FOIA Online Gets Mixed Marks at Three Months

A new digital system for managing Freedom of Information Act requests to the Commerce Department and a handful of other federal agencies deserves an A+ for making it easier to file FOIAs, Amy Bennett, assistant director of the transparency group Open The Government, said. FOIA Online deserves a D or an F grade, however, on one of its stated objectives: Making FOIA’d information more readily available to the general public, she said during a government transparency conference hosted by the American University Washington College of Law. Bennett is managing a project that compares FOIA processes at different federal agencies, including three -- Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Merit Service Protection Board -- that use FOIA Online.