The week of March 17 marks the third annual national Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan campaign to promote openness in government and access to public records.

The core of Sunshine Week, led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is a massive coordinated media blitz around the country and across print, radio, and television to highlight the importance of government transparency and ongoing problems with the issue. As the annual event has become more established, many outside the journalism community have scheduled open government events to coincide with the week, including elected officials, public interest groups, schools, civic groups, and many others.

Sunshine Week is scheduled in March each year to coincide with James Madison's birthday, who is celebrated as a strong proponent of open government among the Founding Fathers. This year's Sunshine Week includes several prominent events and releases.

• Sunshine Week released a survey that found that 74 percent of those polled view the federal government as very or somewhat secretive, which is a significant increase from the 62 percent who responded that way in a similar survey two years ago. The survey also revealed that nearly nine in ten say it's important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government when deciding who to vote for in the upcoming elections.


• The National Security Archive released a new survey of FOIA implementation throughout the federal government, which found that despite a 2005 Executive Order to improve FOIA performance, many agencies still have large backlogs of unanswered requests for information. The report titled Mixed Signals, Mixed Results: How President Bush's Executive Order on FOIA Failed to Deliver concluded that the lack of any enforcement mechanism or increased funding associated with President Bush's order directly resulted in the lack of significant progress on FOIA performance.


• In anticipation of Sunshine Week, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jon Cornyn (R-TX) introduced new FOIA legislation on March 12 called the OPEN FOIA Act. The bill would require Congress to explicitly and clearly state its intention to provide for statutory exemptions to FOIA in new legislative proposals. The Senate unanimously passed similar legislation in the last Congress. Leahy and Cornyn are seeking to build on the passage of their OPEN Government Act, which the president signed into law in December 2007, making the first improvements to FOIA in more than a decade.


• The Associated Press (AP) began a two-part story reviewing laws that address open government and restrictions to public access in all 50 states. The first installment concluded that many states have been increasingly closing down public access to government information since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The AP analysis of 1,023 new laws dealing with public access to government information found that more than 60 percent closed access, just over a quarter increased access, while the rest had a neutral effect.


• On March 17, the Collaboration on Government Secrecy, an educational project on the study of government secrecy at American University's Washington College of Law, held its first annual Freedom of Information Day Celebration with an all-day conference. The program consisted of a series of panels, with both public officials and public interest groups discussing important current issues in the freedom of information, international transparency, and government secrecy arenas, such as the use of state secrets and the explosion of Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) information restrictions.


• OpenTheGovernment.org will be hosting a Sunshine Week webcast on March 19 consisting of two panels discussing government openness, executive branch secrecy, and places to get hard-to-find government information. The event, "Government Secrecy: Censoring Your Right to Know", will take place at the National Press Club and will be webcast online through participating host organizations.


• OMB Watch will be releasing a report on the results of a survey on the top open government questions people want presidential and congressional candidates to answer before the elections. Over the course of several weeks, OMB Watch conducted an open survey on 12 government transparency questions covering a range of topics. The report will discuss the results from more than 2,000 respondents who participated. The report is a part of OMB Watch's 21st Century Right to Know Project, which is seeking to collaboratively develop recommendations for the next administration and Congress to improve government transparency and bring the government's policies and practices into the next century.

For a more complete tally of Sunshine Week events around the country, see the organization's running list.