Just seven of 21 federal agencies that received identical Freedom of Information Act requests in January have provided full responses in the months since, despite a legal requirement to respond to such requests within several weeks of receiving them.
The Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters division answered the FOIA request — which sought copies of the files federal FOIA offices themselves use to track requests — in nine days, the fastest of any agency.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which oversees the FOIA Project, fired off a series of requests Jan. 22 and 23 to test the response time and quality of a number of agencies.
Nine agencies — including Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several Department of Justice offices — failed to even acknowledge receiving the requests or said nothing else after getting the initial letter from the clearinghouse.
The federal officials in charge of FOIA compliance across the federal government, the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, merely acknowledged receiving the group’s request in late February but said nothing else thereafter.
Not every federal office stonewalled the FOIA Project’s efforts. The Army had released the requested records by mid-March, while the Fish and Wildlife Service had released documents by late February.
Fish and Wildlife FOIA officials walked the group through the data in a helpful phone call, a report on the FOIA Project’s initiative said. The CIA was the only agency that denied the request outright.
Four others “appear to be making a good faith effort to comply” but haven’t yet provided any meaningful responses, the clearinghouse said.
The FOIA Project’s experiment highlighted a problem that dogs journalists, citizens and outside groups alike when it comes to extracting information from a secretive government.
While agencies are supposed to respond to normal requests within 20 days, most take much longer to get back to requesters.
Legislation that would reform the open records law by codifying the “presumption of openness” former Attorney General Eric Holder once demanded is awaiting a vote in both houses of Congress.
Similar bills failed to make it off the House and Senate floor at the end of the last session.
