Catching up with OGIS

riders lining up

Congress has temporarily restored funding of appropriated activities, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) resumed normal operations as of January 28, 2019. We at OGIS returned to our offices this week to find more than 450 requests for assistance that accumulated during the shutdown. We have devoted  our time since returning to the office brainstorming how we can best meet this new challenge while continuing to handle work that remains outstanding from before the shutdown.

Over the coming weeks, we will respond to those who contacted us during the shutdown. We will also continue to review the submissions we receive each day, and work those pending in our queue. If you are waiting to hear from us, we ask for your patience as we do our best to catch up and keep up.

Of course, OGIS is not alone in returning to a mountain of work. Agencies—many of which already had a backlog of FOIA requests—continued to receive requests during the shutdown. If you have a pending FOIA request, we ask that you please be patient with agency FOIA professionals.