Fiscal Year 2019 FOIA Data Available

The Office of Information Policy (OIP) is pleased to announce that all 118 agencies subject to the FOIA have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Justice Department has uploaded all of the data from these reports onto FOIA.gov.

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 uploaded onto FOIA.gov, the Justice Department’s government-wide FOIA resource, so that the public can easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.

OIP is currently in the process of compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2019. However, from the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can already see that demand for FOIA continued to remain high in FY 2019 with 858,952 incoming requests.  In the face of this demand, agencies for the third consecutive year processed over 800,000 requests, processing a record high of 877,964 requests.  Additionally, the government's overall backlog of requests decreased by over 10,000 requests.  Eighty-nine agencies reported having a backlog of fewer than 100 requests, with 36 of those agencies reporting no backlog at all.

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