as much, if not more, in 1981, when Government is shrinking, as it was in 1966 when Government was ballooning.

Budget-cutting is bringing swift and remarkable changes in governmental operations, and the temptation for bureaucrats to mask the real impact of those changes is only likely to grow. Certainly, Americans need now the assurances in the FOIA that will enable them to learn how constricted or contained this new Government will affect their lives.

The approach of your proposals in S. 1730, Mr. Chairman, contrasts starkly with the Justice Department's. The Reagan administration has presented your subcommittee with proposals that truncate the act. They_methodically curtail the opportunities for the public to examine Government business.

Secrecy is second nature to Government, as this administration must know, but the Justice Department has the audacity to rationalize this proposal by claiming before this subcommittee last October that the FOIA is overrated as an instrument that generates disclosures about bureaucratic malfeasances. This is wrong, and the Justice Department knows that it is wrong.

Press organizations at this table have told the Justice Department repeatedly that the press uses the FOIA constantly and in diverse, often imaginative, ways that result in giving the public information that would not necessarily surface otherwise. We have also told the Justice Department that the usefulness of the FOIA to the public might be improved by certain modifications.

We can understand why the Justice Department has decided not to be responsive to our suggestions for improving the usefulness of the act, but we cannot understand why they pretend not even to have heard the information we have given them about the usage and the effectiveness of the act.

Apparently the Justice Department believes that if it says loudly enough and frequently enough that the FOI Act is of no use to the public through the press but is a big bother to Government agencies, then someone on Capitol Hill might feel less guilty about dismantling it.

We do not have to tell you, Mr. Chairman, about how the press uses the act daily to inform the public. You will recall that Ted Capener, vice president of news for Bonneville Broadcasting Corp., described to your subcommittee last July no less than six major news stories in Utah that depended on the FOI Act for authenticity and strength, including a prize-winning TV documentary on nursing home neglect and several news stories on how radioactive fallout and waste were affecting the people of Utah. Your hearing record is replete with other documented evidence of how the FOIA, imperfect as it is, has given Americans a window to overlook Government.

But what are we to say, Mr. Chairman, when the thrust and chief justification for the administration's proposal relies so heavily on the creation and careful cultivation of myths-the myth that the press does not use the act, the myth that it its efficacy is overrated, the myth that the FBI must have wholesale changes in the act because informants are being deterred from cooperating with the Bureau out of fear that their identities will be disclosed under the FOIA?

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The longer we listen to the FBI about the need for changes in the law enforcement exemption, the more we are persuaded that the Bureau is simply crying wolf. Every time the Bureau tries to prove that law enforcement has been damaged by the FOI Act, the claim collapses.

We have heard no evidence that any informant has been harmed by the release of records under the FOIA, not even by the release of records that should not have been released but were due to administrative ineptitude.

Instead of reassuring its sources that the FOIA works and that confidential information is not released, the FBI and the Justice Department do the opposite. Then, having stirred up fears, they beseech this subcommittee to quell those fears by cutting off virtually all public information of FBI operations.

As an example of the Bureau's fear campaign, consider a recent editorial of October 29, 1981, in the Des Moines Register. The editorial told of Gary Bowdach, an admitted organized crime figure, who told a Senate committee that information obtained through an FOIA request allowed him to identify an informant by decoding scattered letters and blacked-out spaces in the material.

Bowdach speculated that his cagey handiwork had resulted in the informant being killed. Pouncing on this testimony, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Rose cited this case to express the Justice Department's "astonishment at the press' insistence that the FOIA is not being used to the detriment of law enforcement." Only under questioning did Mr. Rose admit that Bowdach and his fellow hoodlums had killed the wrong person. They had not realized that the records referred to the informant by code number, not by

name.

Perhaps Judge Webster can find some fresh evidence to offer this subcommittee this afternoon. He and the Bureau have been trying to come up with some for more than 2 years now. In fact, the Society of Professional Journalists has reason to understand that the Bureau may be devoting considerable resources to the development of classified promotional material that can be used to persuade Capitol Hill how an informant's identity may be ascertainable under the FOIA.

