Transcript

FOIA Advisory Committee Meeting (McGowan Theater)

Friday, September 13, 2024

10:00 a.m. (ET)

Event Producer: Welcome and thank you for joining today's meeting of the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee. Please note this conference is being recorded and all audio connections are muted at this time. If you require technical assistance, you may open chat with the associated icon at the bottom of your screen and send a message to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the conference over to Alina M. Semo, Director of the Office of Government Information Services and Committee Chair.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you so much, Candice. Good morning and welcome everyone. As the Director of the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, and this committee's chairperson, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to the second meeting of the sixth term of the FOIA Advisory Committee. I want to welcome all of our colleagues and friends from the FOIA community and elsewhere who are watching us either via Webex or with a slight delay on the National Archives YouTube channel. We are holding this meeting on the heels of an extremely exciting and productive kickoff meeting that we held in person this past Monday, September 9th in the McGowan Theater. If you missed it, fear not, you may visit the NARA YouTube channel and catch up on that meeting at your convenience. So I have a few housekeeping notes to go through. Candice, next slide please. Thank you.

Before we launch into our meeting today, let me cover a few housekeeping items that are also covered on this slide. The meeting is public in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, FACA, which requires open access to committee meetings and operations. FACA requires us to post minutes and a transcript of today's meeting and we will do so as soon as they are ready. We will continue our practice of posting the minutes well within the 90-day timeframe that FACA requires and we'll post the transcript shortly thereafter despite having no requirements on that timeline. We'll also post the minutes and transcript from the September 9th meeting as soon as they're ready.

Please visit our website for today's agenda along with committee members' names, and we will also post shortly some member biographies. So please stop by our website again later for that. Our website is www.archives.gov/ogis. I am advised that two committee members are unable to join us today, Kevin Bell of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Sarah Jones Weicksel of the American Historical Association. In addition, I understand that two committee members are unable to join us by video, but they will be participating via audio and that is Joan Moumbleaux of the Environmental Protection Agency and Nieva Brock of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'm going to pause for a second. Kirsten, did I miss anything in terms of housekeeping notes?

Kirsten B. Mitchell: You did not, but I just wanted to note that Joan is indeed here on video. She was able to get that working and I also wanted to note that we have a quorum. A quorum is two thirds of the 20 members or 13 members. And I just wanted to note that I'm advised that Frank LoMonte will have to sign off at 11:30 AM Eastern Time.

Alina M. Semo: Okay.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks for that and thanks for taking the virtual visual roll call. I really appreciate that. During today's meeting, I want to encourage committee members to use the raise hand icon at the bottom of your screen when you wish to speak or ask any questions. The raise hand option is even better than what we used to use, which was the all panelists option from the dropdown menu and the chat function, but that's certainly also available to you. You can either chat me or Kirsten directly or chat all panelists if you want to intercede and be heard. But I want to make an important note to all of our committee members and all Webex participants - in order to comply with both the spirit and intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, we ask that you please use the Webex Chat for housekeeping and procedural matters only. Do not enter any substantive comments in the chat function as they will not be recorded in the transcript of the meeting.

Also, committee members if you need to take a break at any time during the course of the meeting, please do not disconnect from the web event. Instead, mute your microphone by using the microphone icon and turn off your camera by using the camera icon and send a quick chat to me and Kirsten to let us know if you'll be gone for more than a few minutes and join us again as soon as you can. A reminder to all committee members, if you can remember to identify yourself by name and affiliation each time you speak today, that would be very helpful. To members of the public who are watching us today, if you wish to submit written public comments to the committee, you may do so using our public comments form that is available on our website.

We review all public comments and if they comply with our public comments posting policy, we will post them as soon as we are able. We will have a public comment period at the end of our meeting today. My goal is to end by noon today, if not earlier. So perhaps we can meet Frank's 11:30 deadline. As we noted in our federal notice announcing this meeting, public comments will be limited to three minutes per individual. Okay, I'm going to pause for a second. Any questions from our committee members about anything that I've gone through? I'm seeing some head shakes...Kirsten, please go ahead.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yes, I just want to note that we do expect Margaret Kwoka to join us. She will be a few minutes late.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you. Yes, thanks for pointing that out. I appreciate it. Okay, so let's go on to our agenda for today's meeting. We want to focus today on a discussion of the priorities for the 2024 to 2026 term and select subcommittees today along with co-chairs for each subcommittee. We have allocated a significant amount of time on today's agenda to allow for committee discussion on priorities for this term. It doesn't mean that we need to take the entire time, by the way, if we can come to a quick resolution, pick our subcommittees and co-chairs, we can wrap up much earlier.

Following that discussion of priorities, I would like to move the committee forward to form subcommittees and select co-chairs. Just as a reminder, in accordance with our bylaws, we will need one government and one non-government chair for each subcommittee. And by now, all committee members have had a chance to read last term's final report, other material and homework assigned by Professor Baron. I want to thank our fearless DFO, Designated Federal Officer, Kirsten Mitchell for pulling together a great summary chart that captures what each of you expressed at Monday's meeting as potential accomplishments for this committee's term. Kirsten has also tried to place them into the three buckets of subcommittees I suggested that we consider - volume and frequency, FOIA statutory reform and implementation. I believe Kirsten circulated the PDF document to all committee members. It is also posted online under today's meeting materials. Has everyone had a chance to review that?

I'm seeing some nods. Okay, great. A little different than being a McGowan. I can't look around the room and see if people are nodding. I have to flip back and forth to two different screens, so please bear with us. We do hope that it accurately captures what we heard at Monday's meeting. If it doesn't and we weren't hearing correctly, today's a great opportunity to amend or tweak your hopes, wishes, goals for this term during our discussion. And I just have a quick few reminders for committee members to keep in mind. Subcommittees are not set in stone for the entire committee term. Traditionally, we've had subcommittees last the entire two-year term, but it doesn't mean that one subcommittee cannot end in the middle of a term and another subcommittee begin. So I want to encourage everyone to think creatively.

Good morning, Margaret Kwoka. Thank you for joining us. We encourage forming working groups within subcommittees. It's a very efficient way to tackle a variety of different issues. Working groups can report back to subcommittees when they meet on a regular basis. And we have seen subcommittees take up topics and then end up dropping them down the road, and that happens for a variety of reasons. But we've also seen subcommittees take a completely different direction than they first thought they would take, and that is completely acceptable. That just happens in the process of discourse and dialogue and discussion and contemplation about difficult topics that we're facing in the FOIA community.

So I want to pause for a second, make sure that no one has any questions and if no one has any questions about anything that I've gone through, just flipping back and forth on the screens, I would like to open the floor up to committee discussion of topics and welcome any and all comments. So Melissa has raised her hand. Melissa, please go ahead.

Melissa Pickworth: Hi, this is Melissa Pickworth from FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. I had a question about the chart that we kind of put together. And I was just curious from prior committees if we've talked or if there's been a history of kind of consolidating some of the buckets into just maybe two and having some of the topics actually be working groups under the subcommittees. Because for example, the volume and frequency of requests one, I’m envisioning fitting nicely under the FOIA statutory reform possibly because in terms of opportunities for offering relief, it would seem to be that there needs to be some kind of legislative change for there to really be a meaningful way to offer relief to agencies. So that was one of my thoughts is maybe consolidating some of these as working groups that feed into the larger working group or committee, subcommittee so that they can gather information and help feed the decision making for whether or not that seems to be something that we want to pursue as part of a broader legislative reform package or concept.

Alina M. Semo: So thank you for that comment. I'm sure other committee members have thoughts on that too. I believe Shelley has raised her hand next, followed by Ryan. Shelley, go ahead, please.

