Before making a FOIA request, you may wish to conduct a search of federal agencies’ websites to see what they have already made available online. The FOIA requires that federal departments and agencies proactively release certain information automatically without waiting to receive a FOIA request. In addition, the Attorney General’s FOIA Guidelines encourage agencies to systematically post information of interest to the public on agency websites without the need for a FOIA request. As a result, agencies are continually updating their websites with a wide variety of information and data and creating web pages focused on particular topics. Information can be posted in an agency’s FOIA Library (formerly called an Electronic Reading Room), or may be integrated into various other pages of an agency’s website. For certain projects or issues, multiple agencies and offices across the federal government might have participated. Those various offices will all post different types of information on the same project or issue to their individual websites.
The search tool below allows you to search across all federal government websites at once, including the websites of the smaller offices and components that make up these departments and agencies, to see what is already available to you without the need to send in a FOIA request. This tool looks for information available not only in the FOIA Library of a particular agency or office, but in all pages of an agency’s website where information may be located. If you do not find what you are looking for, or if you want to request more information on a given topic, you can submit a FOIA request to the agencies’ FOIA Contacts.
