FOIAonline

» see foiaonline.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A Freedom of Information Act request is a letter to a United States federal agency that the agency is legally obliged to answer. Turkey passed its own right to information law in 2003 and I have never sent one of those either, so this grave is written from the outside of a system I have only ever read the output of. The output is the interesting part, and the output is what died here.

FOIAonline launched on 1 October 2012 as a shared portal built by the Environmental Protection Agency together with the Commerce Department and the National Archives. It was assembled on top of the infrastructure already running Regulations.gov to keep the startup bill down, and the whole thing was delivered for 1.3 million dollars with a projection that broad adoption would save two hundred million over five years. For an agency it handled intake and assignment, and it generated the annual report that FOIA requires every agency to file. For a member of the public it was one address instead of twenty-two.

What made it unusual was the public side. Every request that went through it got a record, and when an agency released documents, those documents landed in the same searchable pile. You could go looking for what a journalist had asked the EPA in 2016 and read the answer without asking anything yourself, which is a different kind of transparency from the one the law actually mandates.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the public side ~

The search was the thing people used. It was also, by the end, held together with string. Results were capped at ten thousand per query and there was no index of public entries at all, so you walked the advanced search one received date at a time and still missed requests, some of which could not be found even when you searched for them directly. Request IDs were an agency code plus a six-digit sequence, with gaps everywhere in the run, most of them records the API refused to serve.

Archive Team worked out that both the search and the file lists ran over POST, which is why almost none of it replays properly in the Wayback Machine. The firewall blocked downloads of any file whose name had a semicolon in it. A government archive built for the public had become a scraping problem, and the people who solved it were volunteers rather than anybody on the payroll.

~ the exodus ~

EPA announced the decommissioning in November 2021, almost two years ahead, and the number of partner agencies fell the whole way down. Twenty-two at the high-water mark, and still seventeen when fiscal 2023 opened. By the September when the co-chairs of the Chief FOIA Officers Council sent round a memo about the sunset, eleven were left. The memo's practical instruction was that agencies had to authorize their vendor to migrate open cases out before the lights went off.

The cost argument had done its work slowly. EPA was carrying the hosting for everyone and the bill kept climbing, so each agency that left made the per-agency share worse for whoever stayed. EPA itself landed on commercial software and brought FOIAXpress up for public use in October 2024, a year after the portal it replaced had stopped answering.

~ what came down with it ~

FOIAonline went off at 5pm Eastern on Saturday 30 September 2023. The agencies kept their own case files, so nobody's pending request evaporated. What ended was the common address and the common index: eleven years of requests and released records that anyone could read in one place, scattered back across however many agency reading rooms, each with its own search box and its own idea of what counts as a document.

There is a Wayback Machine collection for foiaonline.gov, built by the same volunteers who reverse-engineered the API, and it is the closest thing to a successor the records have. It holds whatever the crawler could reach before the deadline.

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