Shelley Kimball: So my comment is more on that volume and frequency subcommittee. I would kind of, because this is my research area, I would warn away from putting it under statutory changes because I think that's sort of a leap toward a solution that there may be other ways to do it through policies or trainings, some other thing. And so my other comment with volume and frequency was maybe to change the name or open the aperture a bit because I know that some committee members had talked about harassment and those kinds of requests. So maybe building it out to fit that as well that, and I know we've just been throwing around unduly burdensome and it's really difficult to find a name, but something in that vein.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thanks. I hope that you can come up with some great ideas about what to call it. So I'm very open to ideas, but thank you for that, Shelley. Ryan, you're next, I believe.

Ryan Mulvey: Thank you, Ryan Mulvey, Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Yeah, I would agree with Shelley that even though... Well, to back up, I think the idea of a statutory reform subcommittee is great, it's really important. I think that there really in my mind needs to be a complete reworking of how FOIA is written to really make it work in the future. And a big part of that is definitely, as Melissa pointed out, going to be dealing with huge volume to say nothing of the huge number of records that are at issue here. But then that begins to touch not just on the sort of vexatious requester problem, which based on our last meeting I think was part of what this volume subcommittee was going to work on. It begins to touch on other issues like the AI [artificial intelligence] stuff that Jason talked about on Monday.

So there's going to be overlap between all of the groups, and I agree that the high volume requesters is going to be something that a statutory subcommittee is going to need to work on. But I really do agree with Shelley that are other solutions apart from statutory reform that could be whether it's changes in agency regulations and procedures for how requests are processed to simply practices that aren't based in regulation at all, like having CAPTCHAs [Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart] on portal submission sites or something like that that can be used to address that. So I guess to summarize, we really need that statutory reform subcommittee. I think that's great. And second, I wouldn't collapse the two proposed areas into one. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: What I'm hearing, Ryan, is that you're volunteering to co-chair the FOIA Statutory Reform Subcommittee. We'll put a pin in that and circle back. Okay. Thank you for all those comments. Liz, go ahead please.

Liz Hempowicz: I love your nomination format, Alina. I am also voicing agreement with Shelley and Ryan, I don't have a strong thought about whether or not to break out volume and frequency or have volume and frequency as its own subcommittee or working groups. But if we do go towards a working group on that, I would suggest we put one in both the implementation and the statutory reform subcommittees, both of which I'm very much in favor of us having here for the reasons stated earlier. But also I was really struck across all of the materials and reports that I've read, one of the common themes being from FOIA practitioners that the recommendations sometimes paint too broad a brush. And I think that's one thing that we would potentially be continuing if we just focus on legislative solutions to volume and frequency issues. I think there are quite a few of our existing recommendations that seek to address those and sometimes in a more tailored way towards the agencies. I'm thinking about the whole body of work on A-files [Alien Files] for example, which would certainly change volume and frequency of requests to the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, sorry. And I should have said, Liz Hempowicz from American Oversight at the top. To summarize, I agree and just also wanted to voice strong agreement on having subcommittees for both statutory reforms, it is past time and implementation.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thank you so much, Liz. Really appreciate that. Other folks have thoughts, comments they want to share? Don't be shy. All right. Marianne-

Marianne Manheim: Marianne Manheim-

Alina M. Semo: And then Nieva.

Marianne Manheim: …from National Institutes of Health, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. And I guess the other area that I was thinking of, I keep going back to is looking at the idea of having a committee going over 67 of these different recommendations. And I mean it's like a beauty contest at this point. Do you like these anymore? Or how do we get Chief FOIA Officers to do this as a whole Council now? So some of these things haven't happened. On the inside of this, I will say they make recommendations and how are you going to force that across all these agencies? So this maybe goes back to the whole point of this stuff will just keep recycling, we'll do it again.

And so I am concerned with spending time other than we can talk about it, but is it going to actually change anything? I don't even know if these recommendations actually are the best way to do this other than legislative changes or actually bringing technology in and actually telling, explaining to requesters what works, what doesn't work, and the same thing on the inside. So I don't know. I do feel like we're going in circles on that one and we might be going in circles again, when I look at that. I know everyone's on the first two, they're like, "This is great. We need to do this." But at the same time, it just seems to be just the wheel keeps going and going on those and I'm not sure that we have the power or even Chief FOIA Officers have the power to actually do this. So I feel like there's a fundamental issue on that one to begin with.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I don't know if others shared that concern from Marianne. I appreciate that concern. I'm going to say that I feel as though a lot of the recommendations that have been made, a number of them OGIS has already tackled by doing assessments. I feel like another pat on the back for me and Bobby is that we stood up two committees of the Chief FOIA Officers Council that are quite active. So some of the recommendations are getting implemented, but I hear you and that is definitely why we wanted to have an Implementation Subcommittee to really go back and figure out what's working and what's not working. But thank you for all of those thoughts. I appreciate that. Nieva, you're next. And then Deborah.

Nieva Brock: Yes, good morning. Nieva Brock from the Department of Defense. Along those same lines, I was thinking that I do appreciate the three buckets. I think it's a reasonable number of buckets and also they're broad enough that we can define what we mean by them. However, with number three, with similar to my colleague, I was thinking it's more of a vetting of past committee recommendations than necessarily an implementation because I think we need to assess are these even actionable anymore? So we vet what's actually something that we need to do and then at that point then we can work on implementing those hopefully fewer. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: That's a great point, Nieva. Thank you. Deborah, you're next. And then Frank.

Deborah Moore: Thanks. Good morning everyone. Deborah Moore from the Department of Education. I definitely recognize what Marianne's saying about the difficulty in moving from we've got these great ideas, these great recommendations for implementation. How do we bridge the gap to the actual doing? And I think there are a couple of things we really need to think about because there are ways, we talked about an EO [executive order], there's the president’s management agenda. There are ways that we can encourage agencies to implement them, but I think we also have to be really careful because if we here do an analysis of which are the recommendations that make sense or we should sunset this or that's ignoring our audience. I think we need to make sure that we work with the agencies and also tailor recommendations because a small agency is a very different working environment than a large agency or a mid-size agency.

So working very closely with agencies about which recommendations make sense, which ones should have resources dedicated to them and which ones don't make sense. So a tailored approach and working with agencies to develop a tailored plan for implementation is kind of what I was thinking, that we might want to go in that direction. Partnering with them so that something can actually realistically get done and make sense and make a difference at the agency.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Deborah. Those are great thoughts. Frank, go ahead, please.

Frank LoMonte: Yes, thanks. So Marianne opened the door for me to resurface a subject that I had briefly raised at our Monday meeting. And it seemed like there was a little bit of interest in going down the path of perhaps identifying five or six core topics that are common to the 67 past recommendations that could become part of a mini-report that could be ready for the inauguration of the new administration shortly after January. And my thought and Marianne has helped me crystallize this thought is that that could nest as a working group underneath implementation. And I'm happy to work on that to identify kind of the Goldilocks level of recommendations here. There are going to be some that require an appropriation and or statutory change, so that would not be appropriate for a day one executive declaration. There are others that can be done internally and are in process of being done internally within OGIS and Archives.

Again, not fodder for an executive declaration because the train is already moving out of the station on those. So that Goldilocks couple in the middle, that could be done by way of a tone setting, priority setting declaration on day one would be, I think, really a productive discussion to have. And it would also help us eat the elephant of implementation one bite at a time. That's a bite that we could eat between now and January. And again, I'm happy to work on that. And I think regardless of how the election comes out or what the next administration is, we could certainly identify a half a dozen that are process improvements and just tone setting things in the same way that President Obama on day one, set a tone, made a priority. I think there's value in that symbolically, even if there's not a whole lot that is accomplished in terms of moving earth.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Thank you so much, Frank. All right, Liz, you're up again.

