Federal Manager's Daily Report

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has concluded that many federal agencies fail or struggle to demonstrate an ability to track the processing of requests under the Freedom of Information Act, giving the government overall a grade of C-.

"While many evaluations of FOIA look at the end result of responses, the committee conducted an evaluation of the process and tracking that agencies conduct in managing requests," chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in releasing the report.

He said greater scrutiny is required because "a number of agencies demonstrated that they are able to track basic information about requests, while others either would not or could not provide such information as requested."

The Committee found that the three agencies that receive the most requests – the Departments of Homeland Security, the Defense, and Justice were all missing critical information from their FOIA tracking logs.

OMB Watch published its own assessment of the Obama Administration’s handling of FIOA requests and concluded that while it has made progress – it processed more FOIA requests in fiscal 2011 than in either of the past two years – that the surge in requests over that period was greater than capacity to deal with it, increasing the request backlog.