Sunlight Foundation

Today, we received a reply to our correspondence logs FOIA from USAID as an excel spreadsheet. This is only the second time we have gotten a reply in a format that can be uploaded and used to fulfill our goal of making the logs searchable using keywords. Here are the two replies we have received so far: from EPA(.xls) and USAID (.xls).

Just a quick update on how things are moving along: I've been asking FOIA officers from SBA, FERC and FTC to give us the logs in an electronic format and not as print outs. Although, as ...

For the past couple of hours I have been trying to get my hands on a letter that Senator McCain wrote to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne on April 4 about requesting documents related to the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter program.

According to a Reuters report, Senator McCain has questioned an Air Force decision giving Boeing contracts worth about $15 billion under the program.

On calling the Senator's office I was told by the press spokeswoman, Melissa Sheffield that they don't release these letters to the press." She added that I could get it from the Air ...

It seems that there's no standard way for government agencies to maintain logs of correspondence.

I had sent a FOIA to the Small Business Administration offices in Washington D.C. for their logs of congressional correspondence. SBA forwarded the request to all of its regional offices and departments--they don't maintain a central log of correspondence. So in the past few days I have received more than a dozen acknowledgement letters and emails from SBA's regional offices.

Unfortunately, SBA is not is a position to consolidate the material and give us one final response. Essentially, each of the ...

We received a reply from the Department of Defense's Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff yesterday turning down the FOIA request we sent them for congressional correspondence logs. The reason given was that the request as presently written, since it would appear to apply to all 535 Members of Congress, is much too broad to enable this Office to conduct an adequate and effective search for responsive records."

Although other offices and agencies within DoD indicated that responding to our FOIAs could take a while, none had so far turned us down. We've gotten acknowledgement ...

My first two weeks working on the real time project has involved sending out FOIA requests to as many as 80 federal agencies. We are asking for logs of correspondence between members of Congress and each agency. Most of them have been via e-mail or online forms and around 25 others via regular mail.

Since this is going to be a monthly feature, I was hoping that FOIA officers would send us the data at the end of every month, but that seems increasingly unlikely after a few conversations I've had with FOIA officers at the Environmental Protection Agency ...