It is no secret that the federal government has never managed to achieve anything like full compliance with FOIA’s basic obligations to release non-exempt records upon request within twenty business days. Endemic delays, persistent over-withholding, and spates of agency policies that undermine compliance have plagued the history of the statutory right to government information. As it stands today, less than ten percent of requests result in the full release of responsive documents. From the perspective of requesters, FOIA has long been “broken.”

But it is not just requesters who register high levels of frustration. As the number of requests increases almost exponentially year over year and the volume of records created and maintained by agencies balloons, the resources agencies are given—both human and technological—perennially fall far short of what is needed. On one side, FOIA offices struggle to communicate with requesters effectively even when communication would be mutually beneficial. And on the other side, those same offices face barriers in securing the cooperation of agency program officials in other units to search for and produce responsive records. Agency officials cite the near impossibility of the task at hand, and having been set up to fail, FOIA compliance contributes to a public perception of government incompetence.

In an attempt to support agencies in their FOIA processing, tracking, referring, communicating, and more, private companies have long offered various purported solutions. The leading product, FOIAXpress, has been used by many agencies for more than two decades, but competitors have cropped up like NextRequest and Armedia. Without doubt, these private companies are innovating in the FOIA processing space, including by trying to integrate across non-FOIA staff and by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. Still, though, private products are adopted piecemeal, agency-by-agency, and do not integrate across the government. Moreover, the nature of private products has exposed government to potential security breaches. And finally, these products are expensive and offer many add-ons and customization options, making even the very same products function differently across agencies. For requesters, this means that each agency still has a bespoke requesting process.

At times, both Congress and the administration have recognized the need for greater ownership and consistency of technology in a centralized location in government. In the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, Congress required the Office of Management and Budget to “ensure the operation of a consolidated online request portal that allows a member of the public to submit a request for records… to any agency from a single website.”

While this had the promise of taking a step in the direction of improving FOIA infrastructure, the implementation has proven wholly inadequate. FOIA.gov, the government’s attempt at moving toward a FOIA portal, acts mainly as a redirect site; that is, it provides a centralized area to find a link to each agency’s request submissions process. It does not, itself, allow a single submission site.

This is not the first attempt that has gone awry. The EPA spearheaded an earlier effort, FOIAonline.gov, a portal system that allowed other agencies to opt in to using it for request submissions on a single site and was used by twenty-two agencies at its height. But after the EPA experienced high costs in maintaining the system, it was decommissioned and shut down entirely in 2023.

Even at their zenith, none of these efforts have been adequately ambitious to produce the kinds of gains that real technology infrastructure might offer. Other countries have vastly outpaced us in this regard, and their models are instructive in the possible efficiency gains of technology platforms that serve the administrative needs of FOI professionals and the public alike.

During the height of Mexico’s transparency regime, Mexico’s then-extant Information Commission created a National Transparency Platform, an integrated portal system that out-imagines anything we have tried. As a basic matter, it allowed requesters to make a request to any governmental body at any level of government from a single portal, or even to make a request to multiple agencies at once. It also allowed the requester to log in and see all past requests made, with deadlines for responses clearly indicated, as well as all subsequent communication and any eventually released records. The portal served as a repository for all released records which (absent individual privacy concerns) were also posted publicly for anyone to search and review. All records required to be made affirmatively available were likewise housed on the portal.

But where it really shone was on the backend. The portal served as the internal processing management system for government entities. Each agency unit that processed requests (the equivalent of a FOIA office) could see all the pending requests and deadlines, could refer the request internally to the program or component of the agency that was likely to have responsive records—each of which had a designated contact for handling FOI requests—and could set an internal deadline for that program to respond to the FOIA office. The contact point in the program office, likewise, had their own login that provided a list of all referred requests pending and allowed them to build the record on their end.

Finally, the National Transparency Portal also facilitated communication between the agencies and the information commission; once the agency response was registered, it allowed requesters, with the click of a button and a sentence-or-two explanation, to administratively appeal the response to the commission. The commission then had access to the full administrative record of what happened prior to the appeal and could receive additional documentation through the portal, as well as request additional information from the agencies. At base, therefore, the portal looked different to each actor who had a touchpoint on a request by virtue of their login. It clearly managed that individuals’ workflow and facilitated retention of a full record of what happened.

Mexico is far from the only country to have developed such a deceptively simple sounding system, but one that radically transforms the FOI space. Brazil, for example, has a very similar one-stop-shopping portal system for their FOI space, as do Paraguay and Norway.

The U.S. needs a true FOIA portal. A real portal would create the infrastructure that would facilitate the possibility of something akin to full compliance with FOIA obligations. It would supplant a piecemeal system with a system designed for this purpose, built in house, maintained by government computer engineers, and consistent across agencies. It would streamline the workflow inside agencies, make clear who has the responsibility for the request at each stage, and create priorities for work based on deadlines. It would provide the public with one-stop-shopping for government information and lower the barriers to use by ordinary citizens. And it could create efficiencies for agencies, which would no longer need to invest FOIA budgets in procurement of third-party products for FOIA solutions.

The most exciting part of a true portal, however, is the nearly endless list of possibilities beyond improving the current request-and-response compliance rate. For example, a portal could facilitate release-to-one-release-to-all, a widely celebrated concept that once a record is released under FOIA it should be available publicly for anyone to access. The DOJ has supported the idea in pilot version previously, but it never became a reality. Indeed, implementing a release-to-one-release-to-all system would obviate the need for FOIA’s current requirement that agencies release publicly any record requested three or more times, a requirement agencies have found extremely difficult to implement. In fact, much more broadly, a portal creates an opportunity for meaningful affirmative disclosure regimes in which records are searchable government-wide and agencies have checklists of disclosure obligations with which they must comply.

Exemption application could be improved through the use of a portal as well. For example, a portal could collect the body of past agency decisions—both at the initial and the administrative appeal level—as well as adjudicated case law in one place. It also would contain all previously released records—whether at the administrative level or in response to litigation—thereby making plain when information is already public on a particular topic and facilitating a determination that further release would not harm a protected interest. Easy access to more definitive answers on the application of exemptions or other matters under the law might improve agency compliance in future cases.

A portal might also be used to facilitate data analysis, auditing, and other programmatic evaluation of FOIA offices. Patterns of violations—whether delay, overwithholding, or failure to engage in affirmative disclosure—could benefit from systematic solutions, and a portal could be used to facilitate identification of areas ripe for improvement.

Even more broadly, a portal could facilitate many of the other types of FOIA reforms that have been considered within the FOIA community. For example, it might allow tracking the personal responsibility attached to FOIA violations to particular employees in a way that could sanction flagrant noncompliance. It could facilitate improved judicial review by creating a full administrative record for the court and permitting easier in camera review of records. It could link to declassification efforts by the National Declassification Center or be integrated as a tool hosted by the Archives into the NDC’s work. It could be integrated into artificial intelligence solutions; imagine, for example, an AI tool that combed through agency records and identified records that are likely of interest to the public and can be affirmatively disclosed. And it may hold the potential for many more uses we could tailor the portal to as it developed over time. FOIA needs a portal now.