As I know nothing about FOIA this is an interesting series, thank you! I have a couple of 101 questions that were not answered by a quick Google search to provide context for the backlog. Does every request require human review and cross referencing that could potentially result in filing a reverse FOIA case or redacted information? Are most documents not digital and thus need to be retrieved manually from a filing system, copied and then mailed or held for pick up?
Those are good questions, and the short answer is “it depends.”
Every year NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration) reports on the record management processes throughout the federal world. Long story long, agencies are all over the place.
For example, I recall that the American Battle Monuments Commission didn’t have any FOIA Officer at all. They didn’t have any digital systems for responding to requests. FOIA requests had to be mailed to an office in Paris.
(The Monuments Commission is an agency responsible for a lot foreign battle monuments abroad, especially in Europe, like WWII’s Utah Beach etc)
They were just an old time Commission with a lot of old vets.
Similar issues plague the State Department and to an extent NARA itself. Diplomatic cable communications, for example, either at State or archived with NARA is not digitized for a whole host of reasons.
And so on and so on. So much depends on what agency.
Thanks for the reply! This is great context. The AI pilot still sounds promising, but now I understand that it would take a lot more than an essentially updated search tool to dig out of the backlog across agencies.
This is aggravating, and proof that a lot of legislation is passed for giggles and grins; apparently the Open Government Act did not and does not require each Agency to be adequately staffed or resourced, but it damn well should have: The simple reason for that is that there is a mismatch between the growing demand from individual FOIA requesters and agency resources.
"Government Accountability Office" sounds like a misnomer. With no penalties for aged FOIA requests and no enforcement there can be no accountability. The GAO is toothless if all it does is report on failure and backlogs year after year. Perhaps the resources used to fund the GAO could be diverted to...oh...I don't know...addressing the FOIA backlog? Just saying.
Speaking of accountability, one of my favorite fun facts is that since GAO is technically a part of the legislative branch, and Congress has exempted itself from FOIA when they drafted the law, the GAO doesn’t have to respond to requests.
Enjoyed this piece. I was confused, however, by the numbers reported as the "highest average requests received" by agency since 2014. For example, DHS received about 3.4 million requests between 2014 and 2022, according to FOIA.gov. By my calculation, that's an annual average of about 377k, not 73,759. Additionally, DOJ received about 757k request in that same nine-year period, which is an average of about 84k requests per year, not 25,787.
You're absolutely right, I got my numbers for outstanding requests at the end of the year and the average amount received mixed up. At one point I had both sets of numbers, deleted one, but kept the wrong descriptive paragraph.
Thanks for writing this! It was really interesting -- I'm a total nerd for this stuff. As a side note, I think you can actually submit a FOIA request for the oldest pending requests at each agency (FOIA requests themselves are part of the public record). It would definitely be interesting to see what information is being held back the longest.
As I know nothing about FOIA this is an interesting series, thank you! I have a couple of 101 questions that were not answered by a quick Google search to provide context for the backlog. Does every request require human review and cross referencing that could potentially result in filing a reverse FOIA case or redacted information? Are most documents not digital and thus need to be retrieved manually from a filing system, copied and then mailed or held for pick up?
Those are good questions, and the short answer is “it depends.”
Every year NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration) reports on the record management processes throughout the federal world. Long story long, agencies are all over the place.
For example, I recall that the American Battle Monuments Commission didn’t have any FOIA Officer at all. They didn’t have any digital systems for responding to requests. FOIA requests had to be mailed to an office in Paris.
(The Monuments Commission is an agency responsible for a lot foreign battle monuments abroad, especially in Europe, like WWII’s Utah Beach etc)
They were just an old time Commission with a lot of old vets.
Similar issues plague the State Department and to an extent NARA itself. Diplomatic cable communications, for example, either at State or archived with NARA is not digitized for a whole host of reasons.
And so on and so on. So much depends on what agency.
Thanks for the reply! This is great context. The AI pilot still sounds promising, but now I understand that it would take a lot more than an essentially updated search tool to dig out of the backlog across agencies.
This is aggravating, and proof that a lot of legislation is passed for giggles and grins; apparently the Open Government Act did not and does not require each Agency to be adequately staffed or resourced, but it damn well should have: The simple reason for that is that there is a mismatch between the growing demand from individual FOIA requesters and agency resources.
"Government Accountability Office" sounds like a misnomer. With no penalties for aged FOIA requests and no enforcement there can be no accountability. The GAO is toothless if all it does is report on failure and backlogs year after year. Perhaps the resources used to fund the GAO could be diverted to...oh...I don't know...addressing the FOIA backlog? Just saying.
Speaking of accountability, one of my favorite fun facts is that since GAO is technically a part of the legislative branch, and Congress has exempted itself from FOIA when they drafted the law, the GAO doesn’t have to respond to requests.
I trust their reasons for the exemption are clearly set out and justifiable.
Enjoyed this piece. I was confused, however, by the numbers reported as the "highest average requests received" by agency since 2014. For example, DHS received about 3.4 million requests between 2014 and 2022, according to FOIA.gov. By my calculation, that's an annual average of about 377k, not 73,759. Additionally, DOJ received about 757k request in that same nine-year period, which is an average of about 84k requests per year, not 25,787.
You're absolutely right, I got my numbers for outstanding requests at the end of the year and the average amount received mixed up. At one point I had both sets of numbers, deleted one, but kept the wrong descriptive paragraph.
Now, both sets of numbers are back.
Thank you for pointing it out!
Thanks for writing this! It was really interesting -- I'm a total nerd for this stuff. As a side note, I think you can actually submit a FOIA request for the oldest pending requests at each agency (FOIA requests themselves are part of the public record). It would definitely be interesting to see what information is being held back the longest.