Citizens filing simple information requests to a key Department of Commerce office must wait on average 836 days — more than two years — before getting responses, and there is no guarantee that what is provided by the government’s reply will be complete or credible, according to a new report based on federal data.

The report is being published July 17 by Open the Books (OTB), the Illinois-based non-profit government transparency watchdog, using data compiled by foia.gov. An advance copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Stand.

The average response time for simple requests of 836 days was compiled by the Commerce Department’s Office of the Undersecretary for Economic Affairs. The second-longest wait time among federal departments and agencies was 811 by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Enterprise Integration.

Third among the longest wait times was the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) at 367 days. The fourth longest average wait was registered by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board at 360 days, followed in fifth by the Executive Office of the President in the White House at 350 days.

The five federal agencies with the fastest average turnaround time in responding to simple FOIA requests include the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at one day, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) at 1.69 days, followed by the Job Corps, the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) at two days.

The average response time for all federal departments and agencies for complex requests was 267 days.

The report was compiled, OTB said, because “as the size and scope of the administrative state grows, decision-making processes become more opaque even as those decisions impact our lives more fundamentally than ever. So, our ability to check their work has become more critical than ever before.”

“Although agencies are required by law to respond within 20 days, in practice many require extensions for months or even years, citing big backlogs of records requests,” OTB continued. “When FOIA wait times stretch to months and years, it becomes impossible for We the People to hold agencies accountable.”

The 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guarantees American citizens access to copies of all government documents except those covered by a handful of reasonable exemptions such as national security, personal privacy, active law enforcement investigations, and protecting commercial business secrets.

Another exemption, Exemption Five or the “pre-decisional” or “deliberative process” exemption, allows virtually all documents produced prior to a decision to be withheld. Critics of how the government has administered the FOIA have for years criticized the frequency with which Exemption Five is used by civil servants to deny providing access to requested documents.

Federal agencies are required to acknowledge all requests within 20 days of being received, but there are no limits on how much time can be consumed in gathering requested documents via extensions. Citizens submitted 1,501,432 FOIA requests in 2024, while federal employees completed processing on 1,499,265. The total received for 2024 represents a 25.15% increase, year over year.

More than 50,000 FOIA requests have been submitted by OTB to federal, state, and municipal governments since the foundation’s 2007 founding in order to put all official spending on the internet and available to all citizens with access to a computer.

As an illustration of the long wait times, OTB filed a FOIA request in May 2023 with the HHS Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

“Open the Books has been waiting for records from one of these agencies, the [ACF], since May 2023. As our auditors previously reported, an office within ACF has spent billions on all manner of aid to migrants, including those who crossed illegally, those who enjoyed relaxed entry rules under the Biden administration, and even some children. The spending included anything from help with small business startups to savings for home and auto loans. The majority of the spending was done through third-party nonprofits who took grants from ACF and distributed them as aid,” OTB said.

Lengthy waiting times for FOIA responses also often result in expensive litigation. In its dealings with HHS on multiple requests for government documents, OTB has experienced particular difficulties in seeking documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has had to resort to litigation.

“Open the Books partnered with Judicial Watch to sue [NIH] over redactions to its data on royalties from pharmaceutical companies paid out to agency scientists. The litigation has since forced NIH to produce thousands of pages of documents, which we’ve used to delivered blockbuster reports on the connections between federal scientists and the private sector. Three years later, litigation is still ongoing.”

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

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