The dean of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications received an angry phone call from a top government official in the summer of 2011.

The call was about a small research center within Newhouse that issued a scathing report about the U.S. Social Security Administration. The report claimed the SSA failed to reduce the backlog of disability social security cases.

There was no public response from the SSA after the report was released. Instead, the commissioner of the SSA at the time, Michael Astrue — a George W. Bush appointee — called personally to ask Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham to sanction the small research center that produced the report.

“They were not happy,” said Susan Long, a co-founder of the research center that released the report, with a laugh.

The research center, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit, non-partisan, data-gathering research organization at SU, has upset numerous government officials and has been at the center of government disputes since its inception in 1989. TRAC — as it is most commonly referred to — systematically uses the Freedom of Information Act to gather and analyze big data from federal government agencies and make it available to the public. The center has now started a new project relating to the Freedom of Information Act.

“Generally people are upset because they don’t believe the info should be made public,” Branham said in an email.

Branham rebuked Astrue’s call and supported TRAC. A few weeks later, Astrue called TRAC’s report “sloppy and irresponsible” while testifying before Congress.

“(TRAC) also serves as a reminder of the importance of the FOIA,” Branham said. “Its work is a great example of public service journalism.”

At its core, TRAC tries to determine if an agency is achieving its stated goals, said David Burnham, a co-founder of TRAC and former reporter for The New York Times.

TRAC is mostly funded by grants, and as a result, Long said the organization has to be “entrepreneurial” with regard to getting funding. If it had unlimited funding, Long said excitedly that TRAC would pursue “hundreds of projects.”

“Wow,” she said. “It’s really endless.”

In its 20-plus years as an organization, TRAC has released reports using data from almost every federal agency, including the Department of Justice; the Department of Homeland Security; the FBI; the IRS; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF); and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE).

The process of getting data from federal agencies, though, is often tricky, Long said.

“You don’t just ask for it,” she said with a laugh. “Some agencies don’t think the public is entitled to see what they’re doing, so there’s a lot of resistance.”

In some cases, government resistance leads to lawsuits. When federal agencies deny public records requests, filing a lawsuit is the only solution under FOIA, Long said. However, she said, lawsuits are both timely and costly, so filing one is a last resort.

TRAC is currently involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits, which claim that TRAC has been illegally denied access to data under FOIA, Long said. Despite TRAC’s continued push through the legal system to force agencies to grant public records requests, agencies continue to deny them.

“You just keep going down all the paths and invoking all the requirements and lay out the record hoping that you’re not going to have to go back and sue them again,” Long said.

Recently, TRAC started the FOIA Project, which tracks how well federal agencies comply with granting FOIA requests. As part of a report released in early November, the project sent FOIA requests to 21 federal agencies.

Seven agencies never responded or did not provide usable data. Those agencies include the ATF, the FBI, the DOJ’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, ICE, the Criminal Division of the DOJ and the DOJ’s Office of Information Policy, according to the report. The Office of Information Policy is supposed to encourage FOIA efforts within the government, according to the report.

The CIA refused to process the FOIA request, according to the report. As a result, TRAC filed suit against the CIA on Oct. 20.

Burnham, a co-founder of TRAC, said the government has always been resistant to the organization’s public records requests regardless of who is in office. He said the Obama administration isn’t better or worse than previous administrations in terms of transparency.

“The Obama administration talked a big talk when it first came into power, and since then hasn’t really followed through very much,” said David Cuillier, former chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Freedom of Information Committee. “It’s a trend that been happening for decades really, and it’s something that goes above just one president.

“It’s a systematic trend that we’re seeing — a bureaucracy that’s out of control.”

Philosophically, both Long and Burnham said it is human nature for people to resist someone looking over their shoulder, which, they said, explains why government agencies have always been vehemently against granting public records requests. This, in some cases, leads to decades long and expensive lawsuits.

“It’s a natural tendency not to want to be real forthright,” Long said. “So there needs to be a countervailing force. It isn’t that our system works automatically.”

Published on December 7, 2015 at 10:48 pm

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu