FOIA Commentary: White House FOIA Reading Rooms

Recent media reports have included comments from the requester community about the removal of FOIA “reading rooms” from websites of those components of the Executive Office of the President (“EOP”) that qualify as “agencies,” as defined by Section 552(f)(1). Although these electronic libraries were inexplicably unavailable for several weeks—arguably, in violation of the FOIA’s proactive disclosure requirements—all FOIA landing pages have been restored.

There are five EOP “agencies” subject to FOIA. Links to their FOIA pages are provided below.

1. Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”)

2. Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”)

3. Office of Science and Technology Policy (“OSTP”)

4. Office of National Drug Control Policy (“ONDCP”)

5. Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (“USTR”)

To be sure, not all of these components have equally robust reading rooms. All the components have FOIA webpages with details about submitting requests. Further research could reveal whether archived reading rooms from prior Administrations contained more information. At the least, though, the availability of these pages and the restoration of electronic libraries is a promising step towards full FOIA compliance.

[N.B. See our links to all agency Reading Rooms here.]

FOIA News: Further details emerge about HHS FOIA reorganization

Kennedy shutters several FOIA offices at HHS

By Ben Johansen, Politico, Apr. 3, 2025

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services this week shut down several offices tasked with Freedom of Information Act requests, a step billed as consolidation that could weaken transparency as the crucial agency undergoes an unprecedented overhaul, according to four people familiar with the cuts who were granted anonymity to speak freely.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the agencies that had its FOIA office eliminated late Monday night, according to a synopsis of the cuts shared at a CDC staff meeting Tuesday and seen by POLITICO.

Each agency, such as the CDC and FDA, had its own individual FOIA offices, which received thousands of requests per year. Now, in accordance with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reconstruction of the department, HHS will consolidate its FOIA requests into one HHS-wide office, according to a senior HHS official who was granted anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations. Next steps are still in flux.

Read more here.

FOIA News: IRS FOIA Backlog Expected to Grow

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.]

FOIA News: Federal judge enters preservation order in DOGE FOIA case

On April 2, 2025, Judge Beryl Howell, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted American Oversight’s motion for a preservation order in American Oversight v. U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, one of several lawsuits challenging the status of DOGE as an “agency” for purposes of the FOIA. As FOIA Advisor previously reported, DOGE released a copy of its records retention policy under the Presidential Records Act as part of its opposition to American Oversight’s motion.

Among other things, Judge Howell explained in her minute order that, “[n]otwithstanding the fact that DOGE has issued a litigation hold,” its personnel “‘may not fully appreciate their obligations to preserve federal records,’ under either the FOIA or the Presidential Records Act, as ‘many of [the] staffers are reported to have joined the federal government only recently and . . . may not be steeped in its document retention policies,’ . . . which, under FOIA, reaches even those government records stored on private devices[.]” She also noted that “[a]dditional concerns arise due to the fact that DOGE ‘operat[es] with unusual secrecy,’ which includes the use of ‘Signal, an encrypted messaging app with an auto-delete function,’ . . . and has refused to stipulate to its preservation obligations of documents that are at the heart of this litigation.” Finally, Judge Howell reasoned that, “to the extent that DOGE insists that this entity's compliance with the Presidential Records Act . . . is sufficient compliance with preservation obligations in this case” that “only confirms plaintiff's concern about the need for a preservation order since . . . what qualifies as a record and the respective retention obligations differ between the PRA and the FOIA[.]” Moreover, “DOGE's actual compliance with PRA record retention obligations mitigates any burden of DOGE also complying with obligations to preserve records at issue in this case and prevent spoliation of records and information during the pendency of this litigation.”

