Senators Urge Passage Of Revised FOIA Bill

By: Lawmakers are scrambling to align House and Senate versions of a bill to strengthen freedom-of-information laws in time to pass it this year.

After talks to reconcile the bills went nowhere, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, presented a new version of their bill, S.849, yesterday that would bring its financial issues in line with the House version, HR 1309.

"We have a strong chance of Senate action on the bill this week, and I hope the House also will swiftly pass this legislation so the president can sign this important act before year's end," Leahy said in a statement.

Senate leaders were trying late yesterday to strike an agreement to bring up the bill this month and vote on it without amendments.

But with less than three weeks left before Congress recesses for the holidays, it was not clear that the measure would pass muster with the House's pay-as-you-go rules or that President Bush would sign such a bill into law.

Talks between the House and Senate stalled over House rules intended to prevent lawmakers from piling on debt to finance tax cuts or new spending programs.

Leahy and Cornyn made changes they said addressed objections, with the hope of passing the bill by a Senate voice vote and sending it to the House for quick approval there.

The new Senate version, they said, would require that when the government loses or settles a FOIA case, the complainant's attorneys' fees are to be paid from funds already appropriated to the agency involved in the suit. The same would hold in cases in which the government does not respond within 20 days, the time limit the bill sets for responding to FOIA requests. The bill clarifies that the 20-day limit commences on the date on which the request is first received by the agency.

The rest of the legislation would make sweeping changes to the 40-year-old law, including:

* Establishing a FOIA hotline service for all federal agencies.
* Applying FOIA to government records held by private contractors.
* Creating a FOIA ombudsman to provide requestors and agencies with an alternative to litigation.

Spokesmen for Bush and House Democratic leaders did not respond to requests for comment in time for this story.

The act that gave citizens the power to request information from government celebrated its 40th anniversary July 4. But it was a bittersweet landmark. Research shows that those seeking data continue to encounter long delays despite a 2005 order by Bush to clear the unanswered backlog.