JMD US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Portal

The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 required OMB in coordination with the Attorney General to develop a consolidated portal where a FOIA requester could submit a request to any agency from a single site. 5 U.S.C. 552(m) (2018). This portal was deployed as part of DOJ's FOIA.gov website. This investment fulfills this statutory mandate and offers several benefits and cost savings the public and agencies.

FOIA.gov contains centralized descriptive information about each agency, along with links to agency FOIA websites and other reference material, which make it easier for requesters to find the correct agency to which they should submit their request. Agencies are also able to update their own contact and other general information, making these changes more efficient and improving the timeliness and accuracy of the data for the public. Additionally, FOIA.gov contains largely standardized request submission forms, tailored to each agency to comply with their FOIA regulations, that streamline the process for requesters to submit properly formulated requests. These benefits to the public also benefit the agencies by reducing the likelihood that agencies will receive misdirected and incomplete requests, thereby lessening the agency burden in responding to such requests and allowing them to move more quickly to substantive processing.

FOIA.gov also provide every agency with a public-facing portal to receive requests electronically. While many agencies have their own public facing portals, many agencies do not. Agencies achieve cost savings because they do not need to develop their own portal in order to receive requests electronically. Vendors frequently charge extra to have public facing portions of their tracking systems. Additionally, FOIA.gov's API integration result in cost savings by allowing agencies to ingest into their own tracking systems requests submitted through FOIA.gov, rather than being received by email and requiring manual input.

Agencies and DOJ have also achieved cost savings on Annual FOIA Reporting. The FOIA requires agencies to report to the Attorney General each year on a number of FOIA metrics. 5 U.S.C. 552(e). Agencies are now able to load, validate, revise, and submit their data to DOJ using FOIA.gov. FOIA.gov contains automated validation logic checks that improve the quality of agency data upon submission and that streamline DOJ's review process. FOIA.gov also reduces the time involved in publishing the final data, which previously required the data files to be loaded separately into the site, but now can be published in bulk with a few clicks.

Continued funding of this investment will ensure that the public has a centralized method for submitting FOIA requests, in line with the statutory requirements, and that agencies continue to benefit from the efficiencies gained in receiving and processing FOIA requests, as well as fulfilling statutory reporting obligations.

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