Liz Hempowicz: Just wanted to give voice to some of the nodding heads in the room from Monday and now across the room to that idea from Frank. I think it's really worth us considering, and I would love to work on that as well.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, that's great. Frank, is that still your raised hand from before? Otherwise I'm going to call on Professor Cuillier.

Frank LoMonte: It is, sorry. I've lowered it.

Alina M. Semo: No problem. David, go ahead please.

David Cuillier: Yeah, thanks. Great discussion. So I've been trying to lump some of the ideas into these basically working groups within subcommittees that you've identified. That's something that I think will help as we figure this out. I like the idea of just having two subcommittees, but I'm not sure if that's going to work. I think the three that you laid out is pretty good, volume and frequency, statutory reform. I could see working groups developing better legislation, maybe toward the 60th anniversary of FOIA, maybe get that congressional hearing, something substantive. People have brought up other legislative changes, deliver the process. Maybe the OGIS 3.0 stuff could fit in that subcommittee as a working group.

On the implementation, I think there's a lot of possibilities. And building on what Frank said, that report done last term, like Jason pointed out, starting on page 20, identified 17 previous recommendations that the subcommittee felt could use more work from future terms, that actually something might be able to be accomplished. And those 17 recommendations were clumped into four topic areas and then explained in a bunch of pages there. So the implementation subcommittee wouldn't have to start from scratch here. It could start with maybe those and incorporate others or change it up, and certainly have working groups on AI technology, which is, and the websites and online interactivity.

The first person requests topic that still could use more work, building culture, transparency, that sort of thing. Maybe the public engagement that was talked about. Maybe there could be a White House transition working group within implementation that distills this and tries to get this into the hands of the next president. So yeah, I think we're on the right track. 

And like you said, Alina, we could create something, but we can always change it up. So if we leave today with some general ideas and people maybe wanting to throw their names in pots, that can come together pretty nicely, I think. 

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, David. I appreciate that. Let's see, Ryan has his hand up. Go ahead, Ryan, please.

Ryan Mulvey: Thanks, Alina. Ryan, AFPF. David, I think you're right to start listing working groups. The statutory reform subcommittee, if that's one that we adopt, that's going to be a big project, and I think there's a lot of, to add, just kind of jotting down ideas for other working groups that could be there. You could have a processing working group that tackles the vexatious requester issue and the volume issue. A fees working group, which I know there's been some interest in continuing work on fee reform that was started in the last term of the advisory committee. As a practitioner, as a litigator, I think a litigation and judicial review working group on how FOIA lawsuits work and how the statute deals with that would be really, really important. Then an exemptions and foreseeable harm working group, which would cover, I know there was interest from you and others about deliberative process privilege reform, but the other exemptions in how foreseeable harm might be changed could be addressed. 

I would also add, and I'm sorry if I blanked out and missed somebody already mentioning this, but maybe it doesn't need to be a subcommittee, but a working group that could be formed in the immediate term to pursue that idea that was raised of a recommendation that's ready for day one of a new administration on a FOIA memo. That could come from either the president or whoever the new AG [attorney general] is going to be. I think that was a great idea, Frank, I think you had raised that on Monday, and I'd love to see that come about.

Alina M. Semo: Ryan, I'm sorry. I think I was a little distracted by the fan that's going on behind you. I just want to make sure that I heard the first part of what you said. Were you arguing now in favor of collapsing volume and frequency under FOIA statutory reform?

Ryan Mulvey: No, no, no, no. This is Ryan again. I just think that that is something that would need to be addressed as part of the statutory reform, but it can be addressed elsewhere too, because I don't see a fix to the statute being the only, or maybe even the best way of addressing the problems that agencies seem to be facing.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. And then I jotted down, just in case everyone missed it, but I at least heard you say a fees working group, litigation and judicial review working group, and exemptions and foreseeable harm working group. Okay, just wanted to be sure I captured that. Marianne, go ahead, please.

Marianne Manheim: Just a quick one, because Ryan made me think about it. But on our side of this, because I know there's a lot of things that we want to talk about from both sides, from the request, are things like, the kicker for us with that falls into all of that is a 20 working days statutory limit, which leads to so many of these litigation problems. So let's throw that in as well, because that's a real problem when you see some of the sizes of these requests. There's no way, ever possibly.

Alina M. Semo: Understood. All right. Any other thoughts? I know folks are definitely taking all of this in. It's a lot to absorb, but let's keep talking. 

Whitney? Oh, great, Whitney, Deborah, Shelley and Jason, in that order.

Whitney Fraizer-Jenkins: This is Whitney from Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. I just had more of a procedural question. How many working groups do you typically see on the subcommittees? Because I see we have a lot of priorities here.

Alina M. Semo: I know.

Whitney Fraizer-Jenkins: And I wanted to know how we can narrow that down to focus the working groups within the three subcommittees.

Alina M. Semo: So I have seen a subcommittee have up to three or four working groups. I don't think there's a particular number, honestly. Sometimes the working group could be just one person just working on a particular issue and exploring it and researching it and then reporting back to the subcommittee. So I think the answer is, it depends, which is Kirsten's favorite answer. But I would say I think if you have 15, that seems a little unmanageable. I think keeping it to a few I think is definitely very workable, and we've seen that work well in the past. Does that help?

Whitney Fraizer-Jenkins: Yes, thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, sure. Thank you. Deborah, go ahead, please.

Deborah Moore: Thanks. Deborah Moore, Department of Education. I just wanted to throw out there, one thought I've had since we talked about the EO first day, one EO idea on Monday, which I love and I think is really interesting. But I was wondering about the whole day one aspect and wondering, day one, no matter what, we're going to have new people, right? New administration with new priorities, and there's going to be a lot of priorities. So that means a lot of competition on day one to catch everybody's eye on what's important. Maybe we should think about, before day one, maybe this administration. Because the other thing I've witnessed is that political appointees, who at the end of their term often are very eager to leave a mark, and they may be more motivated to do something, to take action. So I just want to throw out there, maybe we shouldn't limit ourselves to thinking just about day one, maybe something before then. And maybe it's not mutually exclusive, but something ahead of that to get things moving. I don't know, just want to bring that up for discussion.

Alina M. Semo: Shelley has her hand up, but I would love to hear folks react to Deborah's point. I think that's a great point. Shelley, go ahead and then Nick.

Shelley Kimball: So one of the things I've been looking at the chart and looking at others, anything marked other, to make sure that we're not missing pieces. And one of the ones that we haven't talked a lot about is AI. And I know that previous committees have taken certain working group concepts that have gone across through subcommittees, and so I think AI might be one that could move in that way or be worked into many working groups. I just didn't want to forget that it's a priority to some others.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, thank you, Shelley. I have to say that our DFO and our assistant DFOs do a really good job of providing that continuity and connection among the subcommittees. We try to very much monitor what's happening in terms of the work of each subcommittee and make sure that folks are talking to each other if you're not serving on three subcommittees and you won't know exactly what's going on in all three. So we definitely try very hard to make sure that folks are connecting and they're talking to each other. But that's a great point. I think AI is definitely a topic that everyone cares about, and you're absolutely right, I think it has a thread in all of these themes. So thank you.

Nick, and then Margaret.

