The Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy has reported that the government received a record high of approximately 1.5 million requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, during fiscal year 2024, up 25 percent from FY 2023.
OIP said Tuesday agencies processed 1.49 million FOIA requests, an increase of 34 percent from the prior fiscal year.
According to OIP’s Summary of Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2024, five federal agencies received the vast majority, or 84 percent, of all FOIA requests governmentwide. These are the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Veterans Affairs, Defense, and Health and Human Services.
These five agencies also processed 85 percent of FOIA requests governmentwide in FY 2024.
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Administrative Appeals
The government received 20,115 administrative appeals in FY 2024, a 39 percent increase from the previous year.
Of those received appeals, the government processed 18,575, reflecting a nearly 26 percent increase from the number of appeals processed in FY 2023.
DHS, DOD, DOJ and the Social Security Administration processed 75 percent of the total number of appeals processed governmentwide in FY 2024.
Of the 122 agencies subject to FOIA, 87 agencies ended the last fiscal year with no pending appeals in their backlog.
Proactive Disclosures
According to the OIP report, government agencies continued to proactively disclose large volumes of information in FY 2024.
Under FOIA subsection (a)(2), agencies are required to proactively disclose to the public non-exempt information from certain categories of records without waiting for a specific request to be received. Those categories include final agency opinions and orders rendered in the adjudication of cases; specific policy statements that are not published in the Federal Register; and administrative staff manuals and instructions to personnel that affect a member of the public.
In FY 2024, approximately 251 million records were posted online, a 0.77 percent increase in proactive disclosures over the previous fiscal year.
FOIA offices across the government posted 1.9 million subsection (a)(2) records online, reflecting an over 400 percent increase in online postings compared to FY 2023.
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