Fiscal Year 2017 FOIA Data Available Now on FOIA.gov

The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy is pleased to announce that all 116 agencies subject to the FOIA have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 Annual FOIA Reports and these reports are now available on FOIA.gov.

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 uploaded onto 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.

OIP is currently in the process of compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2017, however, from the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can already see that demand for FOIA continued to increase in FY 2017 with a record high 818,271 incoming requests. Faced with this unprecedented demand, agencies for the first time processed over 800,000 requests while maintaining a release rate of over 91%. Additionally, 85 agencies reported having a backlog of fewer than 100 requests, with 35 of those agencies reporting no backlog at all.

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

Please continue reading FOIA Post for additional Sunshine Week 2018 announcements as well as for the release of the Department’s Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports in the coming weeks.