At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) spoke about using AI to improve FOIA.
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00:00Work and time you put in for this testimony and answering our questions.
00:04We'll have five-minute rounds.
00:06I'm going to start out with Dr. Epstein and refer to the Office of Information Policy at DOJ
00:15and the Archives Office of Government Information Services.
00:19What steps could these offices take to improve the requester experience
00:25and FOIA administration across the government
00:29and are there any statutory reforms that ought to be made?
00:34Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:37So I've had experience with both organizations,
00:42both as the executive director of a transparency group
00:46and during my time in the executive branch.
00:49The National Archives and Records Administration's Office of Government Information Services,
00:55my experience is when requesters look to avoid litigation,
01:02they often look to OGIS to kind of resolve the disputes, effectively to mediate those disputes.
01:09My experience is that OGIS often will notify the government agency that there is a requester who is looking for a solution,
01:19but ultimately takes the position that it's in the government agency's discretion whether to use the OGIS process.
01:27And so I think one legislative reform is to say that whether you go as far as saying that the agency must mediate,
01:36certainly to exercise good faith in mediating a dispute.
01:39And that, of course, reduce the amount of litigation.
01:43In terms of the Office of Information Policy of the Department of Justice,
01:47I think one of the very effective things that office does is it provides an enormous amount of analysis on new case law developing through the courts.
01:56And, of course, as many of you know, as recently as at least when I was in the administration,
02:02about 20 percent of the workload of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is FOIA cases.
02:09And so being able to get that guidance from the Office of Information Policy is useful.
02:14Now, the thing that I would say about the Office of Information Policy is it is often misunderstood
02:20that it is simply just an entity within the Department of Justice.
02:24The Office of Information Policy is supposed to set FOIA policy for the entire executive branch.
02:30And I often think that it is an ignored resource where agencies often consult their own chief FOIA officers
02:38without recognizing that the Office of Information Policy has such experience that it can well advise the agencies.
02:45And I think anything Congress can do to make that office more robust
02:50and to work with chief FOIA officers at agencies would be very helpful.
02:54Mr. Howell, March 20, last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report showing
03:08that in government-wide, the request backlog has continued to climb over the past decade.
03:14Long response times and backlogs violate the law and run counter to the spirit of the law.
03:21In your experience, what impact have agency backlogs had on your use of FOIA?
03:29So the general practice of the federal government to turn what should be an administrative process
03:35into a judicial one where you have to sue and enforce, you know, to get the information that you seek
03:40has made it so only that, you know, the very organized and resourced individuals can go and sue to get that information.
03:48So the net result is the American people are in the dark about a lot of their activities related to how their government is operating.
03:56That is why we've had to really scale up not only our FOIA outgoing to 100,000, but in 100 lawsuits.
04:03And I believe the proof is in the pudding with the list of, you know, documents and stories we have broken as a result of that.
04:11But it shouldn't work that way.
04:12The federal government should adapt to the year 2025, lean into technological advancements, using potentially AI and automation
04:20to get these documents out more quickly.
04:22It shouldn't be such a human intensive process.
04:27He just brought up AI.
04:29So a question to you, Dr. Epstein.
04:31Dr. Epstein, from the past several years, the chief of FOIA officers council has considered impacts of artificial intelligence.
04:40The requester community, too, has debated the possible promises and perils of using AI.
04:47In your view, how could AI improve FOIA process?
04:51Yeah, thank you, Senator.
04:52So I think one thing is that AI can be directly relevant to reading rooms.
04:57Often, you will get agency reading rooms that, I mean, I just think about the FBI vault, where the ability to find useful documents is very difficult.
05:09It's not using the best kind of document discovery software.
05:14And I think there's at least two things.
05:16One is because so much of, I mean, virtually all agency records are now on the cloud, using AI as a tool for agencies to search for records would substantially reduce processing times, right?
05:31You can, AI is effectively a predictive model that can locate, well, if a number of search terms are in this location, there is likely going to be search terms in similar locations, or at least relevant search terms.
05:44I think the other thing is that in contemporary times, a lot of transparency organizations are very pro-tech, which is to say there's nothing that says that you can't have an API attached to government reading rooms that allows FOIA requesters to very efficiently download documents and then upload them into their own technological solutions.
06:08So that, I think, generally using AI in the federal government for transparency would be a good thing.
06:14Thank you, Chairman Grassley.
06:17Thank you, Chairman Grassley.