Many agencies have updated their public records systems in order to ensure their systems work with FOIA.gov, a requirement established in a 2019 White House memo, according to a recent FedScoop review of 2023 Chief FOIA Officer reports and subsequent inquiries sent to agencies. But others are still running into technical and logistical issues.

The Secret Service and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have yet to meet these requirements, according to Wyn Hornbuckle, deputy director of the Department of Justice’s public affairs office. The DOJ, which tracks compliance with interoperability requirements, is also still catching up on the requirement. The agency says that all of its components should become interoperable within a matter of weeks. 

Communications staff for the National Archives and Records Administration told FedScoop that the agency is still working toward its goal of making its online portal for accepting veteran records requests interoperable with FOIA.gov. They added that in regard to requests for other records: “NARA continues to assess its options implementing a FOIA tracking and review platform and is mindful of the need for any system to interact with foia.gov.”

The Federal Aviation Administration told FedScoop only that it’s working on its FOIA case management system and that the agency will move to production “once testing is completed.” Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General’s public records request system has not achieved interoperability and the agency is still working on meeting requirements with its contractor. 

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General told FedScoop that it’s “taken significant steps to resolve technical issues that have prevented us from receiving requests from the National FOIA Portal FOIA.gov,” but that it expects to receive requests through the system in the coming months.  

Notably, meeting these interoperability requirements can be relatively easy, according to Michael Morisy, the founder and executive director of MuckRock, which offers a platform for filing public records requests. 

“A lot of times they’re … going to be working with a vendor that’s done this a number of times,” Morisy told FedScoop. “Some of the smaller shops are surprisingly nimble in being able to build their own tooling.” 

The White House memo, M-19-10, was required under the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and stipulated that agencies could become interoperable with the portal in two ways: incorporating an API or accepting FOIA requests through an email inbox. Unless granted an exception by OMB and DOJ, agencies using automated case management systems were required to use the first approach, while agencies with “non-automated” FOIA systems were supposed to take the second approach. As part of these requirements, agencies were also required to maintain an account on FOIA.gov

The memo established a timeline, too. Chief Financial Officers Act agencies were supposed to submit plans for achieving interoperability by May 2019. Agencies taking the structured email approach were supposed to set one up “as soon as technically feasible,” while agencies with automated case management systems were supposed to set up the API interoperability within two fiscal years. “No exceptions will be granted beyond August 2023,” the memo noted. 

“Foia.gov is a centralized portal,” noted Sue Seeley, a managing director at Deloitte who focuses on public records request technology. “Agencies have required interoperability between whatever system they use and that portal.”

Right now, it’s not clear how well the DOJ has been tracking compliance. The DOJ appeared to update its website for tracking 2023 Chief FOIA Officer reports in response to questions FedScoop scoop sent about the missing reports to them and several agencies, according to a website tracking tool that FedScoop set up. 

“The Department’s Office of Information Policy has been closely tracking each agency’s progress on interoperability and working directly with them to support compliance,” Hornbuckle, from the DOJ public affairs office, told FedScoop. “There currently are no exceptions for any agency,” he added. 

While agencies had been asked about their progress on achieving interoperability, Hornbuckle said, last year was the first time agencies were asked to publicly report on their compliance with the memo. Agencies with more than 50 FOIA requests in the prior fiscal year are required to produce a Chief FOIA Officer report. 

Several agencies indicated they’ve made some progress since their reports were published. For example, 97 percent of Defense Department components comply with the interoperability standards, while the remaining components are expected to achieve “100% compliance” by the end of this month, according to Sue Gough, a spokesperson for the department. 

In its 2023 report, HUD said it was not compliant, but the agency told FedScoop that it has since achieved interoperability. Similarly, the Central Intelligence Agency — which did not respond to a request for comment – reported that it was not compliant in its 2023 report. The agency has now met interoperability goals, the DOJ told FedScoop. 

For other agencies, it’s not entirely clear where they stand. Amtrak reported in its 2023 report that only its headquarters was interoperable and added that its OIG office tracked FOIAs via Microsoft Excel. The agency did not respond to several requests for comment.  

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which said that it had been granted an exception and secured a contract to meet the interoperability requirement in its report, told FedScoop it has no further comment at this time.

