FOIA News: FOIA boot camp on March 4

Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic will host an in-person FOIA bootcamp with three journalists on March 4, 2025. Read more here.

FOIA News: T-minus 10, 9, 8 . . .

Federal agencies have until March 1, 2025 to post their annual FOIA reports for fiscal year 2024. None of the top five active FOIA agencies have posted their reports yet, namely Homeland Security, Justice, Veterans Affairs, National Archives, or Defense. Other departments on the clock include Agriculture, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development, Labor, Transportation, and Treasury.

FOIA News: Layoffs hit privacy/FOIA personnel

CNN Made FOIA Request About DOGE—Only to Learn FOIA Staff Was Fired

"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped one journalist.

By Eloise Goldsmith, Common Dreams, Feb. 18, 2025

When CNN put in a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of Personnel Management for information related to security clearances for billionaire Elon Musk and other personnel at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency who have been allowed access to sensitive or classified government networks, the outlet got an unexpected response.

"Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team," an OPM email address wrote back, according to Tuesday reporting from CNN. An OPM official told the outlet that the federal government's human resources agency did not layoff the entire privacy team, but did not comment further on the matter.

"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped CBS News journalist Jim LaPorta reacting to the news on X.

Read more here.

Court opinion issued Feb. 14, 2025

Am. Immigration Council v. EOIR (D.D.C.) — granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment, and ordering the agency to undertake a supplemental search; concluding that EOIR “properly understood the scope of Plaintiffs’ FOIA request” to seek “official” documents about immigration court practices, but the agency nevertheless inappropriately limited its search to “solely centrally disseminated records” and improperly excluded records created locally by individual immigration courts and judges; concluding further that certain aspects of EOIR’s search were inadequate.

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

Court opinions issued Feb. 13, 2025

Heritage Found. v. CIA (D.D.C.) — granting the CIA’s motion for judgment on the pleadings with respect to the plaintiff’s expedition request because that request lacked the required certification that the grounds for seeking expedition were “true and correct,” which thus rendered it deficient; rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments that its non-compliance should be excused because “this is not a case where . . . [it] ‘matters’” and it subsequently added the necessary “magic words” in a second request for expedition; noting that the ruling does not impact the requester’s remaining claims and does not foreclose a motion for leave to amend or supplement the Complaint.

S. Envtl. Law Ctr. v. Tenn. Valley Auth. (E.D. Tenn.) — denying the government’s partial motion to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, where the requester attempted to challenge the agency’s search adequacy after filing suit for lack of a timely response; holding that the FOIA’s right to judicial review does not distinguish between “an agency’s compliance with the timeframe clause . . . [and] the disclosure, reasonable search, and/or exemption subparagraph(s)”; noting that “Defendant’s labyrinthine conception of the FOIA seems contradictory to the very purposes for which Congress enacted” the law, and if “the Court [were] to take this argument to its logical conclusion, agencies could short-circuit judicial review through precisely the procedural dynamics of this case: force a requester to seek judicial review by failing to timely respond, disclose some requested material only after a suit is filed, and immediately move to dismiss any potential challenge to the adequacy of the disclosure, itself, on grounds of subject matter jurisdiction.”

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

FOIA News: FOIA Advisory Committee meets on March 6th

The federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee for the 2024-2026 term will meet on March 6, 2025, from 10 a.m. to noon EST, per a Federal Register notice published by the Office of Government Information Services on February 18, 2025. The leadership of the National Archives and Records Administration, the parent agency of OGIS, was recently forced out by the White House.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: Weekly report Feb. 17, 2025

The 90-day hiring freeze imposed by the White House on January 20, 2025, has significantly reduced the number of fillable government FOIA positions. Below are vacancies that appear to be exempt from the freeze.

Paralegal Specialist, Dep’t of Homeland Sec./ICE, GS 7-11, multiple locations, closes 2/21/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Army, GS 12, Fort Belvoir, closes 2/28/25 (non-public).

Gov’t Info. Specialist, Dep’t of the Army, GS 11, Fort Belvoir, closes 2/28/25 (non-public).

Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Homeland Sec./USCG, GS 13-14, Wash., DC, closes 3/3/25 (public).

FOIA News: EEO-1 reports are exempt, argues gov’t to 9th Circuit

Feds urge Ninth Circuit to keep lid on contractor workforce data

The feds say records sought by an investigative nonprofit are commercial in nature and shouldn't be released.

By Michael Gennaro, Courthouse News Serv., Feb. 14, 2025

Federal lawyers on Friday morning asked a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel to reverse a lower court's decision that it must release data on federal contractors to a San Francisco nonprofit.

The fight is specifically over EEO-1 reports. These reports reflect the breakdown by job classification of a company’s workforce by race, ethnicity, and sex.

The Center for Investigative Reporting, a San Francisco nonprofit news organization that investigates and reports on injustices in the United States, had submitted a Freedom of Information Act for reports from 2016 to 2020.

The federal government notified its employees of the request, and nearly 5,000 objected to the release of their information. The government released the remaining reports to the Center for Investigative Reporting, prompting the organization to sue in 2022 for the rest of them.

A federal judge sided with the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2023, ruling that EEO-1 reports were not exempt from disclosure under FOIA. The government appealed, arguing that they were.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Interview with Ryan Mulvey

The Office of Government Information Services has posted an interview with our own Ryan Mulvey as part of a series of OGIS posts on members of the federal FOIA Advisory Committee. Keep up the excellent work, Ryan!

FOIA News: CIA's requests ballooned in FY 2024

The Central Intelligence Agency recently posted its annual FOIA report for fiscal year 2024. Here’s a rundown of the main stats:

• 4087 requests received, a 68 percent increase from FY 2023 (2426 requests).

• 2603 requests processed, a 66 percent increase from FY 2023 (1567 requests)

• Backlogged requests increased 71 percent from 2844 at the end of FY 2023 to 4879 in FY 2024.

• The median and average response times for administrative appeals were 688 days and 838 days, respectively. up more than 40 percent from 472 median days and 586 average days in FY 2023

• The agency denied 105 of 106 requests for expedited processing; it denied 86 of 89 such requests in FY 2023.

• The agency employed 50.73 full-time FOIA staff, incurred nearly $4.7 million in processing costs, and collected zero dollars in fees; in FY 2023, it employed 64.42 fill-time FOIA staff, incurred $5.3 million in processing costs, and collected $40 in fees.