It strikes us that this is a somewhat questionable use of the FBI's funds, a misuse of its substantial talents. Accordingly, the society intends tomorrow to make a formal request under the FOI Act to ascertain the nature and extent of any such promotional materials. Apparently, to borrow a phrase from Madison Avenue, the FBI makes myths the old-fashioned way; it produces them.

This morning, Mr. Chairman, my friend and colleague Katherine Graham, chairman and president of the ANPA, addressed the national convention of the Society of Professional Journalists, and her subject was our subject.

I will close and turn the microphone over to Charles Rowe by quoting Katherine Graham's conclusions. She said:

Certainly, if the Freedom of Information Act was indeed being seriously misused, I think as citizens we would be concerned with finding remedies. But in fact, the statute was drafted very precisely to protect fully these legitimate interests, and I think the burden lies on those seeking to change it to demonstrate how those perceptions have failed. For the most part, I have to conclude that the problems that

have been ascribed to the Freedom of Information Act are greatly overdrawn, and the proposed solutions for the most part seem as unneeded as they are undesirable. The case for a sweeping overhaul of the act simply has not been made.

STATEMENT OF CHARLES ROWE, REPRESENTING THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION

Mr. Rowe. Mr. Chairman, I welcome this opportunity to testify today on the Freedom of Information Act.

My name is Charles Rowe. I am editor of the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. I represent here today both the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the National Newspaper Association. Together these trade associations represent the vast majority of daily and weekly newspapers in the United States.

In the interests of time, I will summarize my remarks this afternoon and request that our full statement be submitted for the record.

Senator HATCH. Without objection, we will put your full statement in the record.

Mr. Rowe. Mr. Chairman, the newspapers of our country are deeply troubled by the growing efforts to significantly amend the FOIA. This is evident from the panel which is gathered before you here today.

Also, as Ms. Otto mentioned, Katherine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post and chairman of ANPA, in her speech today before the Sigma Delta Chi convention, issued a rallying cry for all to work together to oppose any radical amendment of this law. With your permission, I would like to submit a copy of her speech for the record.

The vote is unanimous. The mandate of the FOIA that the business of Government is the people's business must be preserved. ANPA and NNA believe that passage of either your bill, S. 1730, or the administration's proposal, S. 1751, in their present forms would undercut the principles of openness which are the bedrock of the present law.

We do find most provisions of your bill preferable to those contained in S. 1751. We would also like to commend you for your efforts to narrow significantly provisions in S. 1730 over those introduced earlier. However, we could not support either bill without substantial modification.

We do not mean to imply that we are absolutely opposed to any changes in the FOIA. In fact, we believe there are several areas where the act could be improved to make it more effective.

For example, we strongly support the provision in S. 1730 which would require the Office of Management and Budget to develop uniform fee schedules for all Government agencies. This is a concept we supported during the last Congress, and we continue to believe that this uniformity would result in a law which is easier for the public to use and easier for the Government to administer.

Both bills would expand current law to allow agencies to charge not only for search and duplication of efforts but also for agency reviews. While we oppose this expansion, we believe it is impera

tive that if this is enacted the public interest waiver provisions of the current law must likewise be strengthened and made mandatory.

In addition, we believe that the GAO should be required to conduct a careful study of FOIA processing and develop meaningful criteria on what constitute reasonable review costs. We also support the approach of S. 1730 to maintain the existing time limits of 10 days for an initial response by an agency and 20 days for an appeal.

However, we believe that several of the definitions of "unusual circumstances" included in S. 1730 should be narrowed. These definitions, such as that which would allow delay for a "major, abrupt and unexpected increase" in the number of requests received by an agency, we feel, are overly broad. We do not believe that they would serve as helpful guidance to an agency but could too easily be used as delay tactics for legitimate information requests.

