EDGI and Toxic Docs are collecting thousands of internal government documents on the environment obtained by public interest groups through the Freedom of Information Act.
Environmental records
About the project
Welcome to Enviro FOIA, a collaborative project of EDGI, Toxic Docs, and the Sierra Club. Our collection contains over 36,000 internal government documents on the environment obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by environmental and open government groups. The records come from requests made from 2016 to the present to agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, the Office of Management and Budget, and others.
Documents released through FOIA can be hard to access. Often, they remain in the possession of the requester or on an agency's FOIA portal, many of which are cumbersome to navigate. Enviro FOIA is a repository designed to address these issues by aggregating documents from a coalition of public-interest groups and incorporating useful tools such as keyword searchability and an index.
Enviro FOIA is a sub-project of Toxic Docs, a dataset and website that contains corporate documents about asbestos, polyvinyl chloride, lead, and other chemicals made available via toxic tort litigation. Enviro FOIA includes email correspondence between agency leaders and external organizations and lobbyists, agency staffing lists, documents detailing grant cancellations, and more.
The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program leads an Environmental FOIA Coordinating Group, whose members submit FOIA requests and share the documents they receive.
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) supports document processing by aggregating, cataloging, and uploading documents to Enviro FOIA. Members of EDGI are also writing FOIA requests and contributing the documents received to Enviro FOIA.