Ecological Rights Found. v. Envtl. Prot. Agency (D.D.C.) — in a challenge to the EPA’s 2019 direct final rule implementing various changes to the agency’s FOIA regulations, (1) granting the government’s motion to dismiss several claims on various grounds (lack of standing, failure to state a claim, redressability, and/or statute of limitations)—namely, two substantive claims challenging provisions requiring submission of all requests to the EPA’s National FOIA Office and authorizing the Administrator to issue final determinations, as well as a procedural claim alleging failure to promulgate the rule through notice-and-comment rulemaking; (2) remanding the remaining claim without vacatur to permit the EPA to revise a portion of the rule authorizing the withholding of a “portion of a record on the basis of responsiveness.”

Cause of Action Inst. v. Dep’t of Commerce (D.D.C.) — ruling that: (1) requester had standing to bring policy-and-practice challenge to agency’s allegedly unlawful withholding of Section 232 secretarial reports under Exemption 5, in conjunction with the presidential-communications and deliberative-process privileges, until such time as the President directs disclosure; (2) the same policy-and-practice claim was ripe for review because it required neither “speculation about future application” nor consideration of “the facts of a particular case”; and (3) the claim fails on the merits because secretarial reports required under 19 U.S.C. § 1862(b)—or at least the underlying report requested by the plaintiff—falls “squarely within [the presidential-communications] privilege” as “a confidential report from a Cabinet Secretary to the President, created to advise him on matters of national security and ‘made in the process of shaping policies and making decisions.’”

Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.