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The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 required that OMB and the Department of Justice simplify the Freedom of Information Act landscape by creating a central portal that anyone can visit to submit a request to any agency. Today, that portal lives at FOIA.gov.

But not all agencies have established interoperability between FOIA.gov and the agency’s existing FOIA platform. Deputy Director for Management Margaret Weichert sent a memo Tuesday setting a deadline of May 10, 2019, for agencies to submit a full strategy for how their in-house platform, which can range from a simple spreadsheet to an automated case management system depending on agency need and resources, will play nice with FOIA.gov.

Not all agencies are linked to FOIA.gov. (Screenshot)

The memo lays out the two ways agencies can achieve interoperability — either by accepting requests through a structured application programming interface (API) or by accepting the request as a formal, structured e-mail to a designated email inbox. If an agency has an automated FOIA system, OMB says, it needs to go the API route unless otherwise agreed.

In any case, though, agencies have until May 10 to let OMB know which option they will pursue, how long it will take and what it will cost. From there, deadlines are a little less clear but the memo states that email interoperability should be in place “as soon as technically feasible,” and API interoperability available within two fiscal years.

In addition to ensuring this interoperability, agencies have a few other responsibilities that have to do with the FOIA.gov portal. Per the memo, agencies are required to maintain an account on FOIA.gov and keep agency contact information up to date there. Agencies are also required to “maintain a customized FOIA request form tailored to its own FOIA regulations.”

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Led by Cause of Action Institute and the Sunlight Foundation, the group sent a letter and a request for rulemaking to Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and Department of Justice Office of Information Policy Director Melanie Ann Pustay asking the agencies to finalize the “Release to One, Release to All” rule.

The road to this point began in July 2015 when, for the 49th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, the DOJ’s OIP launched a “proactive release” pilot program. During the six-month program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Environmental Protection Agency — as well as components or offices of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice and the National Archives and Records Administration — experimented with a policy whereby when information is made public to one person under FOIA, it is made public to everyone.

At the pilot’s conclusion, OIP wrote a memo on the concept and a draft policy, posting it to regulations.gov on Dec. 9, 2016. Public comments were solicited and accepted until Dec. 23.

“It seemed like things were going along well,” CoA Institute counsel and senior policy advisor James Valvo told FedScoop. President Obama, signing the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, set a deadline of Jan 1, 2017 for OMB to deliver further guidance on the issue.

Then things just stopped.

Now, nearly 11 months after the deadline, CoA Institute and the Sunlight Foundation say OMB and OIP are completely mum on the subject. Not only have they not continued to implement “Release to One, Release to All,” but they have also declined to comment on whether the policy is still on the agenda.

Hence the letter and petition for rulemaking.

“Our petition compels the Trump administration to either move forward with disclosure and implementation, or explain why they don’t believe the policy is workable,” the Sunlight Foundation’s Alex Howard said in a statement. “The ‘Release to One, Release to All’ policy for the Freedom of Information Act has broad support within the transparency community, and we deserve an explanation as to why progress has ground to a halt after months of analysis, planning and responsive feedback to a request for public comment.”

The transparency organizations that support the policy recognize that it wouldn’t be completely straightforward to implement. For example, during the pilot various agencies expressed concern about how to comply with both “Release to One, Release to All” and with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, a 1973 law requiring all information published by the government be accessible to people with disabilities. But Valvo believes there’s a way to work within these requirements.

“OIP is already well positioned to resolve these issues after completing its pilot program and receiving public comment,” the CoA Institute letter reads. “We urge OIP and OMB to take the next step and finalize the policy.”

Reached for comment, OMB told FedScoop that “transparency and open government are important to Director Mulvaney and the Office of Management and Budget. We appreciate the Cause of Action Institute’s and the Sunlight Foundation’s petition letter and we will we give their request appropriate consideration.”

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The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 directs the Department of Justice to create a “consolidated online request portal that allows a member of the public to submit a request for records under subsection (a) to any agency from a single website.” DOJ, which received $1.3 million to fund the project, hired the agile-based 18F team to develop the site.

So far, 18F has done research by way of user interviews to develop recommendations for the Justice Department that will eventually inform the build of a minimum viable product, 18F members explain in a GitHub post.

