FOIA Improvement Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, this has been a long time coming, and there is a lot of thanks to go around. Certainly for Senator Cornyn and Senator Leahy, this is going to be a proud week with the passage of this bill in the House and, ultimately, it going to the President.

I don't believe this would have been possible without the partnership that Elijah Cummings and I formed some years ago. The House has led in not just one, but in two Congresses, sending to the Senate very tough language dramatically improving what we see as the flaws in FOIA that have developed.

Congresswoman Maloney, very rightfully so, said there are a lot of things that the interest groups and Congressman Cummings and myself and, perhaps, everyone else who will vote on it here today would like to have seen. I don't want to belabor the point, but when this bill becomes law and is signed by the President, there will be enough left for a new bill to start again.

Having said that, we celebrate today the fact that we have made some milestones. Codifying in law the presumption of openness and, once and for all, ending the deliberative process' unlimited length and reducing it to 25 years long, long after a President has left office, is a good start.

I want to note that, in the original House bill--one area that I was particularly pleased that Mr. Cummings and I were able to come to an agreement on--if an agency unreasonably delays, there should be a result. If someone has to sue, whether it is The New York Times or an interest group, and, ultimately, the government is unreasonable and is withholding, reasonable fees should be recovered. That isn't in the bill. I hope that it will be in future legislation.

The fact is that this bill includes some very important points, not the least of which will be making more public and accessible the repeated request for various parts of FOIA, and, of course, reducing the delays and the time lag.

Having said that, through the establishment of a board and the recognition that only through diligence and closing the quality circle that occurs can we come back to this body and say more needs to be done and name it.

But today is a day for celebration. I want to thank Mr. Cummings one more time, Chairman Chaffetz, the Members of the House and the Senate, urge the passage of the bill, and recognize that this is, in fact, a 50-year-old law. It has stood the test of time. It has proven to be an asset for the American people and for their right to know. We will build on this.

Lastly, and Congresswoman Maloney named it, there were countless outside transparency groups that spanned from the farthest left of our country's politics to the farthest right of our politics, all of whom wanted more open access to their government. Today, we are achieving it. We still will have a government that knows far more about us than we know about our government; but today, we are opening the possibility that, in a timely fashion, more often more people who have a vested interest in knowing something that the government has done or is doing will have the ability to get that information.

I thank Congressman Meadows for making this bill possible today. His leadership has been critical, and his friendship has been critical all along the way.

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