I filed a FOIA on the documents that came out of the Salt Lake City meeting, prompted by The Hotshot Wakeup’s interview with Chris French. Here’s what I asked for:
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I heard about this meeting from Chris French’s interview with Tim of the Hotshot Wakeup from the transcript: https://thehotshotwakeup.substack.com/p/forest-service-announces-reorganization?utm_source=publication-search
starting at 15:49
“whether it’s their inability to effectively get a contract in place, hire people, or the decision-making where our local managers or district rangers and others feel like they can’t make decisions. We took all that and we convened a whole bunch of people in Salt Lake City mid-summer of last year. People represented from across the agency. For supervisors,
district rangers, people from research, people from our business operations, people from our regional offices. And we basically asked them the question, hey, what needs to change in this agency? And what do we need to make sure that we emphasize and maintain? What’s good and what are the things that we need to change?
We had 15 teams come out of that that provided us a set of recommendations of the type of shifts that we needed to make in this agency. We then convened another group of folks in the fall, again, representing the agency that took all those recommendations,
and they worked with a smaller team of folks made up of four supervisors and other representatives around the agency to present the chief and I a set of options to meet the secretary’s direction that she had given us to reorganize the agency. We took those options last fall, made some decisions.
They were approved by a broad set of folks that were on a representative recommending board, again, representing the agency. And we took those to the secretary. And so this has been over a year and a half of work. The things you see being proposed here are coming through us, from us, addressing the things we know about us.”
I would like to see the set of recommendations from the 15 teams.
I would like to see the set of options presented to the Chief.
If those sets of recommendations include not reorganizing, that’s fine, I just want to see them all.
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That’s what I asked for. Last week I got my first bunch of documents. There were many, many redactions. I asked the helpful FOIA person why. Here’s his answer.
“As described in the interim response letter, the majority of the information that has been withheld falls under FOIA Exemption Five (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5)), Deliberative Process Privilege, which protects from disclosure those “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.” One of the frequently invoked FOIA Exemption 5 privileges is the deliberative process privilege. To fall within FOIA’s deliberative process privilege, the records must be both pre-decisional and deliberative; the records must precede the adoption of an agency policy and include the opinions, recommendations, or deliberations on a legal or policy matter.
In this instance, the OIA withheld, under the deliberative process privilege, pre-decisional, intra-agency proposals and recommendations regarding the reorganization of the FS, as well as analysis regarding potential facility actions and/or considerations. This information is pre-decisional in that it is antecedent to any final decision. It is also deliberative in that it reflects the evolving back-and-forth process between agency employees that is so integral to the Executive Branch decision-making process; more specifically, the development of potential recommendations made by agency advisors for use in making determinations and policy decisions.
If this pre-decisional, deliberative information were released to the public, USDA and other Executive Branch employees would be much more cautious in their discussions with each other, and in candidly discussing and providing all pertinent information and viewpoints in a timely manner to agency decision-makers. This lack of candor would also seriously impair the Department’s ability to engage in forthright, internal discussions necessary for efficient and proper agency decision-making.
This makes some sense (except perhaps it is too widely applied?) but one of the many tasks of a Planning Director is to agree with OGC about what should be withheld in litigation. Much of that information was pre-decisional, or maybe I don’t understand what pre-decisional means in legal terms.
Personally, I was pretty deferential to OGC, and their view was that we should hardly withhold anything. So it appears to me that people with lawyers get all kinds of info that Jane Q. Public cannot access about how their government works. This doesn’t necessarily seem like justice to me. But maybe I’m wrong and one of our TSW legal folks can explain how this really works or is supposed to work?
If I wanted to get these parts unredacted, I guess there are appeals, and then possibly lawsuits? As you will see, the redacted parts seem fairly uninteresting except to those of us who are interested in organizational stuff (not as potential partisan fodder), which might be the few, and those without the financial means for lawsuits.