18F stresses that the portal may not and probably won’t solve all of the FOIA process’ glaring problems. There are several policy concerns, like the “release to one, release to all” policy for instance, that it has no control over. But the team is aiming to, at a minimum, “let a user submit a FOIA request in one place to any and all parts of the federal government covered by the FOIA,” the GitHub project says. “We’re striving to understand how this can be done in a way that improves the system as a whole.”

18F generally grouped its recommendations for the eventual site around four qualities: interoperability, status tracking, the request and agency selection process, and searchability.

“In short, we found that while a request platform alone cannot address the most significant challenges with FOIA, a single collection point for requests represents a unique opportunity to make significant improvements to the FOIA requesting system overall,” 18F members explain. “Given limited time and resources, we recommend addressing the public’s lack of confidence and understanding of the FOIA system in the short term by improving the usability of the request submission process and better preparing requesters for what to expect from the long and complicated process of fulfilling requests.”

However, in the long term, the team recommends that “the portal seek to provide requesters with status updates and continuously improve the request submission process through usability testing and by working with agencies to identify opportunities for helping requesters create more easily fulfillable requests.”

There’s more to be done before 18F can begin work on the minimum viable product, such as gathering public feedback, prioritizing user stories, prioritizing steps in the FOIA process, coming up with product features, and then again prioritizing those features.

“Finally, we will start building features. As we build, we’ll continue to gather public feedback through regular usability testing,” 18F says. “Then, we’ll work with DOJ to prioritize making crucial usability improvements against building new features.”

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The FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 signed into law last year mandated the creation of a centralized portal — one place for people to go to submit a request for records from any agency. The act also requires the portal be interoperable with request processing software agencies are using.

Melanie Pustay, director of the Office of Information Policy at DOJ, said Thursday that the office had secured $1.3 million in funding for the project, dubbed the National FOIA Portal, adding “we’re happy obviously with that amount.”

Speaking at the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee, she added that the office knows it will need more money going forward, but that the initial funding would help it get started.

“We are just delighted that we have joined forces with 18F, the tech savvy experts at GSA,” Pustay said Thursday at the meeting.

She encouraged the public and agencies to participate in the product’s development, because 18F’s work style is to use an “iterative, open process” to design a solution. The office and 18F, she said, would work with, and listen to agencies and end users to see what features they might want in the new portal.

“The whole process is very open, it’s very dynamic,” Pustay said.

There are 119 agencies subject to FOIA, Pustay said to FedScoop on Friday. And the goal is to make it easier to direct users to the right one, and to provide one place for all those requests to be submitted.

‘Culmination’ of a journey toward a better FOIA process

“We definitely want to build on all the work that’s been done in the FOIA space with technology and portals,” Pustay told FedScoop on Friday. “And obviously, this effort is a culmination of a lot of … ground work that we’ve laid for this project.”

Indeed, the move toward creating this portal follows several other efforts to streamline the FOIA process. For example, the office launched in 2010 FOIA.gov, a site with guidance and data such as contact information for requests at different agencies and major document releases that are already online.

Pustay told FedScoop that DOJ is envisioning the new portal living as a feature on FOIA.gov — making that site a one-stop-shop for people looking to learn about the FOIA, or file a request.

And some agencies participate now in a centralized tracking and processing tool called FOIAOnline. People can make requests for some agencies through FOIAOnline now, but that site is mainly useful for internal agency processes rather than for the public, Pustay told FedScoop.

“FOIAOnline is a tracking system for FOIA that many agencies are a part of,” she said, adding that “it includes a web portal to make a request, but it fundamentally is a FOIA tracking system.”

In the past, her office also worked with 18F on a project called OpenFOIA, which Pustay called one of the “preliminary efforts” toward building a consolidated portal.

“So all of those things will provide some data, and information and lessons learned that will be helpful for taking the project to the next step, which is where we’re at now, where we’re looking to develop this National FOIA Portal,” Pustay said.

At the time of OpenFOIA’s launch in 2015, FedScoop reported the site got a lukewarm reaction from open government advocates. In particular, some had hoped for a one-stop-shop for FOIA. The site as is essentially lets users search for information on how to file requests in the federal government.

When asked if the new portal would take lessons learned from these past efforts, or if there were mistakes in that past work the team is looking to avoid this time, Pustay responded: “I guess I wouldn’t phrase it that way. I feel like we’re on a progression.”

The office is asking for people interested in contributing to the portal’s development to email National.FOIAPortal@usdoj.gov by April 28.

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