FOIA Advisor

FOIA News: FOIA operating procedures are tough to get, says digital rights group

FOIA News (2015-2023)Allan BlutsteinComment

Federal Agencies Keep Rejecting FOIA Requests for Their Procedures for Handling FOIA Requests

By Beryl Lipton, Elec. Frontier Found., Dec. 16, 2022

The majority of federal agencies — including law enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection — are refusing to release some of the most basic guidance materials used by their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offices: procedures for how they do their jobs.

Government Attic, a website that regularly files FOIA requests and posts the provided records, estimates that at least 60 percent of federal agencies, when faced with filling requests for FOIA standard operating procedures (SOP), claimed that the documents are in draft form and exempt from disclosure or that they don’t have any such records at all. 

Read more here.