semo: I saw one other person's hand up. Michael Heise. Is that an old hand or a new hand?

Michael Heise: It's a new hand. It's a new hand. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks.

Michael Heise: Michael Heise, EEOC. Real quick. Thanks, Alex, for the reference to the market analysis. I, for one, hadn't heard of that, so no pressure, but if you were to show up at the Resources Subcommittee, which I am a part of, it would make me happy at least because you know a lot of things.

But the other thing I just wanted to mention is something that Paul said, Paul referenced FOIAXpress in specific when he was talking about the public versus government sort of ... And I'm sure what Paul meant to say there was FOIAXpress and any other of the many and various systems that are out there...

Paul Chalmers: Yeah, I didn't mean to pick one by-

Michael Heise: Yes. I just wanted to make sure that was clear. We're not targeting them specifically and that's all.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thanks, Michael. All right. Last but definitely not least, the Implementation Subcommittee co-chairs David Cuillier and Catrina Pavlik-Keenan. I'm going to give the floor over to David and Catrina. I don't know who's speaking, but it's all yours.

Dave Cuillier: Thank you. Alina. Yeah, this is Dave. I'm a journalism professor at the University of Arizona and incoming director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida. I'm going to keep this short because we're over time and I want to make sure people, the public, have the opportunity to talk.

So, we've submitted an update on our subcommittee. It's on the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee website, so if anybody wants to see it, it's posted there. It's just a one-page update, basically 10 great people have been meeting nine times as we start to review the 51 previous recommendations from the committee. We're about halfway through and we're starting to see some commonalities and see that we have a lot of work ahead of us. I suspect that in future committee meetings, perhaps the next one, we may even want to start bringing up recommendations for the full committee to consider following up on, such as applying Recommendation 2021-01, which is getting more transparency in the legislative branch. And I just put that link in the chat as well. So, more to come in future meetings. And with that, I'll just hand it back so we can get to public comments. Thank you, Alina.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you.

Dave Cuillier: Unless anybody else wants to add anything.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah. Yeah. Catrina or anyone else from the rest of the committee? Any questions or anything else to add? Jason Baron has his hand up. I'm noticing. Jason. Go ahead, please.

Jason R. Baron: I want to say that David's been doing an terrific job of moving forward on this. We have a lot of past recommendations. Let me just underscore that the subcommittee understands and the fact that there are compliance issues with past recommendations. And so, I know David and the other members know this, but I have been focused on ensuring that this subcommittee does everything possible to engage with government agencies on their efforts to comply with the good work of this committee over the last four terms. And hopefully we will be able to report out [at] future public meetings how we're doing on that score in terms of actively working with agencies on compliance issues.

Alina M. Semo Okay. Thanks, Jason. Tom Susman, I believe, has a question or a comment. Tom, do you want to go ahead?

Tom Susman: Perhaps both. Following up on David's comment on the recommendation to the legislative branch regarding access to its records, I guess my question is we don't really need to wait another four months to make a recommendation. If we need a formal recommendation for either OGIS or NARA to follow up with the new relevant committee and subcommittee chairs and ranking members with the recommendation that we made two years ago. OGIS followed up, they did a great job. You sent letters to your oversight committees, authorizing committees, none of which have jurisdiction over the offices of the Congress that we recommended take action to open their records. And so, if we need a specific recommendation, I guess I'd be glad to make a motion right now that a follow-up letter be sent to the relevant committees reaffirming the Advisory Committee's recommendation on access to legislative branch records.

Alina M. Semo: So, Tom, I know you were in touch with us earlier and I do want to say I don't think you necessarily need to make that formal motion. We are planning to follow up, and I thank you for all the great legwork that you did and giving us all the information we need. So, it's in the works.

Tom Susman: Okay. I'll take that as a successful approach. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Sure. Okay. Anyone else? I'm just looking to make sure I didn't miss any raised hands, which is a new function that Kirsten and I are still learning to get used to. So, I think at this point we can pivot to our public comment period.

