Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that the Obama administration has "delivered" on its promise to make government more transparent, but a new study released the same day concludes the Obama adminisitration is "falling short" of its promise.
"This past year has brought a shift in the way our entire federal government operates," Holder said as he commemorated "National Sunshine Week," which celebrates open government and freedom of information. "It's also signaled the emergence of a government that's striving to work more openly and more effectively for the people it serves."
In January 2009, on his first full day in office, President Obama issued an executive order promising a "new standard of openness," and two months later Holder, picked by President Obama to lead that effort, issued a government-wide memorandum "ordering a change in the way we approach, release and disseminate information," as Holder put it Monday.
"I asked that we make openness the default, not the exception," Holder told a crowd gathered inside the Justice Department.
But only "a minority" of federal agencies have responded to those actions with "concrete changes," according to a new report by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
In addition, a new poll released Sunday by The American Society of News Editors found many Americans are skeptical that big changes have been made in the past year.
In the poll, 38 percent said the Obama administration engages in "about the same amount of secrecy" as its predecessors, 34 percent said the Obama administration engages in less secrecy than its predecessors, and 22 percent said it engages in more secrecy than its predecessors, according a report by the Scripps Howard News Service, which helped conduct the poll for The American Society of News Editors. - FOX News Story
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