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“The FOIA Improvement Act will strengthen FOIA, the cornerstone open government law,” Issa and Cummings said in a joint statement. “The House unanimously passed companion legislation, H.R. 1211, earlier this year. The FOIA Improvement Act is a bipartisan bill that, after last night’s passage by the Senate, deserves to be taken up by the House and sent to the President.”

Key findings: ·  The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the primary federal regulator of over 4,500 banks, targeted legal industries.  FDIC’s explicitly intended its list of “high-risk merchants” to influence banks’ business decisions.   FDIC policymakers debated ways to ensure that bank officials saw the list and “get the message.” · Documents ...

“It’s appalling that our government is working around the law to vindictively attack businesses they find objectionable,” said Chairman Issa. “Internal FDIC documents confirm that Operation Choke Point is an extraordinary abuse of government power. In the most egregious cases, federal bureaucrats injected personal moral judgments into the regulatory process. Such practices are totally inconsistent with basic principles of good government, transparency, and the rule of law.”

“Each year, the federal government spends $80 billion on federal IT systems, yet much of that is wasted on cost overruns, long delays and outdated programs. By giving decision makers the ability to make changes appropriate for their agency, we can ensure that the most knowledgeable will now be able to enact solutions that had otherwise plagued their agencies. As technology changes, Chief Information Officers were previously prevented from adopting new technologies, and often the American ...

Today, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on implementation of The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), transformative federal spending transparency legislation that was first introduced by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) ...

“From the outset, the health law has been the poster child for this Administration’s broken transparency promises,” Chairman Issa said in a statement. “Americans were told if they liked their plans and doctors, they could keep them. They were told the individual mandate wasn’t a tax. None of these were true. Jonathan Gruber, one of ObamaCare’s chief architects, publicly lauded the ‘lack of transparency’ that was necessary to pass the law and credited ‘the stupidity of the ...

“Faced with large numbers of Americans running for an exit from ObamaCare, instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the Administration offered numbers that obscured and downplayed the number of dropouts. Now they’re saying this was just a ‘mistake.’ The claim that this was only accident stretches credulity. The Administration misreported ObamaCare’s enrollment figures not once, but twice, and officials cautiously changed their statements from ‘health plans’ to ...