President Barack Obama’s promise to operate the “most transparent administration in history” animated much of the hearing, with witnesses and legislators noting some progress but much failure to live up to the grand pledge.

“It is particularly a pleasure to be with you here again on Sunshine Week, though it’s unfortunately not as sunny as we’d like,” said Angela Canterbury, director of public policy for the liberal Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

“Sunshine Week” runs from March 10-16 and promotes government transparency.

The president issued an executive order at the beginning of his first term instructing agencies to follow the Freedom of Information Act “with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

However, some representatives questioned the executive order’s effectiveness.

Executive agencies only responded to 37.5 percent of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests they received, said Rep. John Mica (R., Fla.), citing a committee report. He also noted that nearly two thirds of government agencies have not updated their FOIA policies, as Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder directed them to.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) highlighted the backlog of FOIA requests at agencies.

The president’s executive order conflicts with the agencies’ natural predisposition, said committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif) and Celia Wexler, the senior Washington representative for the Center for Science and Democracy.

“Agency culture always kind of pushes back against transparency,” Wexler said.

Issa called agency secrecy a “natural state” that Congress will not be able to change simply by asking it to change.

“The only way that [change] will happen is if rhetoric is also matched by law, if in fact law is enforced and overseen,” Issa said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the committee’s ranking member, praised the president’s actions to promote transparency. He asked the witnesses about legislation he and Issa released in draft form this week that would codify as law the president’s executive order.

Wexler urged the committee to overhaul the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, citing multiple conflicts of interest and the fact that these committees often meet in secret. The committee also discussed the DATA and GRANT Acts, which mandate greater transparency in the federal bureaucracy.

Canterbury said that the administration has done a good job releasing information to the public but criticized them for other things. She singled out the “national security state” for being overly secretive and highlighted an executive order that curtails disclosures to Congress.

“You can’t do oversight and there won’t be checks and balances if the president is allowed to keep secrets from Congress,” she said.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, said that the government does not release much of its information in easily accessible forms.

Harper grades how available the government’s data is, and “the grades are relatively poor,” he said. Much of it is released in a .pdf format, which is far less accessible than other forms, he said.

“I found that the Obama administration was somewhat lagging the House [of Representatives] in terms of transparency. Obama controls a great deal of the government obviously and has not met the outsized promises that he made as a campaigner,” he said.

Harper also expressed dismay that there is not a “machine-readable” government structure chart to aid legislators and the public in monitoring the government. He noted that such a chart would help legislators and others see exactly how legislation would effect various parts of the government.

The emails, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), are from Jackson’s pseudonymous, secondary email account under the name “Richard Windsor.”

The emails are the second of four batches of roughly 12,000 emails from the “Richard Windsor” account the EPA has been ordered to disclose.

CEI senior fellow Christopher Horner first reported the existence of Jackson’s secret email address in his book, The Liberal War on Transparency.

EPA officials heavily redacted Friday’s release, omitting all but the most mundane communications. Meeting schedules, discussions of media coverage, and nearly all other content were redacted.

The EPA relied mostly on the “deliberative process” FOIA exemption, which allows agencies to redact intra-agency communications. The argument for the rule is that disclosing internal debates could chill officials’ ability to have forthright discussions about policy.

However, critics say the exemption gives agencies wide latitude and potential for abuse.

For example, an aide forwarded an email to Jackson from a corporate headhunter seeking a recommendation for a “Climate Change Practice Leader in the Washington D.C. area” for an unnamed firm.

Jackson’s response was redacted.

Portions of emails were redacted in some instances, yet those same emails were quoted in full later on in the email chain.

“The only saving grace of this debacle is that, on their face, the overwhelming majority of these claims of ‘deliberative process’ appear to have nothing to do with the sort of agency deliberation that qualifies for withholding,” Horner told the Washington Free Beacon.

He said the exemptions “look to be abusive efforts to avoid embarrassing revelations about mystery meetings on Jackson’s schedule, planning spin for, and then characterizing, interviews and media coverage, and so on.”

Attorney General Eric Holder issued new FOIA guidelines for federal agencies in 2009, instructing them to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosing information to the public.

“On its face this offers promiscuous abuses of what Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged was FOIA’s most-abused provision, which he swore would no longer be so abused,” Horner said. “But, like all of this administration’s ‘transparency’ rhetoric, they were only thinking about Bush administration documents when striking the grand poses. It never occurred to them that transparency could soon involve them.”

The EPA also invoked a privacy exemption to redact information in several bizarre instances.

According the Justice Department, the privacy exemption permits the government to withhold information about individuals when disclosure “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Among the redacted information was an email from EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton to Jackson in which he inquired about the existence of turducken—a meat dish in which chicken is stuffed in a duck, which is then stuffed in a turkey.