Nick Wittenberg: Yeah, no, I love Shelley's comments, especially having the privilege of working on the tech committee's AI working group. Definitely think that's one. And also with Deborah's comments, I think that's great to really, how do we, the continuity aspect within the now couple of months. And then obviously I think we had some discussion about White House. So if you're a PRA, Presidential Records Act or Federal Records Act, is FOIA applicable to you, but then how do you make it applicable across a federal family? And really I think that's always a great thing now and in the future, to highlight to leadership and agency heads to make sure, maybe some confusion or misunderstanding, but how can we do this efficiently and accurately? And I think it's definitely one, day one is great, but why not get something right now going so we can really show we're ready for this two-year term.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thanks, Nick. Margaret, go ahead, please.

Margaret Kwoka: Thanks. Margaret Kwoka, Ohio State. I wanted to make maybe one procedural ask and a couple of substantive suggestions. So one is, is it possible to, for example, Alina, share your screen with a Word document on it and start to list out working groups that are potentially under each of these subcommittees so that we can see it in real time and start to make suggestions about how to move them around? Because I think I've maybe lost track of how many ideas have been floated, and as we add things, we might be able to combine or rearrange or move and come to consensus about how to do that. So I just didn't know if that might be, I don't know. There might be some rule about that. I don't know. But anyway, I put that out for consideration.

Alina M. Semo: Margaret, one second. I think it's a great suggestion. I don't think we've ever done that before. I'm going to ask Candice if that's something that we might be able to do. 

And Kirsten, what do you think about that? Is there something we could do about that idea, because it's a great idea?

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yeah, I'm happy to share my screen and start taking some notes if you all would like that. 

Event Producer: I've made you the presenter, Kristen. You can do that. 

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Okay. Let me just get-

Margaret Kwoka: Yep. I was picturing something as simple as a Word document that lists the three subcommittees, and then we start putting bullet points with the working groups under them, and then we can start to decide, is this the right number? Where do they go? Which subcommittee, how should we, because I think we actually have a pretty decent outline maybe already stated. I just can't remember it all. 

So my substantive points were that if we are, I wanted to say that if we're doing in the statutory bucket, I think it would be important somewhere in there to have a conversation about affirmative or proactive disclosure reforms. There are past committee recommendations on that topic and also other legislative proposals out there about that as well that we might draw from. So that seems like maybe one piece that we haven't touched on yet.

And then this committee has an enormous amount of work on first person requesting in particular on A-files. And I don't know where that goes. It might be implementation, I'm not sure, but it seems like we shouldn't drop that thread as we think about what to carry forward. So I just wanted to flag those two things as things I haven't heard a ton about yet in this discussion, but arguably or may fit in somewhere. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: Margaret, I know you actually did a lot of work on that in the past. I thought you had sort of moved on, but if you are interested in continuing to work on that issue, it's still a very important topic for agencies. So I very much welcome your input and participation on that topic. 

Let's see, Liz, you have your hand up.

Liz Hempowicz: Liz Hempowicz from American Oversight. I think that is one of those issues that would make a lot of sense to be included in both the legislative, or statutory reform subcommittee, and implementation. So just seconding that, and I do think it's important to keep that thread alive. It's clearly a big concern.

Alina M. Semo: Jason, I thought I saw your hand up earlier, but did you put it down?

Jason R. Baron: Hi. No, I'm here. I think there's a lot to be said to what we've been talking about in terms of the three groups. I'm very supportive of a statutory reform group being it's sort of independently doing its thing, and Ryan has an ambitious agenda for that. I want to also just not forget that Michael Ravnitzky made the point as a public comment last time about the FOIA Bill of Rights, and that we should be thinking about incorporating at least the conversations that we have, those ideas that come. That's a larger question about public engagement going forward in this committee. I've noted with some irony that in a prior term of this subcommittee, there was a time volume subcommittee, of the committee, from 2018 and 2020. And so calling a second subcommittee to be volume frequency I think perhaps underscores the fact that we have endemic issues in FOIA that we have not solved over many terms.

I say about implementation, there's a degree of realism here that there's enthusiasm at the beginning of each term to do many different things and many different working projects. One thing that Gorka Garcia-Malene in the last term, when he co-chaired with me the Modernization Subcommittee, really emphasized at the beginning, which is that we don't have to tackle every problem in a working group all at once, starting on week one or month one of this committee. That is, we could take them seriatim. We could focus on particular matters. And we did that in the Modernization Subcommittee by first working on a model determination letter and also on reforms to the (b)(5) designations. Those came out as interim recommendations because we worked on those first, rather than having lots of working groups within the subcommittee doing everything all at once. That's a structure to this, so whatever the number of ideas there are when the subcommittees are formed, I think there could be a triaging or a prioritizing of what is the most important.

Now, what strikes me and what strikes others here is Frank's idea about day one, having an Executive Order in place. And it's been mentioned that we could even do that. We could certainly start thinking about how to do outreach to the present administration even before a change of administration that will be either easier or more difficult depending on who is elected president. But that's the reality. But I think those are all good ideas. And I think there should be, if I were to co-chair an Implementation Subcommittee, I would want Frank and others to be very quickly drafting up something for us to talk about. That seems to be, on my list, it would be the first priority for a subcommittee. 

Let me also say that David Cuillier did a great job last term of co-chairing the Implementation Subcommittee. But the reality is, as I think David alluded to on Monday, which is that it took a long time to get started. So the way that we conceived it, there were many months where we talked to Alina and Bobby about what they had done on recommendations in the past. We took a number of months developing a survey, which went out about a year into the process. And then at the very end of the term, we interviewed people, and you can see the results that I pointed people to. 

We could recreate that with surveys and interviews, so we could do stuff earlier as an implementation measure. But I have a different vision for the Implementation Subcommittee with whatever working groups or ad hoc task force people are doing along the way, which is that the central thing that comes out of all of these observations from last year's final report and the subcommittee reports is, how can we have more of an impact in raising the consciousness of our own recommendations to the executive branch? It's not that we as an Advisory Committee can go into the Department of Defense and say, "Okay, we've got 14 recommendations. What are you going to do about them?" We can certainly talk to people there, but really the animating question for me is that we've had not quite 67 trees falling in the forest. But because Alina and Bobby have done a great job of implementing guidance for many of these and putting into effect some of our recommendations, like standing up a CFO Technology Committee.

But to a large extent, the work we have done over these five terms has not penetrated to FOIA staff throughout the government and not really to senior officials that could actually list any of our recommendations and say, "Okay, we've implemented this, this and this." So my vision is to figure out how to engage with important senior people and FOIA officers in many places, to see how to heighten the visibility of what we have done and then a path forward in the future so that we're not just a debating society and putting out recommendations and they're not really listened to. So it's the impact level. And as I said, I think the day one stuff, I would say is a first priority for an Implementation Subcommittee. And then there could be any number of other initiatives that we've discussed here and we can list as things that people can work on. I think I'll stop there with those remarks.

Alina M. Semo: Great. Jason, thank you so much. What I actually heard, from my viewpoint, is that you're interested in co-chairing the Implementation Subcommittee. That's my takeaway, but thank you.

Jason R. Baron: Well, it does seem to be your takeaway that, depending on who raises their hand, they get to be for something, so watch out, everyone else here.

Alina M. Semo: Yes. I'm voluntelling as much as I can. Okay, thank you for all those great remarks, though. Really appreciate it. And Nieva is next. I believe she has her hand up.