Court opinions issued Mar. 31, 2025

Campaign Legal Ctr. v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — in a case concerning records about the addition of a “citizenship question” to the census, granting in part and denying in part the parties’ renewed cross-motions for summary judgment on remand; holding that a “10-page email thread between DOJ, Commerce, and White House staff” was properly withheld under Exemption 5 and the deliberative-process privilege, despite post-dating the decision to add the citizenship question to the census, because it was “‘not so much [intended] to explain the agency’s already-decided policy,’ but an ‘iterative weighing of legal and policy concerns’”; holding further that records reflecting discussions about a response to the Washington Post, draft correspondence with a Member of Congress, and inter-agency correspondence were all similarly protected by the deliberative-process privilege; declining, however, to accept the adequacy of the agency’s arguments for the privilege as applied to internal e-mail regarding the census and American Community Survey; noting the agency’s declarations do not “describe the withheld emails with sufficient particularity,” and “[a] one-paragraph explanation without detail, or the document itself [submitted for in camera review], is insufficient”; finally, holding that, while the agency could technically satisfy the requirements to withhold draft responses to interrogatories from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Exemption 5, it had failed to meet the foreseeable-harm standard by not connecting “two comments . . . about two lines of a 24-page” document to the asserted “broader harm of weakened inter agency relationships” or the internal “chill” of agency deliberations.

Webb v. Office of Mgmt. & Budget (D.D.C.) — in a case brought by a “highly vexatious [pro se] litigant,” granting, in relevant part, the government’s motion for summary judgment; holding that OMB conducted an adequate search, and rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments that the agency improperly “characterized his FOIA request as implicating classified records” and failed to locate “records indicating that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory”; noting the plaintiff’s “unsubstantiated assertion that there must be records indicating that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory is the kind of ‘purely speculative claim[] about the existence and discoverability of other documents’ that cannot rebut the presumption of good faith accorded to detailed agency affidavits describing a search.”

Soliman v. Threat Screening Ctr. (D.D.C.) — granting the agency’s motion for summary judgment; holding that the Threat Screening Center (formerly, the Terrorist Screening Center) is a subcomponent of the FBI’s National Security Branch, rather than its own “agency,” and therefore the plaintiff failed to exhaust administrative remedies by filing an appeal challenging the adequacy of the agency’s search for responsive records; notably, the FBI did not raise any specific exhaustion argument in its motion for summary judgement, but only as a defense in its answer.

Aviation Servs. LLC, et al. v. Small Bus. Admin.; Russo, et al. v. Small Bus. Admin. (N.D. Cal.) — in a pair of consolidated cases concerning the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan (“EIDL”) program, granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; holding, firstly, that the agency’s failure to provide timely determinations did not, in and of itself, provide grounds for any declaratory or injunctive relief, particularly since the plaintiffs failed to plead any “policy or practice” claim; also holding that the agency, in large part, conducted an adequate search, but reserving judgment as to certain aspects of the reasonableness of the search methodology due to deficient supporting declarations; directing the agency to provide more detail about certain search terms and to run some supplemental searches; concluding the agency properly withheld case file notes under Exemption 5, in conjunction with the deliberative-process privilege, and that it properly withheld the bank account numbers of individual EIDL applicants under Exemption 6; yet also ruling the agency could not use Exemption 6 to withhold either the names and addresses of loan program participants, or the bank account numbers of “non-personal entities,” i.e., any “company or business entity”; rejecting the agency’s categorical use of Exemption 6 to withhold third-party EIDL application information, including aggregate statistical data, because the agency had not made the necessary showing that “all responsive information” refers to “individually-owned or closely-held businesses” or would otherwise be personally identifying; concluding the agency correctly used Exemption 4 to withhold a company’s “confidential unit pricing”; finally, rejecting the requesters’ “reading-room” claims for failure to meet the “threshold” requirement of describing what records have not been made available under 552(a)(2)(B)-(C) in the agency’s FOIA library.

