For more than a decade, the Environmental Protection Agency hosted a portal for Freedom of Information Act requests used by dozens of federal agencies. The site, FOIAonline.gov, has been the key hub many journalists, academics, activists and the general public use to request and access public records.
But on Sept. 30, FOIAonline will stop accepting new FOIA registrations and requests and begin the process of shutting down. The site’s administrators will work with partner agencies to migrate existing data and pending requests to each agency’s website, according to a “Frequently Asked Questions” document published on the site. A new tool, referred to as a “FOIA Wizard,” is being developed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy and could go live as early as this fall, the office’s director, Bobak “Bobby” Talebian, said in an interview with MuckRock. That tool, a mixture of machine learning and logic-based processing, could help users search for keywords related to their request and find what’s been previously requested.
The plan to decommission FOIAonline was made nearly two years ago, according to an EPA report, due to the high costs of running and updating the site as well as “problems experienced transitioning FOIAonline to operate in a cloud environment.” The federal government spent $2.7 million to run and maintain FOIAonline in the 2022 fiscal year, according to the EPA. Next year’s costs for FOIAonline, had it continued, would have risen to roughly $5 million, to cover help desk costs and rebuild code, among other improvements, according to budget documents obtained through a FOIA by Michael Ravnitzky, an attorney and FOIA expert.
But the government’s plan to shutter its FOIA portal struck even some of those with inside knowledge of the decision as short-sighted. In one internal email, also obtained through Ravnitzky’s FOIA request, EPA Chief Information officer Vaughn Noga wrote to a colleague in October 2021, calling the decision to close the site “fait accompli” and asking rhetorically: “There are huge optics surrounding this one. Remind me again the real rationale for displacing 22 partner Agencies?” (The colleague conceded to Noga that it was “a big change.”)