“Separate and more important question: is there such a thing as a turduckin [sic] (a New Orleans dish)? Was [REDACTED] and they mentioned this. Not sure if they were pulling my leg.”

EPA Facilities Management & Services Director Bridget Shea, in another email, wrote to the EPA deputy chief of staff regarding several paintings the agency was trying to obtain on loan from the Smithsonian.

However, the names of the paintings in question were redacted under the privacy exemption.

“The painting entitled [REDACTED], while available, may not be an appropriate fit as it is 8 feet tall,” Shea wrote.

EPA officials have previously told the Free Beacon Jackson’s use of a second account was standard practice and a necessary one because of the hundreds of thousands of emails that flood her public inbox. The agency also said Jackson’s secret account was included in FOIA disclosures.

However, government watchdogs contend Jackson’s use of a secret email address is a possible violation of federal record laws.

“Administrator Jackson’s practice of using fictitious email accounts to conduct official EPA business, shielding the contents from public view, conflicts directly with her responsibility to follow federal records law,” said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Executive Director Melanie Sloan in a statement. “The fact that others may have engaged in such conduct before her tenure is no justification. ‘Everybody does it’ is an excuse for kindergarteners, not cabinet officials.”

The Daily Caller first identified Jackson’s secret alias in November.

Politico later reported “Richard Windsor” is the name of the Jackson family dog.

The EPA inspector general is currently investigating Jackson’s use of the secret email address, as are several congressional committees.

Jackson stepped down as EPA administrator in December.

The EPA was not available for comment.

Obama was answering questions during a Google hangout when a woman questioned him on his promises of greater government transparency, noting things “feels a lot less transparent.”

“This is the most transparent administration in history,” Obama assured the woman. “I can document that this is the case.”

“Every visitor that comes into the White House is now part of the record,” Obama continued. “Just about every law that we pass and rule that we implement we put online for everyone to see.”

As extensively reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the Obama administration’s record on transparency has been a great source of disappointment to government watchdog groups and journalists.

The administration often points to the White House visitor logs as a tangible example of its commitment to transparency. However, emails revealed that lobbyists sometimes meet with senior White House staff in a Caribou Coffee cafe across the street from the executive mansion to avoid being included in the visitor logs.

The administration’s reforms to the Freedom of Information Act have also fallen short of its goals.

A government-wide audit performed by the National Security Archives in December found 62 of 99 federal agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since Holder issued a 2009 memorandum instructing them to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure.

The audit also revealed that 56 agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since the passage of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which mandated agencies retool their FOIA offices, including fee structures and reporting.

Holder has done little to implement his guidelines four years after issuing them, and his Justice Department has defended all agencies that chose to withhold information from the public, a report on FOIAproject.org found.

A Bloomberg investigation found that “19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information.”

“In all, just 8 of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act,” Bloomberg reported in September 2012.

An August 2012 Washington Post analysis found that early freedom of information progress by the Obama administration “stalled and, in the case of most departments, reversed in direction.”

The number of FOIA requests denied in full due to exemptions rose more than 10 percent last year, to 25,636 from 22,834 the previous year, according to the Post’s analysis.

FOIA lawsuits have also risen under the Obama administration.

Outgoing Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson used a secret email address to conduct official business, a possible violation of FOIA laws.

The Obama administration has also prosecuted a record number of government whistleblowers and argued against journalistic privilege in court.

It has also jealously guarded the details of its targeted drone strikes, refusing to even acknowledge the existence of the program until recently. It repeatedly denied FOIA requests from the ACLU and the New York Times seeking information on the program.

“Obama is the sixth administration that’s been in office since I’ve been doing Freedom of Information Act work. … It’s kind of shocking to me to say this, but of the six, this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There’s just no question about it,” Katherine Meyer, a Washington lawyer who’s been filing FOIA cases since 1978, told Politico in March. “This administration is raising one barrier after another. … It’s gotten to the point where I’m stunned—I’m really stunned.”

A comparison between the last two years of President George W. Bush’s second term and the last two years of President Barack Obama’s first term shows FOIA lawsuits jumped by 28 percent, TRAC reports.

FOIA lawsuits are filed to challenge denials of records requests or the use of exemptions of information by federal agencies.

The number of FOIA lawsuits filed against the State Department rose by 111 percent in those time periods, from 18 to 38. FOIA lawsuits rose by 60 percent at both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Additionally, the Department of Justice saw an increase by 50 percent.

Obama pledged to usher in an unprecedented era of transparency and openness in government, but the rise in FOIA lawsuits “adds credence to the criticism of some activists about the Obama Administration’s actual commitment to this goal,” TRAC wrote.

