The deadline for agencies to post their annual FOIA reports for FY 2025 was Sunday, March 1, 2026, which effectively is today. As of 9:40am, the heaviest government FOIA lifters, DHS, DOJ, and DOD, have not posted their reports. Nor has the DOJ-operated website FOIA.gov been updated to reflect FY 2025 data.
The Department of State’s recently posted report is not a good omen: its request backlog jumped nearly 30 percent from 21,615 requests to 27,619 requests.
Stay tuned for more updates.
D.V.D. v. Dep’t of Homeland Sec. (D. Mass.) — in a class-action lawsuit concerning the removal of non-citizens to “so-called ‘third countries,’” granting the government’s motion to dismiss a FOIA claim concerning the affirmative disclosure of certain relevant agency guidance both for lack of standing and failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted; concluding, with respect to a dated guidance document, that plaintiffs failed to show “‘they sought and were denied specific agency records,’” and therefore lacked any “sign of a ‘concrete and particularized informational injury’”; yet noting the Court was assuming “a formal request [was] not absolutely necessary”; concluding also, regardless of whether the agency had failed to post the guidance document in its reading room, the plaintiffs already had a copy, which was attached to their complaint, and this “belie[d] any allegation that DHS’s reliance [on the guidance] constitute[d] harmful use of a ‘secret’ law against them”; further rejecting the “reading room” claim as it applied to unspecified “other statements of policy or instructions or guidance,” because it failed to “reasonably describe” the records at issue and, thus, could not provide the government with “fair notice” of what records should even have been proactively disclosed.
Levin v. Nat’l Highway Traffic Safety Admin. (D.D.C.) — granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment in a case involving Exemption 5 and records about NHTSA’s proposed guidelines on “distracted driving”; largely rejecting the agency’s use of the deliberative-process privilege given its failure to “articulate any specific foreseeable harm from release,” as well as its decision instead to apply “boilerplate and generic assertions” to “six broad categories” of records; directing the agency to release these records, as “afford[ing] [the agency] a ‘second chance’ to explain [its] withholding” is unlikely to “aid NHTSA’s case,” especially since it has “already had two bites at the apple” in its opening brief and opposition to the requester’s cross-motion; rejecting certain assertions of the attorney-client privilege due to the agency’s failure to “articulate the connection between the documents withheld and the provision of legal advice,” and where it seems communications are just “strategic or policy discussions in which lawyers are simply included or copied,” or where they “describe logistical information about an attorney’s role in review processes or coordination”; otherwise accepting the agency’s attorney-client privilege arguments, as well as its satisfaction of the foreseeable-harm standard and its efforts to release all segregable factual information; finally, rejecting the agency’s invocation of the attorney work-product doctrine because it failed to “articulate[] any reason why litigation was foreseeable at the time of the creation of these documents.”
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 9, Louisville, KY, closes 3/9/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 9, Charleston, SC, closes 3/9/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Treasury/OFAC, GS 9-13, Wash., DC, closes 3/12/26 (public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Health & Human Serv./CMS, GS 12, Woodlawn, MD, closes 3/12/26 (non-public).
On February 26, 2026, the Department of Transportation released its annual FOIA report for fiscal year 2025. Some of the key figures are below:
20,475 requests received, up from 18,345 requests in FY 2024.
16,941 requests processed, up from 16,080 in FY 2024.
11,250 backlogged requests, up from 8048 at the end of FY 2024.
Response times for all processed perfected requests were about 80 days on average for “simple” requests and 262 days on average for “complex” requests.
Processing and litigation costs totaled $19,639,088; fees collected for processing requests were $92,814.
80 requests for fee waivers were granted and 45 were denied.
51 requests for expedited processing were granted and 429 were denied.
Read more here.
Jensen v. Dep’t of the Navy (D.D.C.) — in a case involving a former Naval Academy midshipman seeking records about his expulsion, granting the government’s motion to dismiss all non-FOIA claims raised in the requester’s complaint; rejecting the Navy’s claim that the Privacy Act’s exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional, but otherwise agreeing that the requester’s failure to exhaust administrative remedies, which would be a “prudential precondition for a record-access claim,” “dooms” his Privacy Act claims here; explaining further, that with respect to the remaining non-FOIA claims that concern the requester’s access to records, the FOIA “provides an adequate remedy” and therefore forecloses relief under the Administrative Procedure Act, the All Writs Act, and the Declaratory Judgment Act.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
The National Archives and Records Administration has issued its annual FOIA report for fiscal year 2025. Here are a few of the highlights:
27,797 requests received, up from 22,590 requests received in FY 2024
27,511 requests processed, up from 23,893 in FY2024
5393 backlogged requests, up from 5107 at the end of FY 2024.
For all processed perfected requests, response times of 15 average days for “simple” requests and 1759 average days for “complex” requests.
8 requests for expedited process granted and 157 requests denied.
204 requests for fee waivers granted and 161 requests denied.
