FOIA News: Annual reports remain AWOL

As of 9:48am today, the following departments still have not yet posted their annual reports for FY 2025: Agriculture, HHS, DHS, DOJ, Labor, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

FOIA News: FOIA Advisory Committee meets tomorrow; OIP head will join

The federal FOIA Advisory Committee for the 2024-2026 term will meet remotely on Thursday, March 5, 2026. The meeting material is available here. The Committee will be joined by OIP’s director Sean Glendening, who was recently appointed to the Committee by NARA’s senior advisor to the Archivist.

FOIA News: Def. Nuclear Facilities Bd. finalizes FOIA regs

On March 3, 2026, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued a final rule, effective April 2, 2026, to modernize its FOIA regulations. The update aligns agency procedures with the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and the OPEN Government Act of 2007, among other things. No public comments were received after the agency published a proposed rule on November 24, 2025.

Read the full Federal Register document here.

FOIA News: Where art thou, annual reports?

As of 9:58am today, the following departments have not yet posted their annual reports for FY 2025: Agriculture, HHS, DHS, DOJ, Labor, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

FOIA News: 2025 annual report data due today

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.

Court opinions issued Feb. 25, 2026

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.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: The 4 Tops (It’s the Same Old Song)

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).

FOIA News: Transportation's request backlog up 39% in FY 2025, per report

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.

Court opinion issued Feb. 24, 2026

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.

FOIA News: NARA posts 2025 annual report

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.