Jewish Legal News, Inc. v. Dep’t of Educ. (N.D. Cal.) — granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; holding the requester lacked standing to challenge “certain redactions and withholdings in the FOIA response that were originally made in response to previous FOIA requests” and only “[re-]produced here in response” to an item of the request at issue; holding also that the agency properly applied Exemption 5 and the deliberative-process privilege, except with respect to emails that reflect communications with persons using “accounts outside the government”; rejecting the agency’s contention that such non-government accounts may have been White House employees as unsupported by adequate specificity in its Vaughn index; concluding the agency properly applied Exemptions 6 and 7(A); rejecting the plaintiff’s policy-and-practice claim predicated on the agency having taken “several months to process and produce documents on a rolling bases,” and explaining that productions are distinct from a “determination,” which is what must be provided within a specified timeframe; denying without prejudice the requester’s motion to the extent it alleged a failure to conduct an adequate search or to reasonably segregate non-exempt material from the records at issue.

Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.

FOIA News: Senate Judiciary Committee announces FOIA hearing

The U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary has announced a full committee hearing on FOIA that will take place on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 10:15am. The hearing is entitled: “The Freedom of Information Act: Perspectives from Public Requesters.” Complete details, as well as live video of the hearing on April 8th, can be found here. A witness list has not yet been released.

FOIA News: DOGE releases records retention policy in ongoing FOIA battle

As it stands, FOIA Advisor has identified four pending lawsuits that involve a fight over whether the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” is an “agency,” as defined at 5 U.S.C. § 552(f)(1). In one of those lawsuits—American Oversight v. U.S. DOGE—the requester has moved for a preservation order. The government filed its opposition to that motion on Thursday evening. DOGE’s argument focuses on its claimed status as a non-agency component of the Executive Office of the President, which would make it subject to the Presidential Records Act. It also highlighted existing efforts to preserve records pursuant to an official records retention policy and a litigation hold. Notably, DOGE filed a copy of its records retention policy, which appears to have gone into force at the beginning of the week—March 25, 2025.

FOIA News: Roughly 58,000 documents at issue in CREW's DOGE FOIA suit

According to a notice filed on Thursday evening, the government estimates that “approximately 58,000 documents” maintained by the U.S. DOGE Service are responsive to a FOIA request being litigated by Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington. DOGE explained it “has not yet been able to conduct a review for responsiveness, and deduplication.” The parties continue to contest whether DOGE is an “agency” for purposes of the FOIA, but the presiding judge has already denied the government’s recent motion for reconsideration on that very question, thus leaving in place a preliminary injunction compelling DOGE to process CREW’s request for the time being. FOIA Advisor has previously covered developments in this case. Just over a week ago, DOGE filed its motion for summary judgment, which should be decided on an expedited basis.

FOIA News: ASAP's Sunshine Week Webinar on "FOIA Court Cases"

The American Society of Access Professionals has published a video recording of its recent Sunshine Week webinar on developments in FOIA caselaw. The presenters were FOIA Advisor’s own Ryan Mulvey (who also serves as ASAP President), and Michael Heise of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A complete list of the cases covered in the webinar, with summaries and citations, can be found here.

Court opinions issued Mar. 24-26, 2025

Mar. 24, 2025

Cohodes v. Dep’t of Justice (N.D. Cal.) — after awarding $180,808.50 in attorney’s fees, and following supplemental briefing precipitated by plaintiff having “estimated [certain] fees in the initial fees motion and document[ing] them only in the reply,” granting plaintiff an additional $73,948.95 “in fees for [its] fees motion” because “the hourly rates and hours spent are reasonable”; rejecting the government’s request to apply an across-the-board reduction; in total, awarding the requester $254,757.45.

Basey v. Dep’t of Justice (D. Alaska) — holding the agency conducted a reasonable search given the “context of [the requester’s] broad request”; describing the execution of searches in the components “most likely to have responsive records,” as well as the FBI’s separate search as recipient of a referral from EOUSA; noting the requester’s “allegations of bad faith rest on innuendo” and rest on “purely speculative claims about the existence and discoverability of other documents”; holding also that the government properly applied: (1) Exemption 3, in conjunction with the Child Victims’ & Child Witnesses’ Rights Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3509(d), to withhold “‘interviews of a minor victim and explicit media involving’ child sexual abuse,” (2) Exemption 5 and the deliberative-process privilege, together with Exemptions 6 and 7(C), to withhold records pertaining to interviews of victims abused by the requester, and (3) Exemption 7(E) to withhold records concerning the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team and Cyber Division’s Innocent Images National Initiative Program.