Transparency advocates say federal agencies have largely ignored the executive branch’s directives and memos.

“I think if agencies were updating their regulations and complying with the law better, some of those lawsuits wouldn’t be necessary,” said Patrice McDermott, the executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, at a conference on government transparency Thursday.

A government-wide audit performed by the National Security Archive found 62 of 99 federal agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since Attorney General Eric Holder issued a 2009 memorandum instructing them to do so.

The audit also revealed that 56 agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since the passage of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which mandated agencies retool their FOIA offices, including fee structures and reporting.

Holder has done little to implement those guidelines four years after issuing them, and his Justice Department has defended all agencies that choose to withhold information from the public, a report on FOIAproject.org found.

Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg News the figures may reflect an increase in the number of FOIA requests made to agencies since 2009.

A Bloomberg investigation found “19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information.”

“In all, just 8 of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act,” Bloomberg reported in September 2012.

An August 2012 Washington Post analysis found that early freedom of information progress by the Obama administration “stalled and, in the case of most departments, reversed in direction.”

The number of FOIA requests denied in full due to exemptions rose more than 10 percent last year, to 25,636 from 22,834 the previous year, according to the Post’s analysis.

“Obama is the sixth administration that’s been in office since I’ve been doing Freedom of Information Act work. … It’s kind of shocking to me to say this, but of the six, this administration is the worst on FOIA issues. The worst. There’s just no question about it,” Katherine Meyer, a Washington lawyer who’s been filing FOIA cases since 1978, told Politico in March 2012. “This administration is raising one barrier after another. … It’s gotten to the point where I’m stunned—I’m really stunned.”

Bloomberg reports:

Nine of 15 cabinet offices have yet to release details of their out-of-town travel records six months after Bloomberg News filed requests for those documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Kathleen Sebelius of the Department of Health and Human Services are among those who haven’t complied.

The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 working days. Watchdogs say the delays show that the president hasn’t fulfilled his promise of greater transparency, and one group found that more than half of 99 federal offices ignored a directive to overhaul the way they respond to filings.

News agencies have become more interested in the travel records for these agencies since the General Service Administration’s inspector general revealed in April that the agency used more than $800,000 taxpayer dollars to sponsor a conference in Las Vegas in 2010. Records obtained from a previous Bloomberg FOIA request showed the GSA’s history of misusing taxpayer dollars.

Taxpayers paid $27.8 million for more than 200 overnight gatherings attended by at least 50 GSA employees over the five-year period, the records showed.

Likewise, another FOIA request exposed the Department of Veterans Affairs of spending “about $295 million of taxpayer money for almost 1,600 overnight gatherings attended by at least 50 agency employees since 2005.”

The $831,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” that President Obama spearheaded and signed into law requires his administration to release quarterly reports on its effects.  But “the most transparent administration in the history of our country” is now four reports behind schedule and has so far not released any reports whatsoever in 2012.  Its most recent quarterly report is for the quarter than ended on June 30, 2011. …

Section 1513 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “stimulus”) explicitly states, “In consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers shall submit quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives that detail the impact of programs funded through covered funds on employment, estimated economic growth, and other key economic indicators.” …

In other words, the Obama administration is required by law to submit quarterly reports on the “stimulus” through the third quarter of 2013.  Yet the administration has apparently found it more convenient to stop after the second quarter of 2011 — more than two years early.  Or perhaps it has just decided to put the release of these reports on hold until after the election.  Either way, the Obama administration is now in violation of the president’s most prominent piece of legislation this side of Obamacare.

The Standard speculates about why the administration has not issued the reports.

Why would the administration not want to release these reports?  Presumably because they have shown what a colossal waste of taxpayer money Obama’s “stimulus” has been.

In January 2010, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors reported that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it described as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” had at that point cost $263.3 billion and had added or saved about 1.8 million jobs, whether private or public.  In other words, for every $148,000 in taxpayer money that had gone out the door, only one job had been added or saved — according to an estimate from Obama’s own economists.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a lawsuit against the EPA last week claiming senior executives at the agency used secret email accounts to conduct public business, shielding their communications from the Freedom of Information Act.

The suit cites an internal EPA memo, first revealed in a 2008 Government Accountability Office, which describes secondary email accounts known only to a “few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff.”

CEI is asking the court to compel production of three FOIA requests to the EPA regarding these secondary email addresses.

“In the face of revelations about organized and systemic abuses by senior federal employees to hide from the public their activities, particularly their email, EPA has constructively denied CEI’s requests and its appeal, leaving Plaintiff no recourse but this lawsuit asking this Court to compel EPA to comply with the law,” the complaint states.

