As we have mentioned in earlier posts, agencies must post their annual FOIA reports for fiscal year 2022 on or before March 1, 2023. The unreleased reports we are particularly looking forward to seeing are from DHS, which typically receives half or more of all requests governmentwide, DOJ, Veterans Affairs, National Archives, EPA, State, and Treasury. Stay tuned.
Update: On February 27, 2023, DOJ’s Office of Information Policy announced that the posting deadline is March 1, 2023, at 5:00pm.
Department of Justice Sunshine Week 2023 Celebration
Office of Info. Pol’y, Dep’t of Justice, Feb. 27, 2023
We invite you to join the Department of Justice for this year’s kick-off to Sunshine Week in person and online. On Monday, March 13, 2023 from 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, the Department will hold its annual Sunshine Week celebration event in the Great Hall. Established in 2010, this will mark the thirteenth year of the Department’s event recognizing the importance of FOIA for government transparency and celebrating the efforts of those professionals dedicated to the success of their agencies’ FOIA administration. We invite all agency personnel and members of the public to join us for this year’s event.
The event will include the Department’s annual Sunshine Week FOIA Awards Ceremony to honor and celebrate the work of dedicated FOIA professionals across the government.
The event will also be broadcast via livestream at www.justice.gov/live.
We hope that you can join us for this year’s celebration. If you are interested in attending this event in person, you must register through Eventbrite by Friday, March 10 at 4:00 pm. Registration is not required to view the livestream. If you have any questions regarding this event, please contact the Office of Information Policy’s Compliance Team at (202) 514-FOIA (3642).
Click here for more information.
Two more cabinet department, Labor and Transportation, released their fiscal year 2022 FOIA reports ahead of next Wednesday’s posting deadline. Here are the highlights—or lowlights, as the case may be:
Dep’t of Transportation
19,090 requests received and 18,958 processed, a deficit of 132 requests. In 2021., DOT received 15,740 requests and processed 14,754 requests, a deficit of 986 requests.
Request backlog increased 11.4 percent, from 4,811 requests in 2021 to 5,362 in 2022.
Appeal backlog climbed from 161 in 2021 to 222 in 2022, more than a 37 percent increase.
Average overall time to respond to processed perfected requests was 51 days for “simple” requests (with the Secretary’s Office clocking the fastest time at 7.3 days), whereas “complex” requests took an overall average of .285 days. Of note, the Federal Railroad Administration required an average of 182 days to respond to “simple” requests and 243 days for “complex” requests.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported having the 10 oldest pending requests, which ranged from about 5 to 6 years old.
$18.3 million in processing and litigation costs, with a total of $163,779 in requester fees collected.
Dep’t of Labor
14,491 requests received, a 3.4 percent increase from the 13,560 requests received in 2021.
14,335 requests processed, a 2.2. percent increase from the 14,022 requests processed in 2021.
Request backlog increased 17.2 percent, from 1216 requests in 2021 to 1426 requests in 2022.
Appeal backlog fell from 295 in 2021 to 286 in 2022, a 3 percent decrease.
Average time to respond to processed perfected requests was 49 days for “simple” requests and 250 days for “complex” requests.”
$18.3 million in total costs, collecting only $163,779 in processing fees.
The 2022-2024 federal FOIA Advisory Committee will virtually convene its fourth meeting on Thursday, March 2, 2023, at 10 a.m. ET. Meeting materials and registration information are available here. The public is welcome to attend the meeting via NARA’s YouTube channel or WebEx (registration required by Feb. 28).
Atty Pushes Back After DOJ Says DEA Not An Agency
By Sam Reisman, Law360, Feb. 22, 2023
An attorney who brought a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Drug Enforcement Administration asked a federal judge on Tuesday for a judgment declaring that the DEA is, in fact, a government agency, despite what Department of Justice officials have said.
Read more here (subscription).
The U.S. Department of Education has posted its annual FOIA report for fiscal year 2022, and much of the news is not great. Here are the highlights:
2372 requests received and 1462 processed, a deficit of 910 requests. In FY 2021, the Department processed more requests (2292) than it received (2151) .
The request backlog soared from 697 in FY 2021 to 1557 in FY 2022, a staggering 123 percent increase.
Total processing costs dropped from $9.5 million to $8.6 million, a 9.4 percent decrease.
Overall agency response time for all processed perfected requests was an average of 5.6 days for “simple” requests and 182 days for “complex” requests.
$19,515 of processing fees were collected, which is less than one quarter of one percent of the Department’s processing costs.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released its fiscal year 2022 annual FOIA report. Here are the highlights:
1819 requests received, an increase of 4.9 percent from FY 2021 (1734 requests)
2031 requests processed, a decrease of 2.9 percent from FY 2021 (2093 requests)
Backlogged requests stood at 626 requests at the end of FY 2022, a reduction of 22.5 percent from FY 2021 (808 requests).
The average response time for all processed perfected requests was 80.17 days for “simple” requests and 276 days for “complex” requests.
Processing costs and litigation costs amounted to $7.17 million. The Department reported only $100,535 in total costs for FY 2021, which undoubtedly was an error.
Fees collected for processing requests amounted to $12,372, less than one-fifth of one percent of its total costs.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has published its fiscal year 2022 annual FOIA report. Here are the highlights.
38,462 requests received, a 15 percent increase from FY 2021, when 33,158 requests were received.
37,241 requests processed, a 13.5 percent increase from FY 2021, when the agency processed 32,952 requests.
Backlogged requests increased 13.2 percent, from 9,955 in FY 2021 to 11,320 in FY 2022.
Processing and litigation costs were $29 million and $4.5 million, respectively, a 28 percent increase from FY 2021 ($26 million total costs).
Processing fees of $717,119 were collected, or 2,4 percent of total costs, with FDA collecting the highest amount at $447,791.
Rubio Reintroduces 13 Bills
Office of Sen. Marco Rubio, Feb. 17, 2023
FOIA Fix Act. First introduced in June 2022, this legislation would fix an existing loophole in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that allows foreign individuals, entities, and governments to submit FOIA requests.
Read more here.
Appeals Court Tells ICE Its Counterintuitive Tracking System Doesn’t Justify Jerking Around FOIA Requesters
from the stop-being-deliberately-obtuse dept
By Tim Cushing, Techdirt, Feb. 16, 2023
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), like nearly every government agency, doesn’t care much for FOIA requests or requesters. It generally takes a lawsuit to force the agency to comply with its FOIA obligations. And its day-to-day handling of FOIA requests is so uninspired, it couldn’t even come up with a reason to deny Mike Masnick’s fee waiver request.
Based on my review of your March 4, 2014 letter and for the reasons stated herein, I have determined that your fee waiver request is deficient because .
It will have to be (slightly) more responsive now. The Second Circuit Appeals Court has reversed a pretty terrible decision by the lower court in an FOIA lawsuit brought by the ACLU. The Appeals Court decision [PDF] opens up with the court’s attempt to explain ICE’s needlessly-convoluted incident tracking system.
Read more here.