I ask because it’s like this administration never passes up the chance to do that particular group wrong:

One day after being sworn into office, President Barack Obama instructed federal agencies to ensure government transparency by complying with the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act law.

[snip]

One year later, Obama’s requests for transparency have apparently gone unheeded. In fact a provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

Via Instapundit. Mind you, it’s fair to take the position that what actually happened here may simply be that this administration just doesn’t really care sufficiently about transparency to do any real heavy lifting on the subject: they said a bunch of things during the campaign to get the digital libertarians to vote for Democrats, Democrats got elected, and now the digital libertarians can be safely ignored until 2012. It’s also fair to not really care that the federal bureaucracy is still playing need-to-know (more accurately, don’t-want-you-to-know) with unrestrained enthusiasm. I take the position that you do need people out there who won’t stop pushing and prodding at transparency, but I can understand if other folks don’t.

But, really.  If you thought that your vote for an Illinois Democrat machine politician was going to be a vote for transparency… Abbie Hoffman, thou hath lived in vain!

Well, OK, we knew that already.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.