Ctr. to Advance Sec. in Am. v. USAID (D.D.C.) — granting the agency’s unopposed motion for a stay due to the “extremely limited” number of “USAID personnel available to work on Freedom of Information Act” matters—specifically, “three direct hire FOIA staff” and “nine institutional support contractors”; noting that USAID “cite[d] no authority in support of its request” for a stay, but understanding the request to arise under Open America; noting further that “the Court is skeptical that an agency can avoid its obligations under FOIA . . . by simply implementing a reduction-in-force . . . [or] more generally, by reducing the agency’s overall FOIA staff ‘by half,’” especially when there are no “external impediments to meeting the statutory requirements, such as a lack of funding from Congress or an unanticipated volume of requests that has overwhelmed the FOIA office”; warning that the stay is entered in large part because it is unopposed and “that this decision should not be understood to forecast how the Court is likely to resolve an opposed request for a stay under similar circumstances or a request by Plaintiff to lift the stay.”
Malik v. DHS (D.D.C.) — granting in part and denying in part the government’s motion for summary judgment, and denying the requester’s cross-motion; concluding, in large part, that the defendant-agencies conducted adequate searches for records concerning requester, notwithstanding the requester’s insistence they overlooked “materials which are known to exist”; upholding the agencies’ exemption claims based on the deliberative process, attorney-client, and attorney work-product privileges, as well as Exemptions 6, 7(C), and 7(E); yet also rejecting USCIS’s application of Exemption 7 to a “Memo for the Record” concerning the requester’s employment application because, as a “mixed-function agency,” the agency had failed to meet its burden to show how the record was “compiled for a law-enforcement purpose”; ordering USCIS to produce a supplemental affidavit addressing its law-enforcement functions vis-a-vis the contested memo or to proffer more detailed explanation for the applicability of Exemption 5.
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.