Nieva Brock: Yes. Thank you. This is Nieva, DoD. And I appreciate the comment about DoD earlier. I wanted to raise a different topic, which I might fit under implementation. I'll let you help me with that. And it is more with relationship building and interactions with our requesters. I would like to see if there are any recommendations, any improvements that we can make, that we can offer, I should say, on more proactive engagements and improvements in our relationships with our requesters. And on that note, I would like to just make a point that when we talk about vexatious matters, we should really understand that the topic is a vexatious request, or a vexatious request issue, and not a vexatious requester because we love our requesters. That's the whole reason why we exist, Freedom of Information Act, we want to give this information out to the public. So when we say it's a vexatious request issue, perhaps there's a concern with the type of request and how it's being requested, not the requester. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks for that, Nieva. Great point. Shelley is still working on thinking of a different name for the subcommittee.

Shelley Kimball: I'm still on unduly burdensome, because I know that, I'm sorry, Shelley Kimball, Johns Hopkins University. I know that vexatious has more hostile connotations and people don't like it. And so, our working title in our research tends to be unduly burdensome to tone it down a little. But to add just a little bit in the notes, I know that in the list of wants for everyone, that idea of the harassing feeling types of requests, which I think is a whole different thing than volume or frequency, can go under this, whatever it will be called.

Alina M. Semo: I know Marianne also talked on Monday about introducing some decency back into the process, which also seems to mirror a little bit of many of Nieva’s comments today on having improved relationships with requesters. Any ideas about where that would fit in? Is that something that could be tackled under volume and frequency? I think that's an important point that I'm hearing a stream of thoughts that seem to converge on those topics. Melissa, Ryan, and Marianne, in that order. Melissa, go ahead please.

Melissa Pickworth: I just kind of chiming in on this last topic because I do think, although not all requesters are vexatious, there actually are a handful that are, and I know some of my colleagues on this committee have experienced that firsthand. I do think that this concept of introducing decency and expectations in terms of how requesters engage with us is important, because there are people, I do have staff members that have been verbally assaulted by people and have had mental consequences as a result. So I think we do need to acknowledge there are a few people out there that do have these behaviors. And I do think part of the conversation about how we manage people when they cross the line is important, because some of those people are also the same people that are giving us unduly burdensome requests, but not always. Some of them are other requesters, and I think coming up with some kind of guidelines for how to manage that would be helpful for some agencies that are facing some of these challenges.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks Melissa. And I think there's several agencies who would echo that they're facing those challenges. So that's certainly what we're hearing. Ryan, Marianne, and then Nick. Ryan, go ahead please.

Ryan Mulvey: Thanks Alina, Ryan Mulvey AFPF. As a requester, I don't find the term vexatious requester to be offensive or problematic. And I think we need to be careful, I have an issue with trying to lump that into unduly burdensome, because it's not the same thing. You can have a requester who's submitting 500 requests in a day. None of those individual requests is going to be unduly burdensome, might not be unduly burdensome, right? So to say that this is an issue of burden, I mean it is in a sense, but there's a technical meaning to unduly burdensome that certainly in the case law that kind of goes together with reasonable description. And I would just, I mean if we don't want to use the term vexatious requester, that's fine, but we need to make sure that we are clear that these phenomena are not the same.

My other comment was that on decency, and I think, this could even be broadened to beyond the requester agency dynamic where we can talk about building a better culture in FOIA administration, both in terms of the relationship between requesters and agencies, but also within agencies, between the FOIA office and political leadership, or the FOIA office and program offices. I don't work in the government, but I've come to know in the past decade a lot of people who do and have learned a lot about the difficulties that FOIA officers and government information specialists face in dealing with folks within their own agency. Again, whether that's the head office, which might be reticent to see records go out the door, or whether it's program people who don't want to do a search and don't see FOIA as a priority. So maybe there's a way to broaden decency and improve relationships to really just be about how do we build a better FOIA culture. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Ryan. That's a great point. I really, that resonates with me a lot. We've talked about being assigned to a FOIA shop as being sent to Siberia in the past. Some of you may remember that. Marianne, go ahead, please. Marianne. Marianne?

Marianne Manheim: Okay, I'm still on. Okay. I'm getting confused from mute and unmute. I've been on here. Okay.

So yes, everything Ryan said, but the things actually I was thinking about as we were talking through this, since I've had a few days to think about what I actually was thinking, is that we have this committee, like this committee, and when I started thinking about why I wanted to be on this committee is because we're with requesters and we're actually with the ones that I, all right, you want to say vexatious, sometimes I call it ridiculous. And I laugh at ridiculous, because that's how I get through some of this craziness, because I'm just like, that is completely ridiculous and nobody wants to be called ridiculous. But some of these things, that is the reaction because I laugh. So, but I will say is we might not be able, no offense, Ryan, to make all these statutory changes, because I was thinking about my interpretation of how statutory changes happened in the past is, Bobby over there in OIP and some requesters who had some power talk to someone in Congress and that made it happen. And that's my interpretation of it. So I'd love to see something else happen out of this.

I also was thinking about that memo on the first day, only FOIA people read that and they're really excited about it. So great job, you put that out there. But what I was thinking, we actually, instead of writing all these things down, which we should, maybe we actually have some forums with requesters and with this, because agencies can't do this and requesters can't get people to do it. So maybe have actual in-person or online things and get these requesters in here and get more action coming out of these committees versus all of these recommendations. Just a further thought on this.

Alina M. Semo: We've certainly can contemplate any requesters and having a forum at one of our public meetings. So that's definitely an option that we can definitely explore. So thanks for that comment, Marianne. That's great. Nick, and then Nieva.

Nick Wittenberg: Yeah, no, to piggyback on what was said about, I think we were mentioning a blueprint, and I'm reminded of OSTP's [Office of Science and Technology Policy] AI Bill of Rights, so if we could do a FOIA Bill of Rights, maybe that could be external and internal. So our career folks, as we were mentioning, sometimes the challenges, the mental issues that they have, but then also that our requesters kind of have some guiding points that may help them. And so, that thing, maybe a document that we could put that in and it could be help, I think was just said as a, if we have some type of area where we can get together with requesters and government, that may be kind of a nice document that kind of puts it out there. And so, it's always great to be mindful of our friends at OGIS who help best practices for FOIA. So that's just kind of my thoughts on a Bill of Rights that we've been talking about, this maybe this could be multi-faced.

Alina M. Semo: Nick, just so I'm clear about what you're suggesting, would this Bill of Rights accompany this day one memo that we've been discussing, or is it a separate parallel effort?

Nick Wittenberg: Not to step anybody, so maybe this could be before the document we work on now, to get the conversations going and open up some log jam. But I think it could be referenced in the day one. And I think as Jason and David mentioned, the potential EO, we don't need all of the information, but it could be a reference to it that here's the current work we've done on Bill of Rights, and then the day one is here's the real key points for FOIA and our democratic experience to be successful.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you so much for that. Nieva, Scott, and then Dave Cuillier.

Nieva Brock: Yes, hi, Nieva Brock again, DoD. First off, I just want to say Marianne, I am so excited about the idea of a public forum. I almost jumped out of my skin when you said that, I said this would be so wonderful. Which sort of begs the question to you, Alina, what are left and right limits, and the art of the possible with what we can do besides just meeting and writing reports. I am much more interested in engaging with the actual requesters whenever we can. And I also love the idea of engaging just with the process.

And the other comment I want to make is for Ryan, yes, I truly do agree that unduly burdensome is very different from the whole vexatious request issue, and I do think they should be treated differently.

Alina M. Semo: So Nieva, to answer your question, we haven't had a specific public forum of the type that I think Marianne is starting to outline. We certainly invite public comment at every single one of our public meetings, and we offer an opportunity for everyone at both agency folks and requester community folks to offer public comments that we post on our website. That certainly doesn't take away from the idea of having more public dialogue and discourse in the setting of a public meeting. So we are definitely able to explore that further.

