Below is our roundup of FOIA court decisions and FOIA news from March 2024, as well as a peek ahead to April.

Court decisions:

We posted 27 decisions in March, the most active month of the year thus far. Of note, the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Leopold v. DOJ (Mar. 1, 2024) reminded agencies that they must sequentially analyze exemptions and foreseeable harm, which in this Exemption 8 case the agency failed to do. Although the Circuit stated in passing that the foreseeable harm requirement applied to “all exemptions, except Exemption 3,” a more recent district court opinion correctly pointed out that foreseeable harm would “always” be present when the government properly invokes Exemption 1. James Madison Project v. Office of the Dir. of Nat'l Intelligence (D.D.C. Mar. 26, 2024).

In the interval between the above two cases, the court in Inst. for Energy Research v. FERC (D.D.C. Mar. 13) found that FERC had reasonably defined a “record” as a single text message (as opposed to “threads”) given plaintiff’s request for specific text messages containing certain terms. In reaching its decision, the court relied on DOJ/OIP’s 1995 guidance on determining the scope of a FOIA request.

Top news:

On March 4, 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (DOJ/OIP) announced that federal agencies received more than 1.1 million FOIA requests in fiscal year 2023, surpassing the government’s previous year’s total by nearly 30 percent. As FOIA Advisor reported the day before, the government’s backlog of requests increased slightly from 206,720 to 208,282.

The government released two major reports during ‘Sunshine Week,” which was observed from March 10, 2024, to March 16, 2024. First, on March 12, 2024, DOJ/OIP issued its annual FOIA Litigation and Compliance Report, which indicated among other things that 834 FOIA lawsuits had been filed in calendar year 2023. On the next day, March 13, 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released an 80-page report entitled Freedom of Information Act: Additional Guidance and Reliable Data Can Help Address Agency Backlogs. In sum, GAO recommended that DOJ/OIP develop new guidance to ensure FOIA backlog reduction plans include clear goals, milestones, and timelines.

April lookahead:

April 3: DOJ training, Introduction to the Freedom of Information Act.

April 4: Meeting of the federal FOIA Advisory Commitee.

April 9: D.C. Circuit oral argument in Connell, III v. CIA, 23-5118. The lower court’s decision is here.

April 10: DOJ training, Processing a Request from Start to Finish.

April 17: Meeting of the Chief FOIA Officers Council.