In a statement to the Free Beacon, an EPA spokeswoman said the agency “is strongly committed to transparency and strictly complies with open government laws such as the Freedom of Information Act. We will review this lawsuit closely and respond as appropriate.”

The lawsuit was filed last week by CEI counsel for special projects Hans Bader, CEI senior fellow Chris Horner, and general counsel Sam Kazman.

Horner released The Liberal War on Transparency, a book describing the use of private email addresses by administration officials.

The Obama administration has often used such methods to keep information out of the public record.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report in July detailing how White House officials met off-site with lobbyists and used private email addresses to avoid triggering disclosure laws.

For example, Jeff Smith, a senior adviser to the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, set up a meeting with a lobbyist at the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House.

Upon entering office, President Obama pledged to run “the most transparent administration in history.”

On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a memo on freedom of information, telling agencies: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

A Bloomberg investigation found “19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information.”

“In all, just 8 of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act,” the news organization reported.

An August Washington Post analysis found that early freedom of information progress by the Obama administration “stalled and, in the case of most departments, reversed in direction.”

The number of FOIA requests denied in full due to exemptions rose more than 10 percent last year, to 25,636 from 22,834 the previous year, according to the Post’s analysis.

The government watchdog group filed suit after the IRS denied its request for the names of individuals whose tax returns the Obama White House has accessed.

“The public has a right to know … whose tax records the president has been looking at,” Karen Groen, Cause of Actions’s chief oversight counsel, told the Free Beacon.

Groen said that Cause of Action initially filed the request in March and “went through the whole administrative process,” but they were still stymied, which left no recourse but a lawsuit.

Cause of Action filed the request under the Freedom of Information Act which, according to the IRS’s website, “gives any person the right to access federal agency records or information.”

The IRS denied the request, citing an exemption in the Freedom of Information Act that requires agencies to withhold information that is “specifically exempted from disclosure by another law.”

Tax returns are considered confidential, Groen explained, and the IRS rightfully withholds tax returns from the public. However, Cause of Action is not requesting actual tax returns—just a list of the individuals whose tax returns the president has requested.

“Treating these requests as part of someone’s tax records is taking it too far,” Groen said.

Groen expressed dismay at the administration’s refusal to reveal whose tax returns they have accessed.

“This administration has pledged to be the most transparent in history,” but they are refusing to turn over this information, she said.

The IRS did not return a request for comment.

UPDATE 4:30 P.M. Wednesday, October 3: The IRS provided the Free Beacon with the following statement:

The IRS does not comment on pending litigation.

However, the IRS can confirm that no requests were made, and no tax returns or return information have been disclosed under Internal Revenue Code 6103 (g) during the period in question.

Federal law provides under Internal Revenue Code 6103 (g) a provision for the President of the United States to request and receive federal tax return information.

6103(g)1 states:

Upon written request by the President, signed by him personally, the Secretary shall furnish to the President, or to such employee or employees of the White House Office as the President may designate by name in such request, a return or return information with respect to any taxpayer named in such request.

He has humbly regarded his own administration as one of the most transparent and ethical in history.

But a recent Bloomberg News analysis found otherwise. The Obama administration, in fact, routinely violates the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.

“When it comes to implementation of Obama’s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more ‘talk the talk’ rather than ‘walk the walk,’” said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of Justice’s office monitoring the government’s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981 to 2007.

The Bloomberg survey was designed in part to gauge the timeliness of responses, which Attorney General Eric Holder called “an essential component of transparency” in a March 2009 memo. About half of the 57 agencies eventually disclosed the out-of-town travel expenses generated by their top official by Sept. 14, most of them well past the legal deadline. …

“It’s ironic that the demands in the presidential campaign for Mitt Romney’s tax returns are unrelenting, but when it comes time to release the schedules for senior appointees there’s the same denial of access,” said Paul Light, a New York University professor who studies the federal bureaucracy.

A recent report from the House and Energy Commerce Committee found that White House staff members have routinely conducted official business via personal email accounts in order to skirt transparency requirements.

The pace of regulations issued by the Obama administration is receding as the nation’s economy falters and the 2012 election approaches.

Several of the most expensive and controversial rules — to protect the food supply, reduce exposure to silica dust, require rear-view cameras or other devices on cars, and more — remain under review by the White House long after they were expected to be published.

Advocates for the environment, health and safety say the delay signals an effort by the administration to reconsider the economic and political impacts of its actions, in light of the struggling economy and the 2010 midterm elections that empowered Republicans.

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office scolded the administration for delaying the significant Medicare cuts outlined in the new health care law until after the election to avoid political backlash.