Nieva Brock: Thank you. That would be great.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, sounds great. Scott, and then David.

Scott Hodes: Hi. So overall my comment, I have an overall comment, in that all the ideas we've talked about so far, I think, fit into the three buckets of subcommittees, of committees that we've talked about, pretty easily without a whole lot of stretching. So that's why I haven't made any comments previously.

The second thing we talked about, we talked about your requesters and your agency people. And the one thing I think to remember is, and I've talked a lot about this and I've seen this over the years, is that we've tried, and I think this committee may have, and I know that they've tried to create a FOIA job classification over the years. It's very important to continue to try to professionalize the FOIA workers in the agencies. And one of the problems that we have, however you want to call frequent requesters, burdensome requesters, is that not everybody working on FOIA at the agency level is comfortable speaking to requesters. And that's important for us to think about in how we think about individual, how the requests go through processes at each agency. And they're all different. It's a huge, huge FOIA world with over a million a year. So that's just an overview type of thing.

The other thing at the top level of agencies is, you have your FOIA officer counsel, for your, and I'm going to guess it's cabinet level FOIA officers, not each component's FOIA officers, because otherwise you would have hundreds. And at a lot of these agencies, the FOIA officer, well, the FOIA officer in name may not be the only one making the top decisions on FOIA. So this committee should take a look, I think, at structures of FOIA and how it's actually going through agencies, not just the classical from 25 years ago when it was generally a FOIA officer. Things have evolved a lot. And so that makes it much more difficult for both agencies and requesters. It's gotten much more complicated over the years, and I think that those complications... I have to quit saying um, because it makes me crazy when I hear it and I keep doing it. I'm so sorry.

Anyway, the whole FOIA process has gotten more complicated, and as we introduce new technology to that, it will make certain things easier, but it will also make certain things more complicated. So that's something to be aware of.

My final point is we're talking about, for instance, the last legislation in 2016 added a rule for deliberative process, the 25-year rule. I have not seen any studies on how that's been implemented, if that's had any effect across the board. I have my own anecdotal experience running across certain times when it's been that the rule has come into play. But it'd be interesting to, before we go and completely come up with a new legislative fix for something, see how the previous legislative fix has had an effect, or not had an effect. So I throw that out there and I think that's it for me.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you, Scott. Those are really great points. You'll actually open up the door for me to put a plug-in for the training that OGIS conducts on dispute resolution skills for FOIA professionals. We modified our format. We used to do it in person, now we do it virtually for agencies and we actually help give and provide best practices and tips for how to talk to requesters on the telephone, which we're finding the younger generation is having a slightly tougher time with, and they're very eager to get feedback on how to approach that. So our dance card is full for the moment, but I think we'll open up in the next fiscal year. So that's just my plug. Thank you for allowing me to make that plug. Margaret, and then David.

Margaret Kwoka: I was just going to respond to Scott's last point, which is on the 25-year deliberative process onset. There's a very recent academic study on this question about its impact that suggests that the impact is very small, if at all, because of records retention schedules. So the likelihood that someone's looking for records that still exist at the agency that are that old, it turns out is very low. And in particular, this study tried to ask for records that had been requested at the time and where the deliberative process privilege was invoked, but most agencies have a 7-year sunset on retaining those records that were processed through FOIA. So I can dig up the study if you're interested in it. It's only one data point. There may be other instances and there might be, obviously even if there isn't a volume of requests where it affects, it might affect particularly important requests. I don't mean to say that there's no impact at all, but to say that there is some early academic work done on it.

Alina M. Semo: Margaret, could you send that to Kirsten and to the FOIAAdvisoryCommittee@nara.gov and we'll share that with the whole committee and we can also post that online for our public to see as well. But yeah, that would be very helpful. I'd be very interested in reading that study.

Margaret Kwoka: Yeah, absolutely.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Are you there?

Alina M. Semo: Oh yeah, go ahead Kirsten.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: This is Kirsten. I just want to warn that we may not be able to post this study on our website depending on copyright of the study. I just wanted to point that out.

Alina M. Semo: Correct, yeah.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yes.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, Dave, and then Melissa.

David Cuillier: Thanks. Yeah, this is a great discussion, by the way, on the list there, Kirsten, which is really helpful, professionalizing FOIA officers, I'm not sure what subcommittee that would land on, but great ideas everybody's tossed out, right? And I'm sure there are folks that have other ideas, maybe they haven't offered up yet. And so moving forward, I have a couple technical questions for you, Alina, and then on process. So one, if a subcommittee has 11 people or more and they all meet, is that a quorum of the committee? And does that?

Alina M. Semo: 13.

David Cuillier: 13.

Alina M. Semo: 13 is a quorum.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: 13.

David Cuillier: 13. And that triggers various things and can be problematic. So we want to limit our subcommittees below 13 probably. 

Alina M. Semo: Yes.

David Cuillier: Two, you just raised an issue like disseminating information to each other, the full committee. If someone wants to send a study or something or their notes, or whatever to the full committee, aren't there also some rules on that? That gets posted, is that public then? They have to CC [carbon copy] some email you have, is that correct?

Alina M. Semo: We encourage everyone to CC the FOIA advisory committee at NARA dot gov email box because we retain all of those records.

David Cuillier: So those are public records, so everybody might want to be aware of that. And these studies, because I want to inform a bunch of, on some studies that have been published, and we ran into this last term, so I don't quite know how to deal with this... Maybe some IP lawyers in the crowd here can say whether that really is a copyright violation. I don't know, maybe. I guess making journals being public could be. But if we can figure out a way of disseminating information to each other, the whole committee, that would be helpful. I don't know a solution to that.

And then third, as we move forward today, thank you Jason for volunteering to co-chair the Implementation Subcommittee. If we need a motion, I so move. And we can certainly come up with co-chairs for what we now have as three subcommittees, right? As far as, it would be great if we'd have a way for people to, as a group, formulate at least get a sense of what everybody's kind of interested in, maybe some of these working groups, because clearly it's a long list and it could grow. Maybe there's three or four people interested in a certain topic, and thank you Kirsten for putting that list when people chimed in. But now we have a whole lot of other topics, right? And so is it technically, or legally possible to create a shared Google Sheet, or whatever, where everybody can go in and check, yeah, I really want to do this, maybe, this sort of thing. Then we can all get a sense of where everybody lands in their interests, and then create groups from there with the idea that it sounds like these three subcommittees are where we're moving forward. Is that possible, or no?

Alina M. Semo: It's not impossible, but I was actually going to suggest something a little more organic, Dave, which is forming the subcommittees and then having folks volunteer to serve on one or two subcommittees as they please, gravitating towards the subjects that they're interested in. And then once the subcommittee begins to meet, a raised hand approach of who's interested in working on fees, who's interested in working on legislative fixes for massive litigation. I'm making those up. I think that's probably the better way to go. That's certainly how it's worked in the past, rather than having a formalized sheet, plus things change and folks start delving into a subject and find that maybe it's not as productive or fruitful as they had hoped, and so then they want to move on. So I think that's the better way to go, but I'm not closed to other ideas.

David Cuillier: Cool. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: As you know from having worked with me already.

David Cuillier: Yeah. No, I'm with you. I totally agree. Thanks.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you. Melissa, you have your hand up. Go ahead, please.

Melissa Pickworth: Yeah. I wanted to make a plug for also...Ryan and I had mentioned some of the crossover that might happen amongst the committees. And this going back to the vexatious request concept, I do think that that also should go under statutory reform as an exploratory area, because there are several states that have looked into this in terms of legislation. I think it's something to explore, to look at those bills, and see if there's anything useful that we could pull from, if we were going to put forth legislative reform. I also want to just throw this out there because I don't know if it's ever been discussed or conceptualized.

