We are conducting research to write recommendations for the site referenced in last summer’s FOIA Improvement Act that “allows a member of the public to submit a request for records… to any agency from a single website.” At a minimum, our work requires researching how to send requests to agencies in a way that fits into their existing processes and doesn’t add a delay or otherwise burden the process.
We’re especially interested in understanding how this can be done in a way that improves the system as a whole.
- Initial research that is broader than what we plan to work on
- Imperfect and incomplete: please let us know what we’re missing!
- Qualitative: this research is used to find patterns to further examine and test
- Finished or complete
- A list of everything we plan to fix or address
- Quantitative, statistically significant, or generalizable
We are sharing our initial research because we know it is imperfect and would greatly appreciate your feedback. Please open an issue in GitHub or email us at [email protected], and keep our contributing policy in mind.
The goal of our research is to inform hypotheses that address the following:
- How might we create a platform that improves the FOIA requesting experience?
- How might we make it easier for agencies to respond to requests?
- How might various FOIA requesters benefit from a national FOIA platform?
- How might agency processes be improved or enhanced by a national FOIA platform?
- A sample of federal agencies that respond to FOIA requests
- Requesters
- Vendors
Government FOIA teams are under-resourced for the level of effort required to respond to FOIA requests in a timely manner. Additionally, new or infrequent requesters tend to significantly underestimate the level of resources required for fulfilling requests, especially broad ones.
- A lack of resources makes it difficult to fulfill requests in a timely manner, especially for requests that require coordination across bureaucracies or expertise for finding records and redacting them.
- Publishing documents publicly online can require significant additional time and resources, often due to hurdles related to coordinating with separate IT departments and ensuring Section 508 compliance.
- Current events can cause a spike in requests. These are often extremely broad, resource-intensive requests. For the agencies we spoke with, these requests usually constitute only about 5-10% of all requests, but they take up a majority of time and resources.
- Some requesters intentionally file extremely broad, vague, or nonspecific FOIA requests (e.g., “anything and everything related to…”), but this makes finding responsive documents difficult.
- When faced with broad requests, agencies often attempt to negotiate more finely scoped requests that require less resources, which can occasionally result in an antagonistic relationship between requesters and FOIA offices. These problematic requesters are rare, but often account for a majority of time and resources.
- Of the agencies we spoke with, most are unhappy with the software tools needed to support FOIA requests.
- Receiving requests in paper format requires additional manual work.
- Some agencies have frequent requesters who account for a significant proportion of their time and resources.
- Privacy is a concern for moving to a fully electronic submission-based system for identification verification (currently done with "wet signature," i.e. pen and paper) and document encryption (often done with encrypted files on CDs).
- Of the agencies we spoke with, usually less than 5% of requests were for information that was already publicly available.
- The type, volume, and complexity of requests that each agency tends to receive are often as variable as agency missions. In addition, some agencies primarily receive requests almost exclusively for personal files.
Return to the research summary update