FOIA News: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

As of 9:56am 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 opinions issued Mar. 2 & 3, 2026

March 2, 2026

Slaughter v. Dep’t of the Air Force (D.D.C.) — ordering the agency to file supplemental declarations concerning the adequacy of its search for records, but granting the its motion for summary judgment as to the withholding of a video under Exemption 1; noting how “[t]he government has not provided details regarding the scope or methods of the initial search that was conducted before [the requester] filed suit, nor has it attempted to defend the adequacy of that search”; rejecting the agency’s argument that “supplemental searches conducting after this litigation began fulfilled its FOIA obligations”; with respect to Exemption 1, agreeing with the requester that the agency’s declaration is lacking in its description of “what portion of the information . . . is non-exempt and how that material is dispersed throughout” the video, but “binding D.C. Circuit precedent hold that the Court is to presume . . . no intelligible segments of non-exempt information can be reasonably segregated.’”

Pub. Emps. for Envtl. Resp. v. Envtl. Prot. Agency (D.D.C.) — in a pair of consolidated cases regarding records about suspected chemical contamination, and a reverse-FOIA claim to block their disclosure, granting the plaintiff’s motion to complete the administrative record; concluding the agency must include “initial Confidential Business Information (CBI) Substantiation Forms” provided by a submitter-company, as they reflect the submitter’s efforts to “substantiate its confidentiality claims,” as required by relevant statutes and agency regulations, and because the forms were used by the agency “to identify records to withhold in response to” the FOIA requests at issue; explaining that “[w]hether [the submitter’s] claims [against disclosure] are of any merit is a question left to be decided at summary judgment, but adequate review calls for evaluation of EPA’s treatment of the initial CBI substantiations.”

Haleem v. Dep’t of Def. (D.D.C) — denying a requester’s motion for fees; holding, firstly, that the requester was “eligible for fees” on a catalyst theory; noting the evidentiary record “shows an imperfect process replete with ‘administrative errors,’” “mismarked FOIA referrals,” and a “ten-month” gap where the agency “provides no explanation of its activities”; concluding, however, that the requester was not “entitled” to an award because there was no public benefit in disclosure, and the requester was motivated by a “substantial private interest in bringing . . . suit.”

March 3, 2026

Informed Consent Action Network v. Nat’l Insts. of Health (D.D.C.) — in a case concerning access to records about the “removal of early COVID-19 genetic sequencing data from an NIH-administered database,” granting the agency’s motion for summary judgment; concluding that NIH properly invoked Exemption 6 to withhold two categories of records: (1) identifying information for “Chinese researchers” who “submitted data to the BioSample and SRA databases and later requested withdrawal of that data,” and (2) “identifying information for NIH employees who work on the SRA database”; noting substantial privacy interests were implicated, in part, due to the agency declarant’s citation to stories of “threats of violence” and “harassment” against individuals working on “controversial research”; rejecting the requester’s argument that the identifying information at issue was “‘key’ to understanding ‘the origins’ of the COVID pandemic and ‘how to prevent a public health crisis in the future’”; finally, concluding the agency satisfied the foreseeable-harm standard and its obligation to reasonably segregate non-exempt portions of records.

Barth v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — granting the agency’s motion for summary judgment against a pro se requester seeking records about himself, while also denying the requester’s motions for recusal and reconsideration; holding, in relevant part, that DOJ’s Office of Information Policy conducted an adequate search for records.

Am. Oversight v. U.S. Agency for Int’l Dev. (D.D.C.) — dismissing claims brought under the Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act concerning USAID’s alleged failure to preserve, or seek to recover, federal records, namely, “employee and contractor records” on government-issued electronic devises, certain other “physical records,” and “records stored on USAID’s website,” as nonjusticiable; rejecting the plaintiff’s theory of standing, which was predicated on “imminent threat of future injury from improper destruction or removal of relevant records” that would be responsive to its pending FOIA requests, which were also the subject of the instant litigation and have not been dismissed; describing portions of the plaintiff’s case as “speculative at best” vis-a-vis redressability.

Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.

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.