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New Report on Federal Agencies' Responsiveness to FOIA Requests

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We at Nota Bene have written before about TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC is a research organization at Syracuse University that uses Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gather data for its reports on various government activities, including staffing, spending, and law enforcement. These reports are then published on the TRAC website.

Recently, TRAC published the results of its latest FOIA survey, which assesses the responsiveness of 21 federal agencies to FOIA requests. These requests were designed to ask only about information the agencies are legally required to maintain, and to avoid asking about sensitive information that might have to be redacted. The report indicates that two-thirds of the agencies “are now responding and providing usable data,” and this “represents an improvement over just seven agencies that gave adequate responses in April.” Six agencies have failed to provide an adequate response, and one—the Central Intelligence Agency—has flatly refused to process the requests. You can read the full report here.
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