March 25, 2025

Heritage Found. v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — in a case where the parties contested the proper meaning of the term “request,” denying the government’s motion for summary judgment and adopting the plaintiff’s proposed interpretation; holding that the FBI improperly split-up the plaintiff’s three-item FOIA request into three separate “requests”; explaining that, despite the agency having issued timely adverse determinations on two of the three parts, the requester was not required to exhaust administrative remedies as to those denials (and the separate denial of a fee waiver) before filing suit on the entirety of its submission after the agency failed to provide a timely response to the third item; suggesting that common usage, relevant caselaw, and statutory context all point to “request” best “refer[ring] to an overall FOIA submission,” rather than individual parts of a multi-item “submission”; noting that, while FOIA provides explicit authority to aggregate or consolidate distinct requests, there is no mention of splitting-up a request; expressing skepticism towards the agency’s contention that ruling for the plaintiff would “allow requesters to strategically circumvent the administrative appeal process.”

Evans v. Cent. Intelligence Agency (D.D.C.) — granting the government’s motion for summary judgment and holding that (1) the CIA’s search for records was adequate, (2) it properly issued a Glomar response pursuant to Exemption 1 as to a portion of the request, and (3) the plaintiff failed to exhaust administrative remedies with respect to the CIA’s use of Glomar with Exemption 3; explaining the plaintiff offered only “mere speculation” about “uncovered documents,” and the agency was not required to “list each system it searched, as opposed to the categories or types of systems”; rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments on the Glomar front, which focused on the level of detail in the agency’s supporting declaration; noting the requester failed to raise any objection in his appeal about the use of Exemption 3 with Glomar.

March 26, 2025

Energy Pol’y Advocates v. Sec. & Exch. Comm’n (D.D.C.) — granting, in part, the government’s motion for summary judgment; holding the agency properly used Exemption 5, in conjunction with the deliberative-process privilege, to withhold calendar entries of a former SEC Chairman; yet concluding that, because many entries in the agency’s Vaughn index lacked adequate specificity and failed to “identify the subject of policy under consideration and instead refer[red] only to policymaking in general,” the agency had not met its burden to justify the withholding of certain e-mail communications between the White House, former SEC Chairman, and senior agency officials; ordering in camera review of the e-mail records; deferring consideration of the agency’s satisfaction of the foreseeable-harm standard for the e-mails, but holding the agency’s argument vis-à-vis the calendar entries was adequate.

Bader Family Found. v. Equal Emp’t Opportunity Comm’n (D.D.C.) — denying the government’s motion for summary judgment and holding various parts of plaintiff’s request were “reasonably described”; explaining two of the request items in dispute “are not vague and have only one reasonable interpretation,” the agency “has not put forward a sufficiently detailed declaration explaining why . . . [responsive] records are difficult to locate,” and “the agency’s declarations do not sufficiently explain how the post-search efforts . . . would be overly burdensome”; similarly, with respect to the third item in dispute, concluding the agency “can reasonably construe [it] without” further clarification or defined terms, it “cannot definitively say [based on the record] . . . that searching for . . . text messages would be unreasonably burdensome,” and it “has not provided sufficient evidence” about “overly burdensome post-search efforts.”

Judicial Watch v. Dep’t of State (D.D.C.) — granting the agency’s motion to dismiss and holding that plaintiff’s request did not “‘reasonably describe’ the records sought” because it “uses vague words and descriptions,” including the phrase “all records related to”; emphasizing, at the same time, that “[t]here is no bright-line rule barring FOIA requesters from using the phrase “related to,” and a court’s analysis must focus on “whether the request is otherwise so ‘unusually specific’ that it still manages to satisfy FOIA’s reasonable-description requirement”; noting the plaintiff’s request “lacks any custodial limitation and does not specify the type of records sought”; querying “what . . . [the] other ‘related’ records [are] that the agency must look for if the categories of records identified in the latter part of the request are not sufficient.”

Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.