Troubling Transparency by Pozen David E. Schudson Michael

Author:Pozen, David E.,Schudson, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN008000, Language Arts & Disciplines/Journalism, HIS036070, History/United States/21st Century
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

THE EXPERTISE PARADOX

FOIA is frequently hailed as a tool of citizen empowerment. Although the IG system was not intentionally designed to promote citizen involvement in bureaucratic oversight, IG reports can also provide the public with the raw information with which to mount grassroots political action in the face of bureaucratic misdeeds. However, the often-specialized information released by IGs demands interpretation and, frequently, technical and contextual knowledge to render it politically meaningful. Despite its facade as a popular tool available to any citizen, FOIA requires different kinds of expertise to be used successfully and, as a result, it has been used disproportionately by different constituencies. Expertise is not antidemocratic; democracies need expertise, both within government and outside of it, as an aid to and check on political authority.23 But ensuring that expertise does not come into conflict with democratic principles requires an awareness of the potential for novel forms of expertise to create unintended distributional inequalities. It also requires protections for the independence of experts in government from bureaucratic or political capture. In short, the questions of how state information is framed, translated, and narrated to the public, and who is performing those tasks, are of crucial importance for understanding contemporary democratic processes.

Expertise is required at two moments in the process of seeking information through FOIA: in the access stage (the moment of filing a request for documents with an agency) and in the interpretation stage (understanding the content and significance of the records). At the access stage, FOIA is formally available to any person. All agencies have FOIA offices and websites with guidelines to facilitate making a request. But making effective FOIA requests often demands money and expertise, including the ability to pay agency fees (or the knowledge of how to have these fees waived) and the ability to appeal (and litigate, if necessary) if and when agencies prove unresponsive.24 Corporate requesters operate in this space with the advantage of administrative acumen and, often, with the legal experience and resources to navigate a long and obstacle-ridden process. Successful FOIA requests also frequently require certain kinds of insider knowledge. Seth Kreimer observes that “for FOIA requests to generate illuminating documents, they must be precisely framed, and framing such requests requires knowledge regarding the activities to be illuminated.”25 This is certainly the case with “deep secrets” (the existence of government programs unknown to the wider public) but also, more broadly, for many government programs associated with national security.26

An immediate, but unintended, consequence of this premium on insider expertise is a skewed distribution of the constituencies that use FOIA. Margaret Kwoka demonstrates that commercial organizations make the bulk of FOIA requests at many agencies.27 While corporate concerns are not necessarily at odds with the public interest, Kwoka’s research suggests that their requests often focus on enhancing investor knowledge or unearthing information about competitors.28 These requests advance the goals neither of government oversight nor of increasing public awareness of government activity.29 In practice, FOIA’s structure creates significant inequalities of access to, and benefits from, government information.

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