Kirsten Mitchell: Alina, you're on mute.

Alina M. Semo: Great. Thank you. I muted myself accidentally. So, I think we can now pivot to our public comment section of our meeting. As always, we look forward to hearing from any non committee participants who have comments to share, particularly about the topics we've discussed today. I just want to remind everyone [that] all oral comments will be captured in the transcript and also on the NARA YouTube channel recording, so everyone can go back and look at that later. And as a reminder, public comments are limited to three minutes for each person. Kirsten, I'm going to check in with you first. Have you seen any questions or comments that need to be read out loud?

Kirsten Mitchell: So, thank you, Alina. This is Kirsten Mitchell. I've been trying mightily to keep up with the chat. It looks like most questions were answered by our speakers, particularly Laura Johnson, Jeff Edwards, and Brent Evitt. There was one question pertaining to OGIS, and this might be of general interest to everyone. When is the OGIS annual meeting? I just wanted to point out that in the past four years, it's been in the summer in either May, June, or July. So, stay tuned for more information about that. And so, that's it for me, but I'm going to turn it over to Dan Levenson.

Dan Levenson: Hi, there. As Kirsten said, there were numerous chat comments from our dedicated attendee Mr. Hammond, and most of them have been answered in the discussions that we've had so far. So, with that, I believe we're able to take phone comments at this time.

Alina Semo: Okay. Michelle, if you could please provide instructions, again, to any of our listeners for how to make a comment via telephone.

Michelle [producer]: Absolutely. So, ladies and gentlemen, as we enter the public comment session, please limit your comment to three minutes. Once your three minutes expires, you will be muted and we'll move on to the next commenter. Once again, each individual will be limited to three minutes each.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Michelle, do we have anyone waiting on the line?

Michelle [producer]: Yes, we do. Caller, your line is unmuted. Go ahead. Caller, your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.

Bob Hammond: Yes, this is Bob Hammond. Can you hear me okay?

Michelle [producer]: Yes, we can, sir. Please proceed.

Bob Hammond: Okay, so my email address is FOIAcompliance@gmail.com. This committee has embraced engaging the requester community. I will help you in any way I can. This includes drafting any recommendations and coordinating the review as directed by subcommittee chairman if you desire.

My top three issues for the last two plus years have been increased funding for OGIS, DOJ/OIP, and agency FOIA offices. I advocate before Congress and in other forms. I have some new ideas including providing specific language to authorization and appropriation committees. OGIS is tasked with FOIA compliance oversight and mediation intended to resolve disputes without litigation. Yet OGIS is understaffed at least tenfold. Litigation costs are exploding. Continuing the work from last year's re-imagining OGIS, I have some new ideas. With limited resources, OGIS is very effective at communicating through blogs and other forms. Ms. Semo's December 20th, 2022, holiday wish list is a gift to our nation. Reiterating that estimated dates of completion for FOIA requests and appeals are mandatory. EDCs are the law. 

[The] Department of Navy, Defense Health Agency, and others must engage in mediation and must comply. They must also release contemporary FOIA logs sought under FOIA to compare with EDCs and annual FOIA raw data. I want to work with them directly and quietly. Similarly, DOJ/OIP has a myriad of responsibilities for which they are grossly underfunding. Perhaps this committee may investigate. I'm grateful to Bobby for reiterating DOJ's policy of not defending cases where the agency has not articulated clear foreseeable harm. And for reiterating that there is no circumstance where a request that cannot be answered within 10 days does not require a unique individualized tracking. Thank you, Bobby.

I believe that each agency budget should have a top level line item for FOIA and records management, documenting current shortfalls, what the agency would do with the money to increase staffing levels for professional certifications, improve grade level career ladders, digitize paper records, and automate records preservations under appropriate records schedule with metadata to retrieve them, all the while elevating senior leadership accountability and reducing FOIA requests and appeals backlogs.

