OGIS Releases FOIA Advisory Committee Recommendations Dashboard

Ever wonder what happens to all the recommendations made by the FOIA Advisory Committee? Thanks to OGIS’s new dashboard tool, you can check on their status yourself!

Thirty FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations for improving FOIA administration across the government can now be tracked in one place: a recommendations dashboard on the OGIS website. The dashboard provides descriptions of each recommendation, actions taken to fulfill each, and links to reports, correspondence and other related material. We plan to update the dashboard at least quarterly. 

Photograph of a National Youth Administration Student Tutor. National Archives ID: 7403521
A National Youth Administration Student Tutor (National Archives ID: 7403521)

The FOIA Advisory Committee—whose members are FOIA experts in and outside of government who are appointed by the Archivist of the United States—recommended changes at the end of each of its two-year terms in 2016, 2018 and 2020. The recommendations are as wide ranging as updating the Office of Management and Budget’s 1987 FOIA fee guidelines and adding FOIA information technology to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), a government-wide regulation governing how federal agencies acquire goods and services. A majority of the recommendations task OGIS and the Office of Information Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice with the work required to complete the recommendations. 
Of the 30 recommendations—22 of which were presented to Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero in July 2020 —five are complete, 16 are in progress and nine are pending.