Getting to Know the FOIA Advisory Committee: Kevin Bell

Today we present an interview with Kevin Bell, attorney-advisor at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and a member of the 2024-2026 FOIA Advisory Committee. This is part of a series of posts on the Committee, whose members are FOIA experts from inside and outside of government and who are appointed by the Archivist of the United States.

Why did you wish to serve on the FOIA Advisory Committee?

I started working in FOIA as a requester and a plaintiff attorney and quickly fell in love with the world of public records. I spent dozens of hours in court with agencies before realizing the best use of my time was always when I could make a personal connection with a FOIA officer and really understand the agencies' concerns about releasing information and how to find more useful and accessible records. I made several very good friends in FOIA offices even while suing them and have tried to carry that collaborative spirit to my current work in the FERC FOIA office. The FOIA Advisory Committee's emphasis on requester-agency communication seemed like a natural fit and I am honored to represent FERC's interests and those of other smaller and mid-sized agencies who may be left out of larger discussions about the statute.

How do you think this experience will help you in your work?

Every request I see presents new opportunities to learn about another piece of the seemingly boundless jigsaw of records and information even within my own small agency. And just as no two requests are alike, no two agencies nor two requesters' experiences with FOIA are the same. The FOIA toolbox gives you a lot of ways to fit together the interests of requesters, agencies, and society more broadly, and it would be foolish to assume that any one program has the "right way" to fit them together. Getting to learn about the hundreds of different contexts that we have found to ensure the public's right to access public information is really its own reward. As a staff attorney working my requests at street level, I also hope to center the interests of the line professionals dutifully processing thousands of pages a month in conversations about the future of FOIA.

What is FOIA's biggest challenge?

FOIA has many well-known challenges: we're under-resourced, over-scrutinized, and secondary to agency mission. We are directed by the statute, the President, and the Attorney General to disclose as much as possible as often as possible, but every FOIA professional knows disclosing can be far more difficult than withholding due to internal agency pressures. More than either of those challenges though, is the risk of complacency. We get stuck in a mode of doing business because it's the way things have always been done, we use boilerplate language in response letters that nobody can remember the initial reason for, or we protect a class of records because we've set an expectation that they should always be protected. FOIA professionals are smart, experienced, and dedicated to transparency, but they are often not trusted, and do not trust themselves, to make decisions outside their agencies' learned orthodoxy. We should always be asking how we can do more to better promote the goals of FOIA, to ensure an informed citizenry, and to build and maintain trust between government and the people we serve.

Tell us about your favorite FOIA moment.

I don't know that it is a "favorite," but by far my most memorable FOIA moment since joining government involved a very broad request concerning a decision that was years in the making across four component offices of my agency. As it happened the search included one email thread that spanned all four offices, and which had 30-40 different correspondents on it at one time or another. Each of those four offices had side conversations from that thread, staff level contacts made side conversations to arrange logistics, managers forwarded it to others to ask questions, and of course there were attachments. These came to me from all of the custodians as separate PDF portfolios organized alphabetically by name, and in all I had about 750 pages of emails, almost a hundred versions of the same conversation; and all I have for organizing them is stock Adobe Acrobat. The Friday before a holiday weekend I printed it all to hardcopy and took over the largest conference table on the floor, where I spent 5 hours deduplicating and sorting a year of emails into the three dozen unique conversation threads I found in all. Thank goodness nobody happened to walk in, so I didn't have to explain my 25-foot-long collage of correspondence.