Developing a Consolidated FOIA Service for Making Requests

As part of the Second Open Government National Action Plan's commitment to modernizing FOIA, we have been working on a number of initiatives this summer that will further improve the overall administration of the FOIA for both agencies and requesters. One of these initiatives is the development of a consolidated FOIA service for making requests. 

Currently one hundred agencies are subject to the FOIA, and requesters must submit their FOIA requests directly to each agency. Through the National Action Plan, the Administration has committed to launching a consolidated request portal that will allow the public to submit a request to any federal agency from a single website and that includes additional tools to improve the customer experience. 

The Department of Justice and a number of other agencies have been working closely on this project with a dedicated team from the General Services Administration’s 18F group, which help “agencies deliver on their mission through the development of digital and web services.” The team has been exploring building tools that improve the FOIA request submission experience, that create scalable infrastructure for making requests to agencies, and that make it easier for requesters to find records and other information that have already been made available online. 

The team from 18F has posted a blog post about the great work they have been doing on 18F's website. Be sure to continue reading FOIA Post for updates on this and other FOIA initiatives from the Second Open Government National Action Plan.