Every year, individuals make hundreds of thousands of requests for government records. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal law that Congress passed and signed into law in 1966, protects their right to request this information. Since FOIA’s enactment, journalists, historians, attorneys, and members of the public have used the law to monitor the inner workings of the federal government and hold it accountable.
In 2023, the federal government received 1,199,644 FOIA requests, a 29 percent increase from 2022 and an all-time high. From Q1 through Q3 of 2024, the government had already received over 928,000 FOIA requests, putting it on pace to collect more than 1.3 million for the entire year.
The increasing volume of FOIA requests emphasizes the public’s demand for governmental transparency and accountability. However, numerous challenges have plagued FOIA over the past decade, including:
- A burdensome, pre-digital age process that is inefficient and labor-intensive.
- The need for manual, time-consuming review and redaction.
- Outdated and decentralized records management systems that make it difficult to locate and retrieve records.
- Duplicative search results with limited tools to refine and identify responsive records.
All contribute to extensive delays and increasing backlogs. Although the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 attempted to modernize FOIA for the digital age by making changes to the review process and how agencies apply exemptions and charge requesters, the challenges remain. Facing increasing volumes of records and rising backlogs of requests, how can agencies respond to FOIA requests, comply with statutory requirements, and avoid costly litigation?
Addressing Growing Challenges in FOIA Requests
The number of FOIA requests grows substantially every year, and the volume of electronic records is rising at an even higher rate. Most organizations struggle to update their record retention policies with continually changing and evolving technology. The federal government is no exception. However, federal agencies must keep pace with changes in technology while meeting their FOIA obligation to support transparency and open government. Part of this obligation includes a statutory requirement to respond to FOIA requests within 20 working days, a deadline that remains unchanged despite the exponential growth in the volume and complexity of data that agencies must manage.
Large government agencies operate under complex structures, often housing multiple independent bureaus within a single administrative framework. As a result, they face challenges with fragmented processes and dispersed resources. For example, processing just one FOIA request can require a FOIA officer to coordinate a search for records across multiple departments and conduct searches in various records systems. Once the records are collected, the FOIA officer must assemble, consolidate, and organize them for review – a demanding process when working without a centralized system. The time and money required to process FOIA requests is massive, and delays can cause agencies to exceed statutory time limits, resulting in costly litigation.
When agencies cannot keep up with mounting FOIA requests, they become backlogged. According to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the number of backlogged FOIA requests rose 22 percent, from 95,564 requests at the end of fiscal year 2013 to 206,720 requests at the end of FY 2022. The increasing complexity of FOIA requests, staff turnover, and expanding litigation have all contributed to these increasing backlogs
The surge in electronic records has also added to the challenges surrounding FOIA requests, making traditional response methods inefficient and resource intensive. Solutions are needed to improve efficiency and accuracy and reduce time and money spent on requests. Fortunately, existing eDiscovery tools can be customized and leveraged to improve FOIA workflows for any government organizations.
Centralized and Standardized Systems
One of the chief challenges when processing FOIA requests is searching for responsive records. Without a central database, multiple offices may be required to respond by manually searching through numerous email accounts. These files are often not indexed or are difficult to index, leading to inaccurate and inconsistent search results. In addition, attachments are difficult to search for within the email client, often requiring a separate download and manual search. When searching within email programs, there is no way to efficiently remove duplicates, consolidate email conversations, or reduce the number of documents to review.
However, eDiscovery service providers are familiar with taking information from multiple sources and creating centralized databases with appropriate indexing to enable searching. E-discovery platforms centralize data from various sources, standardize processes, and improve accuracy. Features like advanced search capabilities, email threading, and deduplication help reduce the volume of potentially responsive records to review and staff hours required to review and redact records to release in response to FOIA requests.
Creating a centralized database provides several significant benefits:
- Fewer documents to review
- Improved consistency in work product and released records
- Streamlined review and redaction workflows
- The ability to share documents between offices, bureaus, and even agencies
- Collaboration in real-time
eDiscovery tools also promote future efficiency, making it possible for FOIA offices to leverage work previously performed by their staff. For example, once a document has been redacted to respond to one FOIA request, those redactions can be used repeatedly for future FOIA requests without the burden of an analyst re-redacting them. In addition, automatic reporting on review trends may offer insight into commonly requested topics and documents, supporting proactive disclosures, highlighting areas of inefficiency, and tracking crucial metrics necessary for compliance with quarterly and annual reporting requirements.
CDS’s Expertise
CDS offers tailored eDiscovery solutions with features like Relativity integrations, analytics, and training to help government agencies overcome FOIA backlogs efficiently and securely.
Platforms like Relativity and other eDiscovery tools enable the electronic processing of records in a way that preserves metadata and other essential elements, allowing for deduplication, advanced search methods, and analytics such as email threading, near duplicate analysis, and conceptual analysis to speed review.
The right eDiscovery service provider can offer the expertise and technology essential for addressing governmental agencies’ unique workflows and security needs. A legacy platform without up-to-date features is often expensive to customize or replace. In contrast, modern cloud-based platforms allow agencies to experience significant gains in efficiency, visibility, and accuracy when responding to public records requests.
CDS provides a full range of Advisory Services to the government, including incorporating the strictest levels of data security with FedRAMP Authority to Operate (ATO) for our Federal Cloud Discovery Services (CDS FCDS) platform. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you meet your responsibilities under FOIA.