Whose Side Is He On?

Rep. Bill Sali has been opposing a bill designed to make it easier to get information from the Federal government.

Despite Sali’s effort

A bill designed to make the Freedom of Information Act more requester-friendly has won the backing of a key House committee and will likely be put to a vote before the full body within days, coinciding with next week's Sunshine Week events.

Under the current system, agencies tend to wait until a lawsuit is filed before coughing up the documents. If you’ve been in a lawsuit, you know it’s expensive to hire an attorney, draft a complaint, and file the suit, even if you end up winning. Making it more likely that the agency will have to pay the requestor’s attorney fees if they improperly withhold the documents should help do away with such stonewalling.

Sali’s take on it was thus:

Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho) said a liberalized attorney fees policy would motivate agencies to fully litigate those cases rather than come to a settlement with the requester, defeating the main purpose of FOIA, which is to get records into the hands of requesters as quickly as possible.
"The question it raises in my mind is: Why would any agency want to settle?" Sali said.

Well, the longer the case goes on the more expensive it gets, so there’s that. More likely, the agency will have to make a real assessment up front and produce the appropriate records instead of just stiff-arming the request.
The article also has a nice explanation of the openness policy under Clinton, and the secrecy policy under Bush.