On March 2, 2023, the Department of Justice published data reported by agencies in their annual Freedom of Information Act reports for fiscal year 2022. The data, available on the website FOIA.gov, indicates among other things that agencies received a record-breaking 928,353 requests and that the government’s overall request backlog increased nearly 35 percent. FOIA Advisor staffers Allan Blutstein (AB), Kevin Schmidt (KS), and Ryan Mulvey (RM) share their thoughts on the government’s FOIA metrics.
AB: As goes the Department of Homeland Security, so goes the government, FOIA-wise. And FY 2022 was not kind to DHS. Requesters deluged DHS with nearly 100k more requests than in FY 2021, and the department’s request backlog more than doubled from 25k to 52k. Other agencies also encountered difficulties, albeit on a smaller scale. For example, two popular targets for requesters, DOJ and State, saw their request backlogs rise by 32 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Of note, DOJ now has more backlogged requests at 64,982 than any other agency. A less FOIA-active cabinet agency, the Department of Education, suffered a 123 percent increase in its request backlog.
Processing times are always important to requesters, and in FY 2022 the Office of Science and Technology Policy stood out by taking an average of 409 days to process “simple” perfected requests. Even greater patience is required of requesters who submit “complex” requests to NARA, which reported taking 1048 days on average to process them.
KS: DHS drives the big topline numbers, but FOIA requests received surged in FY22 compared to FY21 among most cabinet agencies. Only Agriculture (19%), Commerce (23%), DOJ (5%) and VA (19%) saw reductions. Big increases at Energy (14%), HHS (14%), State (23%) and Transportation (18%) and smaller increases among the rest.
RM: What struck me was that, across the whole government, the total number of full-time FOIA employees dropped by roughly 300. If we focus on some of the bigger, cabinet-level agencies that have been mentioned so far, the agency-level fluctuation in staffing varies quite a bit. Labor saw no change in staffing. A few agencies increased staffing: DOD (+73), DHS (+41), HHS (+21), Interior (+12), HUD (+8), Treasury (+2), and Energy (+1). Other agencies cut their staffs: State (-45), Education (-31), Commerce (-24), DOJ (-13), Transportation (-9), and USDA (-4). The VA, oddly enough, stands out in a category of its own. Based on its annual reports, the VA’s number of full-time FOIA employees dropped by 299. At first that looked like it must be an error, but I double-checked the reports. It looks like all those employees had been found in the VHA.
AB: I’m glad you looked into staffing levels, Ryan, as that significantly influences the government’s ability to fulfill requests/appeals and processing time. It likely also affects an agency’s ability to collect processing fees from requesters. The available data indicates that agencies collected a meager $2.19 million in FY 2022, an infinitesimal fraction of the $543.7 million that agencies expended to process requests. Taxpayers should not be pleased by this flow of federal largesse, especially when only a minority of requests advance public interests.