New Search Feature Added to FOIA.gov

Yesterday, a new feature was added to FOIA.gov, the Department’s FOIA website, to make it easier for the public to locate documents that have been posted by agencies on their websites. Across the government agencies have widely embraced the President’s and Attorney General’s call to make more information available to the public proactively, on agency websites, so that what is known and done by the government is readily accessible to the public. During the past two years, agencies have posted a wide variety of information and data on their websites and have created dedicated web pages on particular topics of interest to the public. Those proactive disclosures are being made on an on-going basis, providing the public with a rich resource of information in a readily accessible format. To enhance the public’s ability to locate all this material that is being made available, the Department of Justice has added a search tool to FOIA.gov. This tool searches across all federal government websites, including the smaller offices and components that make up the larger agencies. By entering any given search term, the public will see all the various documents that have been posted on that topic by any federal agency. This tool reaches not just those documents that have been released in response to previous FOIA requests, but also captures all the proactive disclosures that agencies are continually making throughout their websites. Before making a FOIA request, we encourage the public to first use this search tool to see what has already been made available on the topic across the federal government. The search tool is located under the “Find” tab on FOIA.gov. This tab is visible from any page of the site to make it easy to do a search at any time.