Once criteria is agreed upon, what meets the threshold of a vexatious request, considering the process for possible debarment from filing FOIAs in the future for a period of time to offer relief to agencies. I don't know where that fits under, whether that should go under statutory reform or the volume and frequency, but I just wanted to explore that because I know that some agencies use debarment in the contracts process. We use it at FDA for clinical investigators, and other people such as physicians that may be abusing the process. And so we want to stop them from being able to file new drug applications, or do certain things. So I just thought I'd throw that out there to see where that maybe would fit as something to possibly explore for that particular type of requester.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks for that. I think that's actually very interesting. I don't want to pick on Shelley and Dave, but I think you guys are actually looking at states right now a little bit, right? As part of your study. Dave, go ahead.

David Cuillier: Yeah, I mean, I guess Shelley and I should divulge this just so there's no weird conflict of interest that arises or whatever. But yeah, working with Suzanne Piotrowski and Ben Worthy, the four of us are working on a study funded by the Democracy Fund, in part, to try to find solutions to this statutory process, any and all possible solutions to help agencies deal with this while not restricting the flow of information for requesters, and what are the best approaches. So we're about six months into the study. I'll email everybody a paper I did initially where I looked at all the 50 states and all the legal provisions they have, and their terminology, what they call this.

It's all over the map. I think we identified maybe 16 different terms, states call it. I like Nevada's extraordinary requests. So I'll send that around, and people can get a sense. And I have a survey of election officials going on right now with Reed College, and interviews and that sort of things [inaudible] a final report by June of next year. And so the work of this subcommittee could help in that. But we'll also share what we find. But I anticipate we'll learn, because we're hearing this is becoming a really big issue at the federal level. And we're also looking at how other countries have handled this. Because they're ahead of us, UK [United Kingdom] and other countries have been dealing with this for years.

And so yeah, I mean, we're looking at all solutions, not just statutory, and it's complex, and the reason why we wanted to tackle this is because it's a hard nut to crack. It's really a challenge to figure out how to do this right, and who knows what we'll come up with. But anyway, I just wanted to mention that. Thanks, Alina. And I'll email this around to everybody, kind of see where we've started.

Alina M. Semo: Great. Thank you. Shelly, did you want to add anything?

Shelley Kimball: No, Dave pretty much covered it. Just to underscore that we're looking at all kinds of solutions. So in answer to Melissa's comment, we are absolutely considering statutory as well. And so I think that even in each of the subcommittees, not all statutory reform suggestions are going to happen in the statutory reform committee. I think that implementation may have some, we may find that in the volume frequency burdensome vexatious committee as well, that statutory in certain situations may be the right thing. And so just kind of keeping that open aperture.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you. Dave, is that a hand from earlier? Yes. Okay. Frank, go ahead, please.

Frank LoMonte: Thank you. So I don't know that it is time urgent that we finalize all the rosters of all the committees in this particular meeting, but I do think that getting back to the point about at least contemplating having a set of day one recommendations for a new administration, there is kind of some time urgency about coming to a decision on that today, because looking ahead on our calendar, I see only the December 5th meeting between now and Inauguration Day. So, if we are to set the process in motion toward reaching a consensus on what a day one memorandum might look like, December 5th is D-day for us. So my suggestion would be, and again, I apologize, I have to catch a plane, so I've got 10 minutes. My suggestion would be, if we could put at least that framework in place with the understanding that our clock is ticking toward December 5th, then there may be some other niceties that can be finalized between now and then. But at least that much I think needs to be put in place in set and motion now, if there's a consensus toward doing so.

Alina M. Semo: I feel like I've heard consensus from several people. I think we can form a working group perhaps under the implementation subcommittee. I've heard several folks express interest. Frank, would you like to lead the working group?

Frank LoMonte: I'm happy to do that.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. So we already have a volunteer. Thank you. And what I think we should do is solicit folks who want to both serve on the implementation subcommittee, and in particular have an interest in working with you on this day one memo, or whatever we want to call it. So we can certainly do that more informally, right, Kirsten? We don't have to do it during our public meeting today.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Correct, correct. It would be very helpful though to have the co-chairs of implementation selected. And it looks like we have our non-government one.

Alina M. Semo: If Jason accepts and no one else objects, I nominate Jason as the non-government representative, co-chair for the Implementation Subcommittee. Do I have a government volunteer? All right, folks. Not all at once.

Marianne Manheim: I'll do it.

Alina M. Semo: Who said, "I'll do it?”

Marianne Manheim: Marianne.

Alina M. Semo: Oh, that was Marianne.

Marianne Manheim: Yeah.

Alina M. Semo: Okay.

Marianne Manheim: We got another NIH person, sorry.

Alina M. Semo: Am I dragging you screaming, or is this something you're willing to take on?

Marianne Manheim: No, no, it's fine. I feel like it'll be interesting. There's a lot in there.

Alina M. Semo: There's a lot in there, yes.

Marianne Manheim: Anything we do will be an accomplishment.

Alina M. Semo: Yes, I agree. So Frank, I think you've got your subcommittee co-chairs, and we'll help you form a working group, and then you can go off and catch your plane soon. So thank you.

Do we have any other folks who have thoughts or comments about anything we've talked about today? Lots of great discussion points everyone has raised. I really appreciate the great discussion. And thank you, Kirsten, for being a great note taker and filling in all the blanks. I think that's very, very helpful. And Margaret, thank you for suggesting that as a starting point.

How about volume frequency burden of some vexatious subcommittee? I feel like it's now morphed into a longer name, but does anyone have any interest in co-chairing that subcommittee? I see. Oh, wow. Nieva and Nick have both raised their hands. Is that my government and non-government volunteers?

Nieva Brock: It looks like it.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Nieva, you are down. And Nick, are you down for the non-government co-chairmanship of that?

Nick Wittenberg: Yes.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Well, this is formed. Great. I really appreciate that. Last but not least, FOIA Statutory Reform. Do we have volunteers for that? I heard Ryan loud and clear. Did anyone else hear Ryan?

Nick Wittenberg: I did as well. I think that's a great choice.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you. Thank you, Nick. All kidding aside, Ryan, are you interested in co-chairing the FOIA statutory reform subcommittee?

Ryan Mulvey: Sure.

Alina M. Semo: Okay, thank you. I need a government volunteer, please. Melissa, would you consider it?

Melissa Pickworth: I'm really honored, but I'm trying not to overcommit myself right now because of our reorg at FDA. It's like the largest reorg in the history of FDA, so I wouldn't want to, somebody else have more time, overcommit.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. I appreciate that. Anyone else from the government side? Whitney, would you consider it?

Whitney Frazier-Jenkins: Yes, I was going to speak, yes. I will volunteer to co-chair that committee.

Alina M. Semo: Really appreciate that. Thank you so much. Okay. Well, that's great. I think we're having a great way forward where things are falling into place, so I really very much appreciate that.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Hey, Alina?

Alina M. Semo: Yes, Kirsten.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: I just want to make sure that, this is Kirsten Mitchell, the DFO. I just want to make sure that I have this correctly because there were some volume issues on my end. So for Volume and Frequency, we have Nick Wittenberg and Nieva Brock. Is that correct?

Nieva Brock: That's correct.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yes.

Nick Wittenberg: Yep. That's correct.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Great. Okay. And then Implementation are Jason Baron, Marianne Manheim. And then for Statutory Reform, Ryan Mulvey and Whitney Frazier-Jenkins.

Alina M. Semo: Correct? I heard a yes. Thank you.

