FOIA Advisor's Allan Blutstein Interviewed by Racket News

Do Your Own Research: How to File Your Own Freedom of Information Requests

By Greg Collard, Racket News, Mar. 18, 2024

Public records are a key part of Racket’s library project—not just for the stories we cover, but as a resource to help you access the records that matter to you. I figured talking to a guy with “FOIA” as his vanity license plate would be a good place to start.

Allan Blutstein helps run a site called FOIA Advisor. It’s a labor of love among Blutstein and two others that he jokes is funded by his credit card. All three are involved in conservative politics for their day jobs, but FOIA Advisor is for anyone. It has a roundup of FOIA news, FOIA-related court cases, links to searchable FOIA regulations for federal agencies, samples of FOIA appeal letters by conservative and liberal groups, FOIA letter-generator sites, and electronic reading rooms where you can access records and see what other people are requesting.

Read the whole interview.

FOIA Commentary: Major news outlets misreport recent steps in FOIA case about Prince Harry’s immigration records

Recently, several major news sources have published articles claiming that a federal judge "ordered the Department of Homeland Security to “release Prince Harry’s immigration records.” NBC News, for example, reported that the release of these records could reveal the Duke of Sussex’s “prior drug use before coming to America.” USA Today filed a similar story.

These reports are incorrect, as FOIA Advisor’s Ryan Mulvey explained on X, formerly known as Twitter. The confusion appears to stem from a misreading of the district court docket and Judge Carl Nichols’s ruling on the Heritage Foundation’s motion for reconsideration.

In September 2024, Judge Nicholas ruled against Heritage, as FOIA Advisor thrice reported (here and here and here). Heritage subsequently moved for reconsideration, arguing that the court had failed to review the government’s in camera filings (as well as a transcript of an ex parte hearing), which were sealed from Heritage and the public docket. Looking to D.C. Circuit caselaw, Heritage maintained that Judge Nicholas should have reviewed these filings to ensure everything that could be made public was accessible.

Judge Nichols granted the motion for reconsideration in part roughly one month ago. He directed the government to provide its position on “whether and to what extent (1) the declarations it provided in camera, (2) the transcript of the in camera hearing, [(3)] the Court’s August 15, 2024 Order, and/or (4) additional parts of the Memorandum Opinion can be redacted and made available to Heritage.”

This past weekend, upon consideration of the government’s recommended disclosures, the court directed DHS to lodge those redacted versions on the public docket. The documents should be available tomorrow, March 18th. Notably, the court accepted DHS’s contention that no further portion of the memorandum opinion granting summary judgment to the agency could be released.

Although there might be some very minimal amount of information substantively related to Prince Harry contained in the documents to be released by DHS, it will almost certainly not be anything that could be protected by Exemptions 6 and 7(C). More importantly, these records will not constitute Prince Harry’s immigration file or “visa records”—they are simply the supporting declarations and court transcripts created in the course of litigating Heritage’s case.

FOIA News: DOJ upgrades online FOIA tool

Upgraded FOIA.gov Search Tool Delivers Improved Results

By DOJ/OIP, FOIA Post, Mar. 17, 2025

The FOIA.gov Search Tool was recently upgraded to leverage advancements in machine learning. This upgrade is expected to significantly improve the results and resources it delivers to the public.  Initially launched in October 2023, the Search Tool helps users locate already-public information or the correct agency to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Sunshine Week activities

Here is a calendar of events being held during Sunshine Week and beyond. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy has not announced a public event, which it traditionally holds on the first Monday.

FOIA News: CFO Council issues white paper on FOIA job series

By DOJ/OIP, FOIA Post, Mar. 14, 2025

A white paper issued by the Chief FOIA Officer (CFO) Council Committee on Cross-Agency Collaboration and Innovation (COCACI) has been published on FOIA.gov.  The white paper, written by COCACI’s Working Group for Standardizing the Government Information Specialist (GIS) Position (Working Group), presents its findings and recommendations on ways to standardize the GIS job series.

The Working Group surveyed FOIA practitioners and agency executives about four key areas: work demographics, FOIA experience, workplace environment, and career plan.  Taking the data from this research, the Working Group held conversations with FOIA leadership at several federal agencies, with the goal of identifying existing approaches in improving the professionalization and standardization of qualifications for FOIA professionals and determining the transferability of these approaches to the GIS job series. Additionally, the Working Group aimed to understand what made a FOIA program successful, what challenges were faced by FOIA programs, and how a cross-agency approach could improve a FOIA, and therefore GIS, professional’s career.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Be on the lookout for CFO Reports

Agencies are required to publish their 2025 Chief FOIA Officer Reports online by March 17, 2025. These reports contain detailed descriptions of the steps taken by agencies to improve FOIA compliance and transparency.

FOIA News: FDA's FOIA director departs

Sarah Kotler, FDA’s FOIA Director, announced via LinkedIn that she has left the agency after 22 years. Ms. Kotler served on the federal FOIA Advisory Committee for the 2018-2020 term, where her biography notes that she also “was an attorney with the FDA's Office of Chief Counsel and, before that time, an attorney in private practice.”

FOIA News: DOGE moves for reconsideration in FOIA case

The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, moved for reconsideration on Friday evening in a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) case brought by Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington. The government seeks to reverse a district court judge’s prior ruling that it must process CREW’s FOIA request on an expedited basis. Judge Cooper had concluded that DOGE was, in fact, likely an “agency” as defined by the FOIA. Yet that decision—which has not gone uncriticized—was based mostly on factual information gleaned from CREW’s filings and anonymously sourced media reports. The government, for its part, had offered almost no argument about DOGE’s non-agency status when opposing CREW’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

The government’s start-of-weekend motion for reconsideration focuses, principally, on the district court’s “fundamental[] misapprehen[sion] [of] the structure of USDS” and its ostensible “conflat[ion] [of] the responsibilities assigned to USDS within the Executive Office of the President and DOGE teams within agencies.” The DOGE also protests CREW’s efforts to force a “novel and significant” merits question “in a preliminary posture on an expedited basis.” Indeed, the EOP component insists the court’s ruling “implicates substantial separation of powers” issues and “imposes a significant burden” on an entity with “no FOIA apparatus in place and no personnel or resources allocated for processing FOIA requests.” And all this comes on top of what the government claims was the court’s adoption of a novel theory of irreparable harm not even advanced by CREW in its original motion, let alone briefed fully by the parties. Notably, the DOGE motion is accompanied by a declaration from its now-publicly identified administrator, Amy Gleason.

The DOGE motion for reconsideration is opposed. FOIA Advisor will bring you an update on this important and interesting case once further argument from CREW is filed.

FOIA News: The worst FOIA responses of 2025

The 2025 Foilies: Recognizing the worst in government transparency

By Elec. