Federal 100: Helen Goff Foster
Name: Helen Goff Foster
Title: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Privacy, Transparency and Records
Agency: Treasury Department
Transparency czar. Foster's influence on government transparency extends beyond the Treasury Department. Her leadership was critical in developing the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace and the president's legislative cybersecurity proposals, and her 2014 efforts arguably prompted the first reference to information privacy in a State of the Union address since 1981. At her home agency, she has overhauled information compliance programs and reduced pending Freedom of Information Act requests by 40 percent. She also initiated a digitization program that reduced storage costs for paper records by more than 15 percent.