Zero fees collected for processing requests.
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 12, Jackson, MS, closes 2/26/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 11-12, Richmond, VA, closes 2/26/26 (internal only)
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Navy, GS 9, Mechanicsburg, PA, closes 2/27/26 (public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 9, Temple, TX, closes 2/27/26 (non-public).
Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Justice/BOP, GS 12, multiple locations, closes 3/16/26 (non-public).
The deadline for agencies to post their annual reports is less than one week away (3/1/26), and we’re eagerly awaiting the numbers from FOIAs heavy lifters, e.g., DHS, DOJ, DOD, HHS, and NARA. We hope they’ll do better than the General Services Administration with respect to their request backlogs. The key figures are as follows:
Requests received: 2387, up from 1663 in FY 2024
Requests processed: 1841, up from 1632 in FY 2024
Backlogged requests: 945, up from 375 in FY 2024
For all processed perfected requests, response time of 42 average days for simple requests and 192 average days for complex requests.
414 requests for expedited processing received; 64 granted; 350 denied
280 fee waiver requests received; 160 granted and 120 denied
Personnel costs of $2,862,875 versus $43,900 fees collected for processing requests
See more here.
[FOIA Advisor Note: As Allan and Ryan noted in their commentary on the “Top Cases of 2025,” Judge Canon’s preliminary injunction barring disclosure of volume two of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, which was set to expire tomorrow, has figured prominently in ongoing FOIA cases like American Oversight v. Department of Justice, 779 F. Supp. 3d 40 (D.D.C. 2005), and N.Y. Times v. Department of Justice, No. 25-0562, 2025 WL 2549435 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 4, 2025). Judge Canon’s decision now to enter a permanent injunction will presumably keep volume two secret in perpetuity, although it seems likely that advocates for the report’s release will continue to explore legal channels for compelling disclosure.]
Judge blocks release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump classified documents case
Alanna Durkin Richer & Eric Tucker, CNN (Feb. 23, 2026)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday permanently barred the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents that led to charges once seen as the most perilous of the four criminal cases the Republican faced.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, granted a request from the president to keep under wraps the report on an investigation alleging Trump stored sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left the White House following his first term and obstructed government efforts to get them back.
Smith and his team produced a two-volume report on the classified documents investigation and a separate probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Joe Biden. Both investigations produced indictments that were abandoned by Smith’s team after Trump’s November 2024 election win in light of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution.
Attorney General Pam Bondi had already determined that the report was “an internal deliberative communication that is privileged and confidential and should not be released” outside the Justice Department, according to court papers. The Trump administration has characterized Smith’s investigation as politically motivated and said in recent court papers that the report belongs in the “dustbin of history.”
Cannon’s order, however, blocking the release also applies to Bondi’s successors at the Justice Department. Cannon, who in 2024 dismissed the case after concluding that Smith was unlawfully appointed after multiple other favorable rulings for Trump, said the release of the report would present a “manifest injustice” to the president and his two co-defendants.
[. . .]
Read the rest here.
Aaronson v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — in a case involving an investigative journalist’s inquiry into the FBI’s “alleged impersonation of the media,” granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; concluding the FBI properly denied one of the reporter’s requests as “unduly burdensome” because it would have required searching for email records covering “a four-and-a-half-year period” across “more than 70,000 email accounts”; rejecting, in this regard, the requester’s argument that the FBI could “perform bulk, backend searches of its classified and unclassified email systems through its existing IT and e-discovery capabilities”; ruling against the government vis-a-vis its failure to perform an adequate search “in one respect,” namely, looking for potentially responsive records maintained by the Undercover Review Committee; holding moreover that the FBI did not justify its categorical Glomar response based on Exemptions 6 and 7(C) as any records that mention “Brent Tyler”—a pseudonym for an FBI employee—would not implicate those exemptions’ underlying privacy concerns because no “person’s privacy is at stake”; finally, explaining that, after reviewing an in camera declaration from the FBI, if the agency had, in fact, invoked a statutory exclusion, that invocation “was and remains amply justified.”
Khan v. Dep’t of Homeland Sec. (D.D.C.) — granting the government’s motion for summary judgment; holding, firstly, that plaintiffs did not exhaust administrative remedies for two of the requests at issue because they failed to file appeals, and rejecting the requesters’ argument that untimely determinations “alleviated the appeal requirement”; also holding that the government met its burden to show it performed adequate searches for potentially responsive records and noting, contrary to the requesters’ insistence, that there was no evidence of “bad faith”; finally, concluding the agencies properly invoked Exemptions 3, 5, 6, 7(C), and 7(F).
Bradley v. Dep’t of Veterans Affairs (N.D. Fla.) — adopting in full a magistrate judge’s Report and Recommendation and dismissing a pro se, in forma pauperis requester’s FOIA case for “failure to comply with court orders,” namely, directions to file an amended complaint that addressed several pleading deficiencies.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.