STATUS REPORT
Medicaid Services reduced their backlogs by 66%. All of these findings demonstrate considerable success with respect to the Administration's efforts to reduce backlogged FOIA requests.
Improving the FOIA Infrastructure
Agency progress over the last two years reveals itself also in ways not captured by agency FOIA statistics. In particular, many agencies have made substantial improvements to their FOIA infrastructure. This includes increased personnel dedicated to FOIA, better training, various FOIA request processing improvements, and an increase in agency resources dedicated to FOIA. Examples are too many to mention. But to illustrate: HHS's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services nearly doubled the resources it commits to FOIA and radically restructured its methods for processing requests. The Department of Defense offered its components training methods to improve FOIA efficiency. The Department of Education developed procedures to increase awareness within the agency, increased FOIA training, and hired new experienced personnel. The Department of the Interior developed a "FOIA Request Status" interface on its FOIA website allowing requesters to check the status of their pending requests at any time. A branch of the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Patrol processed nearly as many FOIA requests in FY 2010 as it had in the five previous years, and nearly triple the requests processed in FY 2009, and eliminated its FOIA appeals backlog. DHS's Citizenship and Immigration Services added 30 additional employees to its FOIA operations for Fiscal Year 2011. The Department of Justice now accepts FOIA requests by e-mail at all of its components and added nearly ninety full-time employees (FTEs) to handle FOIA matters. The State Department created a "FOIA Rapid Response Team," developed new procedures to handle document referrals, and streamlined its FOIA processing structure. The Treasury Department created a new webpage to facilitate public participation and the IRS created an intranet website to educate IRS employees about their FOIA responsibilities.[1]
In addition to agencies' own initiatives to increase transparency through FOIA, the Administration has also facilitated a stronger FOIA system across the executive branch. In March 2011, the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy (OIP) launched a new website dedicated to the administration of FOIA, called "FOIA.Gov," a site for monitoring FOIA compliance at agencies, spotlighting significant FOIA trends, highlighting major agency FOIA releases, linking to agency FOIA pages, tracking agency FOIA performance, learning about FOIA and how and where to make a FOIA request, and providing additional FOIA resources and support. FOIA.Gov provides public access to all the detailed data contained in Annual FOIA Reports and presents the data graphically in charts and tables summarizing the federal government's FOIA performance, including the number of requests and received and processed by each agency, the disposition of those requests, and time taken to respond. The data can be sorted and compared between agencies and over time using whatever criteria the user chooses. In short, FOIA.Gov provides transparency about transparency.
- ↑ Such structural improvements, and others like them, can be found in a separate set of qualitative annual FOIA reports entitled Chief FOIA Officer Reports, submitted by all agencies with designated Chief FOIA Officers, now available at the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy website and cross-linked at FOIA.Gov.
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