OGIS Publishes COVID-19 FOIA Website Review Follow-up

Medical Department – Influenza Epidemic 1918 – Masks for protection against influenza. Traffic “cop” in New York City wearing gauze mask (National Archives ID: 45499301)

OGIS is pleased to announce publication of our latest report which examines whether agencies are following the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Information Policy (OIP) guidance encouraging them to post alerts on their websites indicating how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting their FOIA operations. The results of this assessment, for which OGIS reviewed 305 agency and department FOIA websites, shows that 47 percent of the federal FOIA websites we reviewed alert requesters to changes in their FOIA processing due to the pandemic. Generally, agencies that receive a higher volume of FOIA requests are more likely to have COVID alerts on their FOIA websites than agencies that receive fewer FOIA requests. Read our report the findings and download the spreadsheet of our findings.

This report follows up our June 2020 assessment, “Agency Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Website Communications on COVID-19.”