proud of the important work that you are doing but your role is so critical and ultimately saves the taxpayers so much money that i want to make sure you have what you need is your funding and sufficient to meet your responsibilities under the law ms nisbet thank you mister clay for those very kind remarks we are working hard we have a staff of six professionals who are very dedicated and hardworking and i think in this budgetary environment we know we are going to our very best to make the most with what we have mister clay with whatever amount you have you are going to accomplish  process at some agencies are there legitimate reasons why top agency executives and others should know about certain foia requests before the releases are made and efforts show impact but that some agencies have been slow to improve these problems go back to at least the previous administration which was significant transparent and much less willing to disclose in fact the previous administration changed the official presumption to withholding rather than disclosing  thankfully president obama reversed that presumption back to disclosure to what it was during the clinton administration do you think the issue is simple agency to change or agency culture to not disclose or are there other reasons for those agencies who are not complying with the president's clear direction more money for her to actually do the job than she actually has i think that is an important factor as well i think that is true for agencies as well i also think that the system does need to be changed so that you create more efficiencies once a request has been responded to numbers that i saw in the studies yes mister clay on top of your good work to make the public aware of these varied exemptions what do you recommend we do to fix the problem  arizona doctor gosar for five minutes mister gosar to the panel outside of circulated memos what true or real hard core pursuits of foia enforcement have you seen from this administration and department of justice i would like to start with aspect a critical aspect of implementation is being able to show examples concrete examples so people at other agencies can see what actually has occurred first and foremost in litigation perfect major part of implementation that i think has been lacking it probably will come in time it almost has to as a matter of good common sense but the fact that we are here two years after the stands in very stark contrast with what happened and what i know firsthand happened in the implementation of the reno memorandum during the clinton administration mister gosar from your expertise here we have seen an unprecedent the exemption three statutes is to focus on the roughly half of them that our academic study showed do not qualify as exemption three statutes to begin with that would be an easy hit so to speak you could build upon the research that we did you had to pick an agency which is the worst in compliance with that is a very tough question to ask and i am not sure that i feel comfortable answering it we are still looking at agencies we are very new we are still really beginning to implement our mission i haven't looked at the numbers to give you a specific cite for which agency is doing the worse however in our experience we have had lots of trouble at the sec that requires more investigation and also the department of homeland address your previous question about things the administration has done on foia i think in addition to the directives the memoranda the guidance and the work that is being done at ogis the open government directive has also created a sort of open government infrastructure where foia has played a large role it has been featured the agencies when they prepare their open government plans many of them if not all had some mister towns there are nine exemptions but they do not all necessarily require that information be withheld some of them do allow some discretion by the agency i will give you an example mister towns please do ms nisbet exemption one is national security information if information is properly classified pursuant to the executive order on national security information  agency officials are not free to just release it in fact they are prohibited from doing that they have to be extremely careful in the way they handle that under other exceptions for example exemption five which incorporates certain privileges in civil discovery and typically is thought of as including deliberative process privilege or executive privilege attorney work product attorney client privilege  that is an exemption the courts have long held does allow the government to decide whether or not it wants to essentially invoke the privilege so that information particularly after the passage of time might be very appropriate for disclosure it does not have to be withheld mister towns thank you i understand that outside of foia there are over two hundred other exemptions of information that cannot be disclosed under fo which incorporates other statutes is really a number that we not all quite sure about in fact i think that is something this committee could look at what those statutes are and whether or not they are properly being like to say that we can and certainly we would try to do that particularly in partnership with some of the other organizations that do track those things but my understanding from talking to people who work very closely with all of you on the hill is that it is sometimes very difficult to spot those things before they go through so it really takes some vigilance from you all as well as from the i really appreciate the fact that you are having this hearing i think it is a very important hearing because we are talking about transparency and opening up government i think in order to do it we would have to be involved in the process and we all have to work together least one foia related to their portion of the government and we will deconflict it so we will have at least seven subcommittee hearings on this we are also forming a working group which i am very confident you will be joining along with other parties some of whom are at the table today to begin the process of fashioning foia reform not just to deal with one exemption but to look at all of them that presently exist thank you for your leadership in the past and i extend things you may have said please let the committee know and the chairman and ranking member by unanimous consent will extend that to allow your information to get in this is extremely important i would close by asking are all of you willing to come back again if