Whitney Fraizer-Jenkins: Yes

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Okay. And may I stop sharing my screen, or would you like me to keep this up a little bit longer?

Alina M. Semo: What are folks' preferences? Does anyone want to continue seeing Kirsten's screen, or have we kind of exhausted our topics that we want to tackle? And we'll circulate this document.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yes.

Alina M. Semo: So everyone can be aware of it, and study it some more. I actually would like to look at it a little more closely myself. It's a little hard to see on my screen.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I tried to...

Alina M. Semo: It's not your fault at all. I'm just trying to also look at everyone's faces and see whether I can…I'm not picking on anyone unduly. I picked on Melissa. Sorry about that.

Melissa Pickworth: It's okay. It really is. I definitely want to be on that [sub]committee to participate.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you for making that plug, because I was going to make that plug now to remind all committee members to please volunteer for one or more subcommittees. I think we talked earlier about the fact that we had one committee member last term who served on all three subcommittees, that might've been a little too much, but it was also really great continuity that committee member added to the discussions from one subcommittee to another. So I don't necessarily strongly recommend it, but it's certainly an option for everyone. But I really hope everyone will sign up for at least one subcommittee. So what we'll do is we'll get our co-chairs started and we can circulate interest and get folks signed up. Melissa, yeah, go ahead, please.

Melissa Pickworth: Just a quick question. I mean, I'm definitely interested in two of the committees, but I don't know yet where I best fit. So is it possible to sign up for two and then kind of see where you feel like your contribution is going to be best placed, and then maybe drop out of one if it seems like it's somewhere else? Okay.

Alina M. Semo: Yes, absolutely. And we've had committee folks do that in the past, and they've signed up for one committee, and a subcommittee rather, and gravitated towards another. So it's definitely absolutely possible. Yep. Great point.

All right. I'm going to look around on screen. A lot of people are now off camera, so I can't see very many people. Thank you, Whitney, for popping back on. Thank you, Deborah. I would like to invite any other comments, but hearing none, I'm happy to move forward to the next part of our agenda. I'll just give everyone a moment to collect their thoughts.

Nieva Brock: No objections from Nieva.

Alina M. Semo: All right. Thank you, Nieva. I appreciate that. 

Okay. So we have now reached the public comments part of our committee meeting. We're actually a little bit ahead of schedule, so I would love to give you all back a gift of a few minutes. We do look forward to hearing from any non-committee participants who have ideas or comments to share, particularly about the topics that we discussed today, and there've been some really great topics. All oral comments are captured in the transcript of the meeting, which we will post as soon as it is available. Oral comments are captured on the NARA YouTube recording, and are available on the NARA YouTube channel.

And as a reminder, public comments are limited to three minutes per person. So at this time, Candice, I would like to ask if you could please provide instructions to any of our listeners for how to make a comment via telephone, and let us know if there are any callers waiting to be called on.

Event Producer: Certainly. As we begin the public comment period, please click the raise hand icon located at the bottom of your screen to join the queue. You'll be given three minutes to make your remarks, you’ll hear a tone when your line is unmuted, at which time please state your name and affiliation, then make your comments. To assist you, there is a timer on the right side of your screen. It'll begin counting down as soon as you start your remarks, and you will hear a five-second warning before your time is up.

Alina M. Semo: Thank you, Candice. Do we have anyone waiting in the telephone queue?

Event Producer: There's no one on the phone. And at this time I don't see any raised hands here on Webex either.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Why don't we give folks a minute or two to make sure that we've given everyone an opportunity to be heard. So committee members, bear with us. Thank you. Kirsten, go ahead, please.

Kirsten B. Mitchell: Yes, I'd just like to remind everyone that we accept written public comments at any time. Please go to the link that is on the slide there on the FOIA Advisory Committee's web page on the OGIS page.

Alina M. Semo: And committee members are always very happy to hear from the public, other agency colleagues. We're always happy to get comments and feedback, so don't be shy. We have a pretty easy to use public comments form that we have posted on our website.

Candice, I don't see anyone raising their hands, and I suspect you don't hear anyone on the telephone line.

Event Producer: No, there are no hands raised.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. If I have no objections from everyone, I'm going to move on to closing remarks, and we can wrap up our meeting early and give you back about half an hour.

I want to thank all of our committee members today for participating in both the Monday meeting in person to those of you who could make it, and for today's meeting, I'm definitely going to thank you for your anticipated hard work that's coming up in the future on all the subcommittees. Thank you to all of those who volunteered to co-chair the subcommittees. I'm very grateful for that. Just a reminder, we'll see each other again virtually in this space at our next meeting for this term as Frank reminded us, December 5th. And we're going to start again at 10:00 am Eastern Time. And I want to just ask our committee members if there are any questions or comments before we close up the meeting. Oh, Dave has this hand up. Go ahead, David.

David Cuillier: Yeah, sorry. And I apologize if you already said this, I missed it, but next steps, the co-chairs will email... We email the co-chairs for the subcommittees we're interested in, and then they probably will do Doodle polls to set up the first meeting, which could be in the next couple of weeks. We'll probably get moving pretty quickly. And then each subcommittee starts meeting maybe every two weeks toward getting something to report out December 5th. Is that correct?

Alina M. Semo: Yes. All that sounds great. I also want to suggest if committee members just want to email Kirsten and me directly, as to subcommittees that you're interested in working on, that might be the easier way for us to collect interest. Also, please indicate if you're interested in particular on the working group that Frank is heading up, as we want to build that very quickly. And yes, David, I agree, I think it would be very helpful to start things off, and build on the momentum that we've already had from these great discussions today and Monday.

David Cuillier: Great. Yeah, I thought it was excellent today. Thanks, everybody.

Alina M. Semo: Yeah, I agree. Thank you, everyone. Nieva, did I see your hand up or was that accidental?

Nieva Brock: Oh no, it was up. But it was basically what are the next steps. I know that we're not going to be sitting on our laurels between now and December 5th, so just wondering. Also, I was thinking sort of just process wise and technology wise, is there going to be a shared drive for all of us to drop information in, or are we just going to have to figure that out per committee?

Alina M. Semo: Subcommittees, I think we'll figure it out on their own. I know we've had some issues in the past for the agency folks not having access to a Google Drive, for example, and sharing Google Docs has been an issue, but we could try to talk through the logistics and see if we can come up with some creative ways to manage that. Maybe today's technology, that wasn't yesterday's technology, maybe there's some better solutions. Kirsten, do you have any other thoughts on that point that Nieva just made?

Kirsten B. Mitchell: No, unfortunately, I don't. It's a great idea. I wish there was a forum where everyone, both with the government and outside the government, could collaborate, but we've not found that yet. But I also just wanted to add that I'll be working with the subcommittee, co-chairs, Nick, Nieva, Jason, Marianne, Ryan, and Whitney, so we can move ahead on the scheduling meetings and those sorts of things, so we can get started.

Alina M. Semo: Great.

Nieva Brock: Thank you. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Thanks, Nieva. Okay. Any other questions or comments around? Rick, you've been very quiet. I know you're going to do a lot of hard work behind the scenes.

Rick Peltz-Steele: Yeah. Everyone has said things that I would've said, and probably better than I. So I have refrained. Thank you.

Alina M. Semo: Okay. Appreciate that, thank you. All right. I hope everyone has a great fall. I know we'll be hard at work behind the scenes. We will see each other again for our next full committee meeting virtually on December 5th. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. I hope everyone and their families remain safe, healthy, and resilient. And with that, we stand adjourned. Thank you.

Deborah Moore: Thank you.

Event Producer: That concludes our conference. Thank you for using Intellor events. You may now disconnect.