Russell Carollo, of Mark Cuban’s JunketSleuth, has a great post up today about the way in which the FDIC aggressively rebuffs FOIA requests that other government agencies are happy to comply with. The FDIC has long been a hugely powerful and unaccountable arm of the government, and its letters to Carollo stink of arrogance and entitlement.
The FDIC repeatedly refused to provide any information on travel by its employees, claiming, among other things, that it has no central database, that Junketsleuth’s requests were too broad and that even if they had the information, the public wouldn’t have a right to see it…
Although the FDIC has rejected all of JunketSleuth’s Freedom of Information Act requests, more than 20 other agencies that got identically worded letters turned over their travel databases, which contain hundreds of thousands of records…
In addition, more than 30 agencies have provided JunketSleuth with other types of records. Those include hotel bills, airline receipts and other documents related to travel by top agency officials and other government employees, or to travel to specific destinations that we asked about.
But the FDIC provided nothing.
In response to JunketSleuth’s initial request for data, the FDIC claimed that our request—again, worded identically to those that yielded voluminous records from many other agencies—did not “reasonably describe” the information being sought.
The FDIC also said that we did not specify a time frame for the records we sought, suggesting that our request for data could be interpreted to mean all travel-related information compiled since the agency was created in 1933.
The FDIC seems perfectly happy to send responses to FOIA requests saying that it will provide no information at all on the grounds that the FOIA “could be construed to include” some impractically massive amount of information. It’s a textbook example of bad faith: what’s clearly happening here is that the FDIC has first decided that it’s not going to provide anything at all, and then instructed its lawyers to find some colorable reason why the request is being denied.
Why is it that the FDIC is being so willfully obstructive even as other agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FDA, are much more cooperative? The answer is surely the culture of secrecy and of we-know-best that pervades the financial sector generally, including the areas where it seeps into government. The Fed, of course, is just as bad, if not worse—it has a habit of dismissing FOIA requests out of hand, on the grounds that it’s not a government agency. (Technically, it’s a privately-owned corporation.)
Whenever information has emerged which Treasury or the Fed initially wanted to keep secret, the deleterious effects have been invisible—once again, the risk of something bad happening as a result of disclosure is an excuse used to justify a blanket decision not to disclose anything, rather than the reason for that decision. It’s worth remembering here that immediately before he was Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner ran the hugely secretive New York Fed, and did nothing to improve its transparency.
Government is, by its nature, a massive bureaucracy, and it’s very hard if not impossible to change an ingrained culture in such places. But a bit of top-down pressure could only help. Perhaps the White House could appoint an “openness czar” or similar to whom anybody getting serially rebuffed could appeal. Because this secrecy is ultimately self-defeating, not to mention politically damaging.
Felix Salmon is a financial writer, editor, and podcaster. A former finance blogger for Reuters and Condé Nast Portfolio, his work can be found at publications including Slate and Wired, as well as his own Substack newsletter.