Ensuring Agency Compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

HEARING PURPOSE:

• This hearing will examine the processes agencies use to meet FOIA’s legal requirements and explore barriers to effective and efficient compliance from the FOIA officer’s perspective.
• The Committee will hear from the witnesses tasked with implementing FOIA at several agencies that need to improve response efforts.

HEARING BACKGROUND:

• Enacted in 1966, FOIAis a transparency tool for individuals to ensure government accountability. Under FOIA, requesters may ask federal agencies for information about any matter. An agency has 20 business days to respond to a request (and an additional ten days for unusual circumstances) and must release non-exempt records to the requester.
• In Fiscal Year 2014, the federal government received 714,231 FOIA requests. The backlog of FOIA cases that had not been processed within the statutory time limit increased by 67 percent to a total of 159,741 backlogged cases.