IRS FOIA Backlog Expected to Grow
By Lauren Loricchio & Amanda Athanasiou, TaxNotes, Apr. 3, 2025
The backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests at the IRS and Treasury is expected to increase during President Trump’s second term, amid mounting concerns about the administration’s transparency.
“There was a pretty healthy increase in the volume of FOIA requests” during Trump’s first term, said Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy.
Topic, an attorney who specializes in FOIA litigation, said the first Trump administration failed to do what was necessary to keep up with the volume of requests, and the Biden administration “did absolutely nothing to fix those backlogs.”
The COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to FOIA backlogs at the IRS and other federal agencies.
The number of FOIA requests backlogged at the IRS as of the end of the fiscal year (from the previous annual Treasury FOIA report) has varied, increasing from 605 in 2008 to 916 in 2024, according to data on FOIA.gov. In 2008 there were 1,297 backlogged requests at the end of the fiscal year at Treasury, and in 2024 there were 2,468.
“Backlogs have been a long-standing issue,” Chioma Chukwu of government watchdog American Oversight said, adding that President Obama signed the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, which hasn’t “helped with the backlog in the way one would have thought.”
“It’s still too early to tell how things will play out, but we have reason to believe it will be infinitely worse in the second [Trump] administration,” Chukwu said.
Read more here. [NB: This article contains multiple quotes from FOIA Advisor’s own Ryan Mulvey.]