CREW today paid homage to this year’s Sunshine Week by issuing an assessment of the Obama administration’s response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Our reaction is mixed. President Obama has made undoubtedly clear his commitment to open and transparent government through his January 2009 FOIA Directive and the December 2009 Open Government Directive.

Unfortunately, however, a culture of secrecy lives on in executive agencies despite obvious and pressing needs for disclosure. CREW’s report highlights:

• the Justice Department’s refusal to disclose the notes of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview on the Valerie Wilson leak with the FBI,

• the Health and Human Services Department’s refusal to provide documents regarding the monumental failure to send H1N1 vaccines to where they were needed most,

• and the Department of Veterans Affairs’ failure to turn over records regarding the under-diagnosis of PTSD as a cost-saving measure.

CREW’s Executive Director Melanie Sloan said today:

While the Obama administration has made some progress in increasing government transparency, CREW’s experience indicates there is still a long way to go. Sunshine Week is the perfect time for the administration to reassess and reinvigorate agencies’ efforts towards making the government more accountable to the American people.

Click here to read CREW’s report.

Yesterday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was honored as the co-winner of the American Library Association’s James Madison Award. The award recognized the work by CREW and the National Security Archive (NSA) in the missing White House emails case.

The ALA bestowed the award jointly to CREW and Meredith Fuchs, General Counsel for the National Security Archive (NSA). The James Madison Award is given annually to those who make a great impact on strengthening government transparency.

Last December, CREW, the NSA and the White House announced a settlement in the long-running lawsuit challenging the failure of the Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to recover and properly archive millions of emails. These emails had disappeared from White House servers over a two-and-a-half-year period.

The settlement directs the Executive Office of the President to restore a total of 94 days of missing emails, which will then be sent to NARA for preservation and, eventually, opened to public access.

CREW's chief counsel, Anne Weismann, accepted the award and gave this speech.

CREW is deeply honored by this award and very proud of the tireless work put in by Ms. Weismann and the entire CREW legal team to ensure these critical records of our nation’s history are preserved.

This is Sunshine Week, a time when activists, journalists and organizations such as CREW make a special effort to remind Americans why the principles of transparency in government are so important to our democracy. A recent poll of Americans by the Scripps Survey Research Center revealed their views on secrecy in government. Here are some highlights:

* When asked if there is "more secrecy, less secrecy or about the same amount of secrecy in the Obama administration as in the previous administration," 38 percent said the amount of secrecy is about the same, 34 percent said the government has become less secret under Obama and 22 percent said it has become even more secretive.

* Only 32 percent were familiar with President Obama's order instructing all federal agencies to adopt a "presumption in favor of disclosure" when handling requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

* The public believes that state and local governments are more "open and transparent” in their operations than the federal government. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed said their state governments were very or somewhat secretive. And only 36 percent rated their local governments as very or somewhat secretive.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recently complained about President Obama's State of the Union speech criticism of the court's Citizens United ruling. Now, the head of the League of Women Voters (LWV) has a message for Justice Roberts: "a little honest feedback can be a good thing."

In this letter to the editor of the Washington Post, LWV President Mary G. Wilson writes:

It is particularly important in this instance, since the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission clearly revealed that the majority on the court has an astonishingly naive view of how corruption works in our nation's capital. Everyone else in the room understood that allowing huge sums of unregulated cash into our elections will undermine the role of individual voters and further expose our elected officials to the siren calls of corporate lobbyists.

Buck up, Mr. Chief Justice. Occasionally there are some things you really need to hear.

Click here to see what CREW had to say about the Citizens United decision.

When taxpayers in Minnesota chose to pay the $30 required to buy a license plate with the message "Support Our Troops," they probably never imagined that some of the money would be diverted by state officials to pay the salary of one of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's political appointees.

But that's exactly what happened. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports:

Last year $30,000 from the license-plate fund was used to pay a portion of Buckley's salary. Buckley worked in Pawlenty's office as a $92,000 a year special adviser on faith and community services.

During budget hearings on Pawlenty's office budget this week, Sens. Steve Murphy, Don Betzold and other legislators were furious over what they saw as a siphoning off of the money and a deception to those who bought the plates thinking they were directly helping veterans organizations.

By state law, money from the plates is split between the Department of Military Affairs for family members of deployed service members and the Department of Veterans Affairs for grants for homeless and needy veterans.

On Wednesday, 10 House Republicans released a joint statement declaring their intention to ban earmarks because they represent "a broken Washington." Yet, according to the group Media Matters, 8 of these 10 Republicans have requested nearly $245 million in earmarks since 2008.

Click here and scroll to the bottom to read the list of GOP lawmakers and the amounts of their earmarks.

Although we're pleased to hear these GOP members of Congress commit themselves to earmark reform, it's clear that they have been a part of the problem. It sure would have been nice to see both parties confront the earmark problem before. But better late than never.

Forbes magazine has released its 3rd annual list of America's 20 most miserable cities. Cleveland tops the list, and three other northern Ohio cities also made this infamous list: Canton, Youngstown and Akron. A variety of factors contribute to a city's quality, and one of them is corruption. Perhaps it's no coincidence that, as Forbes notes:

Northern Ohio has seen 309 public officials convicted of crimes over the past 10 years according to the Justice Department.

A current FBI investigation of public officials in Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is located) has ensnared more than two dozen government employees and businessmen on charges including bribery, fraud and tax evasion.

By a 402-1 vote, the House ethics committee was urged to continue its investigation of Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), even though the congressman has resigned. But did the committee ever hang up its cleats?

That depends on whom you talk to. Some media reports declared the Massa investigation over. But Politico quoted a senior Democratic aide who insisted that the committee had never ended its probe into Massa's alleged misbehavior.

Rep. Massa resigned earlier this week amid charges of having improper physical contact with at least four aides. The congressman acknowledged behaving inappropriately, but he insisted that there was nothing sexual about the contact.