The U.S. Department of Education has posted its annual FOIA report for fiscal year 2022, and much of the news is not great. Here are the highlights:

• 2372 requests received and 1462 processed, a deficit of 910 requests. In FY 2021, the Department processed more requests (2292) than it received (2151) .

• The request backlog soared from 697 in FY 2021 to 1557 in FY 2022, a staggering 123 percent increase.

• Total processing costs dropped from $9.5 million to $8.6 million, a 9.4 percent decrease.

• Overall agency response time for all processed perfected requests was an average of 5.6 days for “simple” requests and 182 days for “complex” requests.

• $19,515 of processing fees were collected, which is less than one quarter of one percent of the Department’s processing costs.