An agency’s response to your FOIA request will usually fall under one of these three general categories:
1. Initial acknowledgment
Within twenty business days, the agency requested should respond with an acknowledgment that your request has been received and is in the queue for processing. This response will usually be marked with the date the request was received and trigger a ten-day extension for them to respond bringing the total time they have up to thirty days. This response will also provide you with a tracking number for your FOIA request and contact information of the agency for any additional questions or follow-ups you may have (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(A)).
2. Administrative closure response
Agencies may also respond back to you seeking additional information to help them fulfill your request. In these cases, they’ll often say that your response is too “vague” or “broad” and that they need more detail to fulfill the request. In this case, you have thirty business days to provide more information to the agency or else your request will be closed.
In this case, do not file a new request. Instead, be sure to respond promptly either via writing or a call to go over the key points of the request and clear up any confusion the agency may have. Try to preserve the original request as much as possible but at the same time also look and ask what additional information the agency needs to make the request more specific.
3. Substantive responses
After the initial acknowledgment, agencies under the law have twenty business days to provide information about what is happening with your request. Sometimes they will provide a variety of responses that are short of providing you with the information that you sought in your request. They may include but aren’t limited to the following responses.
- The agency doesn’t have the documents that you requested
- The agency forwarded your request to another agency or a specific office/component of their own agency
- They are searching for the requested documents and will follow up later
- They provide the status about whether or not your fee waiver request was granted
- They tell you whether or not your request for expedited processing was granted or not