On 14 May 2009, several organizations, including SLA, signed on to a letter written to the Honorable Gregory B. Craig, Counsel to the U.S. President, requesting that the Obama administration act promptly to restore treatment of the White House's Office of Administration (OA) as an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
From its inception in 1977 until August 2007, OA functioned consistently as an agency subject to the FOIA, adopting comprehensive FOIA regulations and processing hundreds of FOIA requests. In August 2007, in the midst of litigating a FOIA request for records related to OA's discovery that millions of e-mail messages were missing from White House servers, the Bush administration declared OA as a non-agency and therefore need not comply with any information requests under the FOIA.
Disappointingly, on 19 May 2009, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an opinion upholding the district court's conclusion that the OA is not an agency and therefore is not subject to FOIA.
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