Following the 1996 amendments to the FOIA requiring agencies to release electronic records because of their inherent value such as formulas and spreadsheets. I had the privilege as a then contractor working for Information Network Systems of helping [Nancy] and others to meet those requirements. But little has changed, even though NARA no longer accepts paper records. Timely retrieving records for FOIA requires good upfront records management. Kudos to Defense Logistics Agency who did the work, moved both records management and FOIA under information systems to answer simple requests in one day and complex requests in 58 days on average. That also helps with the clear ladder. You might want to talk to those folks and perhaps have them brief. I also have ideas for [inaudible].

Michelle [producer]: Thank you very much for your comment, sir. Your three minutes has expired. Thank you. All right. And we're moving on to see if there are any other comments in queue. At this time, I do not see any additional comments in queue.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. All right. Well, thank you. I think that means we can try to wrap up pretty much on time today. I want to thank all of the committee members for all their hard work so far. Everyone is doing a fantastic job. Keep up all the great work. We've already made a Sunshine Week announcement about NARA's Sunshine Week program on Monday, March 13th, which I hope everyone will join us for, Making Access Happen: FOIA at the National Archives. We're also going to be running some videos with the theme of making access happen throughout the whole week of Sunshine Week that I hope everyone will tune into and you'll hear some great stories from folks all over the National Archives about how we're making access happen to all the great records that the National Archives has, not just through FOIA, but more generally. Bobby, did you want to just take a minute to talk about your Sunshine Week program?

Bobby Talebain: Yes, thank you and I appreciate that. We're excited to have our event again in the morning of Sunshine Week. So, I encourage everyone to go to both DOJ and OGIS's event or to both DOJ and OGIS's event. Details about our event are on our website. We are having it in-person and live streamed and look forward to talking about the importance of FOIA, of course, and recognizing some of the great work that agency professionals have done in key areas of FOIA administration. And so, look forward to a great Sunshine Week and a great kickoff on Monday with both DOJ and OGIS events. So, please do view it online or, even better, if you would like, visit us in person in the Great Hall of the Justice Department.

Alina M. Semo: Great. Thanks, Bobby. Appreciate that. I want to just thank everyone again for all the hard work you're going to continue to do, and we're going to meet again as a committee virtually, I suspect, Thursday, June 8th, 2023, beginning at 10:00 AM Eastern time. Does anyone have any other questions or concerns before we adjourn? Looking for hands raised or anyone jumping up and down? Being neither...Oh, Alex is raising his hand. Yes, sir. Alex Howard.

Alex Howard: I would like to invite the White House Office of Management and Budget to the next meeting now that we have some lead time so that they can update us all on the status of interoperability between FOIA.gov and all the different case management systems. OMB has that responsibility under the FOIA Improvement Act, and it would be useful to hear what progress agencies have made.

Interestingly, the deadline for interoperability is August of this year, one month before FOIAonline is supposed to go offline, so there will be a transition or handoff in a way from one set of case management systems to a new one, and interoperability will be very important. And since OMB has been designated as the agency on top of that, I hope that they will come and talk to us about that along with a possibility of restoring across agency priority goal on FOIA, which they had set up in 2016. Just wanted to get that in there. And to thank both of you for doing a Sunshine Week celebration since it is always good to hear our government celebrating access to information for the public benefit. Thank you so much.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks. Any other Sunshine Week announcements? Anyone else know of any other activities going on the week of Sunshine Week? I'm looking at David Cuillier, hoping he can speak about what's going on at NFOIC (National Freedom of Information Coalition). No? No, nothing. Got nothing. Okay.

All right. I just want to thank everyone again for joining us today. We had a packed meeting and a lot of great information was shared. I want to hope that everyone is staying safe, healthy, and resilient, and without any other questions, we will see each other again Thursday, June 8th. Sorry, Alex. It will be virtual and we stand adjourned. Thank you very much, everyone. Take care.