Mar. 25, 2026
Informed Consent Action Network v. Nat’l Cancer Inst. (D.D.C.) — in a case concerning records of the National Cancer Institute’s involvement with the publication and later retraction of a medial journal article, granting in part the government’s motion for summary judgment; holding, first, that the agency’s search for responsive records was reasonable; noting, “that [given] Informed Consent was seeking email communications to and from a particular individual, it is hard to imagine what else the agency could do outside of search that individual’s inbox for the relevant emails,” which was done; further holding that the agency had not yet adequately justified its use of Exemption 4 because it failed to explain the basis for its declarant’s personal knowledge of the relevant medical journal’s privacy practices and, thus, had not established why the records at issue were “confidential”; permitting the agency an opportunity to “file additional evidence” before another round of briefing.
WP Co., LLC v. Nat’l Highway Traffic Safety Admin. (D.D.C.) — granting in part the government’s motion for summary judgment in a case concerning access to records “related to the safety of motor vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems”; holding that NHTSA properly invoked Exemption 4 to withhold “Tesla’s version and narrative information” as found in accident report data, but improperly redacted “information reported by other manufacturers” and “Tesla’s [operational design domain] information”; noting various “confidential treatment requests” from manufacturers, as well as NHTSA’s “subsequent determinations” to treat certain information as confidential, may be “indicative of the entities’ actual and customary treatment, but they are not, without more, sufficient grounds to conclude that the agency met its burden under FOIA”; noting also that, for the “confidential” analysis, what matters is “how the particular party customarily treats the information, not . . . the industry as a whole”; concluding, however, that Tesla’s “own submission fills the factual gaps in the agency’s declaration,” at least for some categories of Tesla-submitted data; rejecting the requester’s argument that Tesla drivers’ access to “individual data points” through their “phone applications or via their car’s touch screen” is sufficient to vitiate the confidentiality of that same information when submitted to the government at an aggregate level; agreeing with “other courts in this district that the government’s assurances of confidentiality are, at a minimum, ‘relevant to the confidentiality analysis,’” and here the agency’s “practice of ‘routinely’ granting Tesla’s requests [for confidential treatment], with few exceptions, established reasonable and actual reliance interests on Tesla’s part”; agreeing also with various courts that the foreseeable-harm standard requires showing how disclosure would “pose ‘genuine harm to the submitter’s economic or business interests . . . thereby dissuading others from submitting similar information to the government’”; holding that, at least with Tesla’s operational design domain information, there remained “a genuine dispute of material fact . . . over whether disclosure . . . would result in reasonably foreseeable harm”; with respect to Exemption 6, as applied to information pertaining to the “specific location of . . . reported crashes, including the latitude, longitude, address, and zip code of the accidents,” concluding the “private interests at stake here appear, at most, barely greater than de minimis because the requested spreadsheet data is not, in and of itself identifying,” and “the public interest that the Post has identified is not insignificant”; ultimately concluding, however, that further information about “the privacy interests at stake” was needed to “properly weigh those interests against the public’s”; finally, holding the agency met its burden vis-a-vis segregability.
Schiff v. Internal Revenue Serv. (D.D.C.) — granting in part and denying in part the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment; concluding the IRS conducted an adequate search for records responsive to plaintiff’s first FOIA request, which concerned a press conference hosted by the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement; laying out how the agency employed its eDiscovery team for an electronic search, as well as directing officials to conduct manual record searches; deciding the agency failed to justify its use of Exemptions 5 (in conjunction with the deliberative-process privilege), 7(A), and 7(E); noting the IRS’s briefing speaks only in “broad strikes” and without any “detail,” and fails altogether to address segregability and foreseeable harm; noting further, with Exemption 7, that the IRS failed even to “specify what investigation or enforcement proceeding disclosure would disrupt” or “what [law enforcement] technique or procedure is ‘at stake’”; with respect to the second FOIA request at issue, holding that plaintiff reasonably described most of the records sought, even if the resulting volume of potentially responsive records might be voluminous, but did fall short of the reasonable-description requirement for one portion of the request seeking any “materials that ‘mention’ the ‘tax authority, or authorities’ of the United States and four other countries.”
Mar. 26, 2026
Office of the Fed. Pub. Defender v. Dep’t of Justice (D.D.C.) — granting in part the government’s motion for reconsideration of a summary-judgment order rejecting DOJ’s use of Exemption 7(E), despite the agency’s continued failure “to meaningfully engage with the text of the exemption and basic line-drawing questions that result from [its] position”; clarifying the previous order does not apply to Exemption “7(E) materials that Plaintiff . . . was not challenging”; further amending the summary-judgment order to hold that the government had established certain categories of information concerning, inter alia, BOP “deputy information,” “means of communications” during inmate “transport,” and other deputy assignment details, reflected law enforcement techniques and procedures given their “nature” or tendency to “reveal generalized procedures” that are part of a broader “Operational Plan”; concluding, moreover, that the government demonstrated “logically how release of the requested information might create a risk of circumvention of the law.”
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.
