Many Agencies Violate FOIA’s 20 Day Requirement
For FOIA test, POGO sent 100 FOIA requests “for work done by federally contracted consultants” to 30 agencies and departments. That was in the first week of February.
For 23 of the 100 requests, agencies haven’t responded at all (despite a 20 business day deadline) and three other agencies have only replied in part.
Of the 100, only 8 “conclusive” responses have been received. But for 5 of the 8, the agency said no documents were found.
As for agencies covered on national security beats, Department of Justice and Army were in the batch of non- or partial ressponders.
And the Department of Defense was among those who said they’d need an extension (this happened with 26 of the requests).
All told, the POGO has yielded results that appear worse than a 2011 study on FOIA.gov, which found a 70% average response rate to “simple” requests in 20 days among the top 10 most-FOIA-ed agencies.
An interesting national security beat note related to that study, according to POGO:
“The Department of Veterans Affairs, to which POGO sent 3 requests regarding 3 specific contracts, has both the highest rate of simple and the highest rate of complex requests processed within 20 days at 100 percent and 79 percent, respectively. On the other hand, the Department of State—where POGO sent 3 requests—has the lowest rates of response within 20 days for both simple and complex requests at 8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.”
Table below is from the POGO story, using FOIA.gov data.
