Today we present an interview with Frank LoMonte, Senior Legal Counsel for CNN and a member of the 2024-2026 FOIA Advisory Committee. This is part of a series of posts on the Committee, whose members are FOIA experts from inside and outside of government and who are appointed by the Archivist of the United States.
Why did you wish to serve on the FOIA Advisory Committee?
I’ve been an avid user of freedom of information laws as both a journalist and a lawyer, and I hope I can be an effective conduit giving voice to some of the recurring frustrations of the requester community. Most importantly, I really want to help stimulate conversation about some of the most widely used FOIA exemptions. We haven’t comprehensively revisited FOIA in nearly three decades, and it’s past time to take a look at whether exemptions like “deliberative process” still make sense given the benefit of half a century’s worth of experience.
How do you think this experience will help you in your work?
In my day job, I help journalists navigate the FOIA process and, when necessary, appeal FOIA denials. It’s already been incredibly helpful, after just a few months in this volunteer role, to hear from the top federal agency people who handle incoming FOIAs all day long about the challenges they encounter in their own jobs. I’m sure I will come away with a much deeper understanding of the inner workings of these agencies and where the ”pain points” are that get in the way of prompt fulfillment.
What is FOIA’s biggest challenge?
My first response to journalists who ask me for help preparing federal FOIA requests is always, “What year is your book due?” I say that as a joke, but not really. My experience with federal FOIA unfortunately is that responsive records almost invariably arrive – if at all – after they are too stale to be of value. There has to be a way to improve on the all-or-nothing system of fulfillment, where a person whose request encompasses 1,000 documents must wait for that very last document to get reviewed by the agency’s lawyers before seeing any of the other 999 documents. No other organization operates that way. If I want three things from Amazon.com and two of them are immediately in stock and the third one is on back-order, I don’t have to wait for that third one before I receive the first two. Records should be at least as easy to obtain as tube socks.
Tell us about your favorite FOIA moment.
Going way back to my newspaper reporter days, I remember my very first use of federal FOIA, for data from [the Department of] Health and Human Services about reimbursements being paid out to the home health care industry. I got back a huge fat envelope full of spreadsheets in the mail. It was obvious from looking at those printouts that the government was overpaying a bunch of shell companies operating at the same addresses under different corporate identities so they could double-bill and triple-bill Medicaid. It was a huge rat’s nest of fraud just waiting for someone to uncover it, right there on the face of the documents.
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