Agencies Processed Over One Million FOIA Requests in Fiscal Year 2023

The Office for Information Policy (OIP) is pleased to announce that all 120 agencies subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Justice Department has uploaded all of the data from these reports onto FOIA.gov.

From the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can see that demand for FOIA reached another record high in FY 2023, surpassing 1.1 million requests received and reflecting a nearly 30% increase compared to FY 2022.  In the face of this demand, agencies processed a record high of 1,122,166 requests.  OIP is compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2023, which will provide further breakdown of the data.  Agencies will soon be posting their Chief FOIA Officer Reports, which provide helpful context to the statistics reported in the Annual FOIA Reports and detail agencies’ work in key areas of FOIA administration.  OIP will again assess agencies based on key FOIA metrics from both reports.

Since its initial launch in 2011, FOIA.gov has served as a dashboard of all agencies' Annual FOIA Report data.  Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report to the Attorney General detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, and the time taken to process them.  The data from all of these Annual FOIA Reports is then published on FOIA.gov so that the public can easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.  Users can search for individual agency or component data, compare data from several agencies, and gather government-wide data.  The results can be viewed on the page or downloaded as a .csv file. 

We encourage everyone to visit FOIA.gov to view each agency's data as well as government-wide FOIA statistics.