FOIA News: Here come the FY 2024 Annual Reports

January 6, 2025FOIA News (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

At least twenty-one agencies, including one cabinet department, have published their fiscal year 2024 annual FOIA reports online (see below). Agencies were required to submit their annual reports to DOJ’s Office of Information Policy by November 12, 2024, and the final reports must be published online no later than March 1, 2025. FOIA Advisor will summarize the reports of the most active FOIA agencies—e.g., DHS, DOJ, DOD, NARA, etc.— as they become available. Quarterly FY 2024 data can be found on FOIA.gov.

FY 2024 annual FOIA reports

CFTC

Court Serv. & Offender Supv.

Dep’t of Commerce: 4048 requests received; 3410 processed; 1410 backlogged requests (vs. 1083 FY 23).

Nat’l Indian Gaming Comm’n

Nat’l Mediation Bd.

Office of Gov’t Ethics

Peace Corps

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

Privacy & Civil Liberties Oversight Bd.

Railroad Retirement Bd.

Selective Serv. Sys.

Surface Transportation Bd.

Udall Found.

USAID:

U.S. Int’l Trade Comm’n

U.S. Postal Serv.: 4429 requests received; 4203 processed; 201 backlogged requests (vs. 136 FY 2023).

U.S. Trade Rep.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: Weekly report Jan. 6, 2025

January 6, 2025Jobs jobs jobs (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

Federal positions closing in the next 10 days

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Veterans Affairs/VHA, GS 11-12, White City, OR, closes 1/7/25 (non-public).

Sup. Gov’t Info Specialist, Dep’t of Educ., GS 15, Wash., DC, closes 1/8/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Air Force, GS 9, Ramstein, Germany, closes 1/8/25 (non-public).

Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Transportation/PHMSA, GS 14, Wash., DC, closes 1/9/25 (public)

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Treasury/IRS, GS 13, nationwide, closes 1/10/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., GS 12, Wash., DC, closes 1/10/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Agric./Forest Serv., GS 12-13, Wash., DC, closes 1/10/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of Transportation/FMCSA, GS 9, Wash., DC, closes 1/13/25 (public).

Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Homeland Sec./USCG, GS 13-14, Wash., DC, closes 1/13/25 (public).

Federal positions closing on or after Jan. 16, 2025

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of State, GS 9, Rosslyn, VA, closes 1/21/24 or first 50 applications (non-public).

Att’y Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/Pardon, GS 13-15, Wash., DC, open until filled (public).

FOIA News: FOIA’s worldwide influence

January 2, 2025FOIA News (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

How FOIA Gave Rise to Government Transparency Laws Around the World

Flawed as it may be, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act became a model in transparency for other countries to follow.

By Matthew Petti, Reason, Jan. 2025

It's well-known that the government heavily censors documents before declassifying them—something humorously captured by The Onion in 2005 with the headline, "CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years." But from a glass-half-full perspective, it's incredible that the U.S. government shares information with the public at all. The original Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966—the law under which many of those redacted documents are obtained—was the "product of years of slow campaigning by a network of journalists, scientists, and politicians seeking to make the government more transparent," the historian Sam Lebovic writes in State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime. FOIA was later strengthened in the wake of the Watergate scandals in the 1970s.

FOIA News: How to fix FOIA from the ivory tower

January 2, 2025FOIA News (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

Needed: A Transparency Guardian

Our FOIA system was once the world’s gold standard. Here’s how it became sclerotic—and what we need to do to fix it.

By Margaret Kwoka, Democracy, Winter 2025

* * *

When the Freedom of Information Act was enacted in 1966, it was revolutionary. Its basic premise—that ordinary citizens have a right to know what the government knows—radically reimagined the relationship between the public and the federal government. . . . But more than a half-century after Congress passed this landmark legislation, it is clear that FOIA largely has not—and cannot—live up to its mission.

The core problem is this: There is no arm of the U.S. government that champions transparency. No government agency embodies a transparency mission; no court possesses transparency expertise. FOIA provides a core right for the public to access government records, but it lacks a locus for implementation and enforcement. . . .

Monthly Roundup: Dec. 2024

January 2, 2025Monthly Roundup (2025)Allan BlutsteinComment

Below is a summary of the notable FOIA court decisions and news from last month, as well as a look ahead to FOIA events in January.

Court decisions

We identified and posted 14 decisions in December. Of note was Am. First Legal Found. v. DHS (D.D.C.), a split Exemption 7(C) and 7(E) decision involving data about enforcement actions taken against certain non-citizens. With respect to Exemption 7(C), the court ruled that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement properly withheld names of non-citizens, docket numbers, and full dates of birth, but that it had not justified the blanket withholding of birth months and years, residential addresses by city, state, and country, or gag, cartel, terrorist group affiliations, and monikers. In reaching its decision, the court rejected plaintiff’s threshold argument that non-citizens have no privacy rights under FOIA, noting that plaintiff’s position was unsupported by the statute’s text and case law and would lead to absurd results. As for Exemption 7(E), the court determined that ICE properly withheld precise addresses where at-large, non-citizens could be located, but it failed to justify withholding city, state, and country data. Further, the court found that ICE properly withheld operational details about its past and future attempts to locate non-citizens, as well as “‘apprehension locations of non-citizens attempting to enter the U.S. illegally”; however, ICE fell short with respect to its Exemption 7(E) withholdings of the names of gang, cartel, and terrorist group affiliations, and monikers.

Top news

On December 9, 2024, the Office of Government Information Services issued recommendations on intelligence community records.

The FOIA Advisory Committee for the 2024-2026 term met for the third time on Dec. 5, 2024,

January calendar

Jan. 13, 2025: Deadline for agencies receiving more than 50 requests in FY 2023 to submit their 2025 Chief FOIA Officer Reports to DOJ.

Jan. 14, 2025: D.C. Circuit oral argument in McWatters v. ATF, 24-5083.

Jan, 15, 2025: DOJ Exemption 4 and Exemption 5 Training

Jan. 22, 2025: DOJ Privacy Considerations Training

Jan. 29, 2025: DOJ Administrative Appeals, FOIA Compliance, and Customer Service Training

Jan. 31, 2025: Agency deadline to post FY 2025, Quarter 1 data.

Court opinion issued Dec. 31, 2024

January 2, 2025Court Opinions (2015-2024)Allan BlutsteinComment

TC Co. v. U.S. Forest Serv. (D.N.M.) -- concluding that: (1) plaintiff’s FOIA requests filed after the instant litigation commenced were not properly before the court; (2) agency properly relied on Exemptions 6 and 7(C) to withhold personally identifiable information about employees and third parties; (3) agency conducted adequate search for various records concerning a 2022 wildfire.