New Annual FOIA Report Data Page and Agencies' Fiscal Year 2020 Data Now Available on FOIA.gov

The Office for Information Policy (OIP) is pleased to announce that it has recently upgraded the Annual Report Data page on FOIA.gov.  Since its initial launch in 2011, FOIA.gov has served as a dashboard of all agencies' Annual FOIA Report data.  Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report to the Attorney General detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, and the time taken to process them.  The data from all of these Annual FOIA Reports is then published on FOIA.gov, the Justice Department’s government-wide FOIA resource, so that the public can easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.

The new data tool has a user-friendly design that enables the public to search individual agency or component data, compare data from several agencies, and gather government-wide data.  The revamped tool combines the previously available Basic and Advanced Report features into a single interface that is more intuitive and mobile-friendly.  Users can search across all data points in the agency Annual FOIA Reports since Fiscal Year 2008.  The results can be viewed on the page or downloaded as a .csv file.  OIP is actively working on additional enhancement to FOIA.gov's data page capabilities.     

OIP is also pleased to announce that all 119 agencies subject to the FOIA have finalized their Fiscal Year 2020 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Justice Department has uploaded all of the data from these reports onto FOIA.gov. 

OIP is currently in the process of compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2020. However, from the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can already see that demand for FOIA continued to remain high in FY 2020 with 790,772 incoming requests.  In the face of this demand, agencies processed 772,952 requests. 

We encourage everyone to visit FOIA.gov to view each agency's data as well as government-wide FOIA statistics.