Thank you.
Thanks for pronouncing my name correctly that time. It is Melanie Pustay.
I'm the director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice. We have a twofold mission connected to implementing the Freedom of Information Act here in the States. First of all, we're responsible for encouraging agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. We then also ensure that President Obama's memorandum on the FOIA and Attorney General Holder's FOIA guidelines are fully implemented across the government.
We do that in a number of ways. We first have an overall FOIA guidance responsibility. We carry out that function in a variety of ways. We develop and issue policy guidance on the proper application of the FOIA for all agencies. We publish a legal treatise that's called the Justice Department Guide to the Freedom of Information Act. It's relied on not only by government officials but also by private sector individuals and open government groups who are interested in having a comprehensive discussion of all the FOIA case law and all the FOIA principles in one place. We also have an online website for FOIA posts where we give guidance to agencies. We disseminate FOIA news and generally share information about FOIA on an ongoing basis.
We provide a lot of training to agencies. A key part of what we do is to provide training. There are thousands of agency employees in the U.S. who work with FOIA either full-time or as a collateral duty. We have an entire range of training programs where we cover every aspect of the FOIA, all the procedural requirements, the exemptions from disclosure, and litigation considerations. Of course we now focus in particular on President Obama's FOIA memorandum and the Attorney General's FOIA guidelines. It's one of the key ways in which we're spreading the word about the new culture of openness, the presumption of openness. We give concrete guidance to agencies on how they can actually implement those principles when they respond to the Freedom of Information Act.
We also provide individualized counselling services to agencies. We have a dedicated phone line that's called our FOIA counsellor line. We have an attorney from my office who is assigned to that phone line every day. The volume of calls is such that it pretty much takes all day for that person to answer the calls that come in. There are usually 20 or 30 calls every single day from agency employees wanting to talk through a particular FOIA issue that they're having and wanting to get legal advice from us on how to proceed.
We have found that over the years the public has become aware of our FOIA counsellor service. We actually ended up getting quite a few calls from the public, where people asked how to make a FOIA request and where to make a FOIA request. We actually answer about a thousand calls a year from members of the public who have a question about the FOIA.
But in addition to this big guidance role that we have to lead agencies in compliance with the FOIA, we also have an oversight role. There are two principal ways that agencies report to the Department of Justice on how they're doing with the FOIA. First, they have to report every year to the Department of Justice. They have to submit a report that's called an annual FOIA report. It contains a tremendous amount of very detailed statistics about the number of requests they've received and processed, the disposition of the request, how many records were released in full, how many requests had records released in part, the procedural reasons for denying a request, and the many details about the time it takes to respond to a request, time increments, and money allocated to processing FOIA requests. It's a tremendous amount of information about all the nuts and bolts of the FOIA process within each agency. It's also required to be broken down by the components of each agency.
The Department of Justice, my office, developed guidance for agencies on how to fill out that report. We provide training to the agencies so they know what it is they are supposed to include and how to compile the statistics. We then review all the reports in draft form. There are 97 agencies that comply with the FOIA in the U.S. All those agencies send their reports to us first in draft so that we can review them and make sure they've covered all the elements that are required. We also find all types of things that are missing from their reports, math errors, or data that's not correctly carried over from year to year.
For all those reasons, we do a review of the reports before they are finalized. Then they get cleared and they get posted. DOJ then posts all those annual FOIA reports on our website so they are in one single place so it's easy for people to look at them. And then we also conduct a completed summary of those reports so that we get overall statistics about how the government is doing.
Since the issuance of President Obama's FOIA memo and Attorney General Holder's FOIA guidelines, we have a new reporting requirement that we imposed on agencies, and that's to complete every year a chief FOIA officer report. That report is a narrative, and it's a detailed narrative description of all the steps that the agency has taken to implement the presumption of openness. It has required elements that need to be addressed, like the agency's use of technology, what steps they're taking to improve proactive disclosures of information.
So we wanted to take the key elements of President Obama's and Attorney General Holder's openness principle and give agencies the ability to showcase to the public and to the department the steps they're taking to learn from one another by looking at each other's reports. And we have the same sort of process in my office, where we've given guidance on how the reports should be completed. As part of our training, we encourage agencies to do things that they then know they have the satisfaction of being able to report in their chief FOIA officer report. We also then create a summary. Last year was of course the first time that we had a chief FOIA officer report, so then we created an extensive summary of how agencies did in implementing the new guidelines, and we gave new guidance to agencies to move us now to the next step down the road. Those things together are the ways we conduct oversight.
The last thing I wanted to mention is that at the Department of Justice we had our own open government plan. As our flagship initiative under the plan, we have developed a brand-new website that's going to be called FOIA.gov. It's a website that's devoted to all things FOIA, and it combines our leadership and our policy role with FOIA. It's totally developed by DOJ. But it was born from the results of when we were developing our open government plan. We got ideas from the public, and this was one of the most voted on suggestions for a flagship initiative for DOJ.
There are two main elements to this new FOIA website that we're going to be launching actually in the next couple of weeks. First of all, what the website does is take all that detailed data that I was just mentioning that's collected in annual FOIA reports, and it displays all the data graphically. This means that you can go into this website and compare data, mash data, compare across agencies, and compare over time, and be able to see graphically how agencies are doing.
For example, if you just wanted to compare the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and you wanted to see which of those agencies gets the most requests, and which of those processes the most requests, you can select those three agencies, select their criteria that you want to look at, and the data will pop up in graphs, and you'll see graphs showing the differences between the agencies. You can compare and contrast in a myriad of ways. It really makes the data living and meaningful. We think it's a really nice way to shine a light on agencies' FOIA compliance.
And one of the things we're going to do in our management role is we're going to run reports ourselves and then post them on the site so that we can highlight the five top agencies that have made the most releases of record, or the agencies that have reduced their backlog most significantly. So we'll highlight different things that we think are useful for people to see and that will also in turn be an encouragement to agencies to try to race to the top so that they can get on one of our lists of the top five.
Secondly, FOIA.gov will have an educational component. We have a full description on the website of how the FOIA works, what to expect when you make a FOIA request, where to make your FOIA request. We have contact information for all 97 agencies. We have the names of officials you can call in each agency when you have questions about your request. We have the websites of each agency. We also even have videos embedded in the website so that we can explain just in conversational tone and terms how the FOIA works, what exemptions are, what the process is. We think that aspect of the website is very valuable in terms of educating the public to help them understand what to expect and then also to make it easier for them to know how and where to make a FOIA request. So we're really looking forward to launching that new website in the next couple of weeks.