Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Def./Sec’y, GS 14, Alexandria, VA, closes 5/13/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Air Force, Maxwell AFB, AL, closes 5/15/26 (non-public).
Sup. Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OIP, GS 15, Wash., DC, closes 5/24/26 (public).
Att’y Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OPR, GS 14-15, Wash., DC, closes 6/2/26 (public).
Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OIP, GS 13-14, Wash., DC, closes 6/5/26 (public).
Federal jury convicts Alexandria man on charges relating to the deletion of U.S. Government databases
U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia
May 7, 2026
A federal jury convicted Sohaib Akhter, 34, of Alexandria, today on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, password trafficking, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.
According to court records and evidence presented at trial, Sohaib Akhter, and his twin brother and co-defendant, Muneeb Akhter, worked for a Washington, D.C., company that provided software products and services to more than 45 federal government agencies and hosted data for some federal government clients on servers in Ashburn. On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.
Read more here.
Energy & Policy Inst. v. TVA (6th Cir.) -- in a case concerning TVA’s communications with two industry groups, the Climate Legal Group and the Power Generation Air Coalition (which were coordinated by a law firm), as well as a TVA insurance policy with AEGIS, affirming in part, reversing in part, and remanding; finding that: (1) the district court correctly upheld agency’s Exemption 4 withholdings for CLG legal updates, membership lists, PGen recruitment materials, and AEGIS insurance policy terms, but erred in upholding withholdings of purely logistical documents and the name of the AEGIS negotiating representative, for which TVA articulated no foreseeable commercial harm; (2) Exemption 6 protected individual names and email addresses but not company names or email domain names; and (3) reversing the denial of attorneys' fees because TVA's mid-litigation release of documents was a "voluntary or unilateral change in position" even though the submitter prompted the release, because "the choice to release documents is TVA's own."
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Democracy Forward Found. v. SSA (D. Md.) -- denying plaintiff's motion for partial summary judgment in a case involving fee waiver denials on three of four FOIA requests; holding that the court lacked jurisdiction under FOIA to review the SSA's fee waiver denials because the SSA had imposed fees pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1306(c), a separate statute that applies "[n]otwithstanding" FOIA and permits the agency to charge requesters the full cost of responding to requests not directly related to the administration of Social Security programs; noting that FOIA's judicial review provision extends only to "action by a requester regarding the waiver of fees under this section," meaning FOIA itself, and that fees imposed under § 1306(c) fall outside that provision; rejecting plaintiff's argument that jurisdiction was conferred by SSA's own regulations, which purported to make § 1306(c) fee waiver decisions subject to judicial review under FOIA, because 'a regulation cannot grant a federal court jurisdiction when Congress has not done so.'"
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Welter v. U.S. Dep't of the Air Force (D.D.C.) -- in a case where plaintiffs sought Air Force records relating to a child abuse and neglect investigation, granting in part and denying in part both parties' cross-motions for summary judgment; concluding that the Air Force properly invoked Exemption 5's deliberative process privilege for portions of emails and Family Advocacy Program records containing questions, advice, and give-and-take discussion about how to proceed with the investigation, but improperly redacted purely factual information that merely recounted events or consisted of directives from superiors to subordinates, noting that "directions to deliberate do not themselves constitute deliberation"; concluding further that the Air Force adequately demonstrated foreseeable harm by explaining that disclosure would chill candid internal discussions and discourage witnesses from reporting abuse; and lastly, rejecting the Air Force's reliance on Exemption 2 to withhold an email concerning its policy for contacting patients, because under Milner v. Dep't of the Navy, 562 U.S. 562 (2011), Exemption 2 covers rules about personnel, not rules "for personnel to follow in the discharge of their governmental functions."
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Malone v. USPTO (4th Cir.) -- affirming the district court's grant of summary judgment to the agency in a case where plaintiff sought records relating to a Patent Trial and Appeal Board proceeding, including draft opinions circulated to nonpanel judges, and ruling that: (1) disputed draft decisions and related emails were categorically predecisional and deliberative and thus properly withheld under Exemption 5; (2) PTAB's practice of circulating draft opinions to nonpanel judges did not constitute ex parte communications, as that term refers to communications between a party and a decisionmaker, not between two judges, and (3) no government misconduct exception exists under Exemption 5, but even if it did, plaintiff’s argument that PTAB’s circulation of draft opinions constitutes government misconduct was “utterly unsupported by law.”
Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia Univ. v. DHS (D.D.C.) -- granting in part and denying in part the agencies' motion for summary judgment in a case concerning border searches of electronic devices, and holding that: (1) DHS properly invoked Exemption 5's deliberative process privilege to withhold legal analyses in a “CRCL Impact Assessment,” rejecting the requester's argument that the privilege fails absent an identifiable final decision; (2) CBP failed to demonstrate that purely factual information in statistical spreadsheets could not be segregated and released; (3) CBP did not justify its use of Exemptions 6 and 7(C) to withhold travelers' country of birth, ethnicity, citizenship, and occupation, and ordering supplemental briefing; (4) ICE and CBP properly invoked Exemption 7(E) to withhold search reasons, notification data, aggregate demographic statistics, and internal analyses; and (5) DHS, CBP, and ICE satisfied FOIA's segregability requirement with the narrow exception of one DHS document citing Exemption 5.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Richards v. NSA (W.D. Ark.) -- determining that NSA properly relied on Exemption 1 (and alternatively Exemption 3) in response to pro se plaintiff’s request for records relating to NSA's collection of intelligence on himself and the agency’s “development of ‘mind control, directed-energy weapons, neural interfacing, remote influence, or behavioral engineering.’”
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Biden seeks to block DOJ release of 2017 audio, court filing says
Heritage Foundation FOIA request could produce transcripts and audio from Biden's 2017 book sessions by Tuesday
By Eric Mack, Fox News, May 10, 2026
President Joe Biden's lawyers are expected to object to the Justice Department's release of redacted written transcripts and audio recordings of Biden's 2017 interactions with his book ghostwriter, according to a new court filing.
"President Biden, through counsel, has advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures," Assistant Attorney General Civil Division Brett Shumate wrote in a filing from a Freedom of Information Act request from the Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell. "The Department does not oppose intervention."
There is a Tuesday deadline for Biden's lawyers to respond to the DOJ's release for a response to Howell's FOIA request, which would come shortly after Tuesday if there was no objection.
Read more here.
On May 7, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that it had posted agency FOIA data from their annual FOIA reports for fiscal year 2025 (see FOIA Advisor’s earlier post). Below are some of the key metrics available on the DOJ-run website FOIA.gov.
Requests received: 1,707,197, up 13.7% from 1,501,432 in FY 2024
Top 5 recipients (same order as in FY 2024)
Dep’t of Homeland Sec.: 1,019,496
Dep’t of Justice: 159,743
Dep’t of Veterans Affairs: 124,435
Dep’t of Def.: 77,423
Dep’t of Health & Human Serv.: 55,006
Requests processed: 1,635,055, up 9% from 1,499,265 in FY 2024
Backlogged requests: 339,671, up 28.2% from 264,816 in FY 2024
Notable increases
Office of Personnel Mgmt.: 698% (207 to 1652)
Office of Mgmt. & Budget: 150.6% (909 to 2278)
Dep’t of Veterans Affairs: 130.6% (1539 to 3549)
Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau: 123.9% (142 to 318)
U.S. Agency for Int’l Dev.: 88.7% (593 to 1119)
Dep’t of Education: 85.9% (2458 to 4570)
Appeals received: 32,059, up from 20,115 in FY 2024
Appeals processed: 23,108, up from 18,575 in FY 2024
Backlogged appeals: Total not available
Total costs: $661,394,858, down 8.5% from 723,415,561 in FY 2024
Processing costs: $610,670,216
Litigation-related costs: $50,724,642
Total No. of Full Time FOIA Staff: 4823, down 14.3% from 5628
Total amount of fees collected: 2,511,193, up from 2,434,243 in FY 2024
Agency Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report Data Published on FOIA.gov
DOJ/OIP, FOIA Post, May 7, 2026
The Office for Information Policy (OIP) is pleased to announce that all agencies subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Justice Department has published all of the data from these reports on FOIA.gov.
Since its initial launch in 2011, FOIA.gov has served as a dashboard of all agencies' Annual FOIA Report data. Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, the time taken to process them, and much more. The data from these Annual FOIA Reports is then published on FOIA.gov, allowing the public to easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time. Users can search for individual agency or component data, compare data from several agencies, and gather government-wide data. The results can be viewed on the page or downloaded as a .csv file.
From the data published on FOIA.gov, we can see that demand for FOIA continued in FY25, surpassing 1.7 million requests received, which is a 13% increase compared to FY24. The number of FOIA requests received has steadily increased every year since FY20. In the face of this demand, agencies processed a record high of 1.6 million requests, a 9% increase in the number processed compared to FY24. OIP is compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY25, which will provide a further breakdown of this data. Agencies have been posting their Chief FOIA Officer Reports, which provide helpful context for the statistics reported in the Annual FOIA Reports and detail agencies’ work in key areas of FOIA administration. OIP will also provide an assessment of agency FOIA management based on key metrics from both reports.
We encourage everyone to visit FOIA.gov to view each agency's data as well as government-wide FOIA statistics.
Read original post here.