White House makes its Office of Administration ineligible to FOIA requests

White house makes Office of Administration ineligible for FOIA requests
(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Formalizing a practice begun by the Bush II administration, the "most transparent administration in history" officially sealed the activities of the White House Office of Administration from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As USA Today reports, the office "handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails."

The timing of the decision has struck critics as curious in light of the recent tumult over presumed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email habits, as well as fact that this week is Sunshine Week, an annual promotion of transparency in government.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.