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.

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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.