We also believe that procedures should be built into the current law to allow notification to companies which submit information to the Government that that information is the subject of an FOIA request. This is only fair. We strongly oppose, however, provisions in S. 1751 which would allow submitters to unilaterally stamp all documents "confidential" upon submission.

We also strongly oppose provisions in S. 1730 which would allow for informal ex parte hearings when a submitter opposes release of information. These hearings would only serve to delay the process and would add a substantial administrative burden to an act that is too frequently labeled "burdensome."

ANPA and NNA also believe that the reverse FOIA time limits recommended in both bills are far too long. We believe that the entire reverse FOIA procedure should not exceed 30 working days from the date of the initial request. This is ample time for all affected parties to have their say and make their decision.

We in no way support any change in the substantive language of the (b)(4) trade secrets exemption. While we agree that it is consistent with basic notions of fairness to notify a submitter when requests are made for information it supplied to Government, we do not believe that a case has been made for greatly expanding the classes of information protected by this exemption.

Several studies back up our position. A 1978 report on exemption 4 by the House Committee on Government Operations determined that, "Disclosure of business data has caused some administrative difficulty, but the committee has found no major abuses."

A more recent study confirmed the House committee's findings. While this later study found that there is "little evidence to suggest that exemption 4 of the FOIA is working poorly," it did conclude that perceptions that the exemption was not working well could be cleared up by establishing reverse FOIA procedures.

I would like to take just a couple of minutes, Mr. Chairman, to describe how my own newspaper is currently making use of the FOIA. It is not a success story yet. Rather, it is a story of months of frustration. Yet, without the FOIA as a helpful tool for a reporter, I doubt if we would have made the modest progress that has been made so far.

The story begins in January of this year, 10 months ago. I assigned a reporter to contact the Richmond, Va., regional office of the Small Business Administration to get information on SBA loans to businesses in our area, including those loans where defaults had occurred. I made this assignment after receiving a tip which told me that a look at these records might provide some information concerning possible abuses of SBA loans.

We were first put off by an SBA regional official who said he was getting ready to go on 10 days' leave and he would talk with our reporter when the leave was over. OK. We got together with him. Although the information we wanted was available in the Richmond SBA office, we were told we could not get it there because that office contended it did not have the personnel to dig out the data. We said we would look and dig it out. No, they would not permit us to look at the files because they said we might see protected information.

So the scene shifted to Washington where we filed an FOIA request for the information that we wanted. Finally, in June, 5 months after we began seeking the information, we were given a list of loans that had been approved in our area but were denied a list of loans that were in default. So we renewed our FOIA request for the default information.

In the meantime, I learned that the Miami Herald had won a Federal district court case against the SBA, and the court had ruled that default loan information should be provided by the SBA to that newspaper. SBA appealed the Miami case to the circuit court of appeals and cited the pendency of that appeal as the reason they would not follow the district court decision with regard to our request.

Still later I learned that the SBA had in fact provided the Miami Herald with a list of default loans in one category, and so I asked the SBA why we could not get similar information.

In September, 9 months after this process began, the SBA finally conceded that they might be able to provide us with the Miami Herald-type information. We still do not have that information, and last week, 10 months after the initial request, we were told it would probably take another 4 weeks before it could be provided. If the SBA has been this dilatory when we were using the FOIA and talking with them of possible litigation, I shudder to think what their attitude would have been without the FOIA or with an FOIA that was weaker than the present law.

My paper is small, and we have a limited reportorial staff. When we hit roadblocks in seeking information from the Federal Government, we cannot often devote endless hours of staff time to an effort to dig out that information. We need the FOIA and a strong FOIA to help us in our struggles with the Federal bureaucracy.

In short, Mr. Chairman, the newspapers of this country believe that the Freedom of Information Act is a good statute, carefully written, and for the most part, well enforced. It reflects more than a balancing of significant interests. It embodies a national commitment to the need for Government to operate in full view of the public.

FOIA sends its signal around the world as well that a fundamental pillar of democracy is the ability to function openly. These prin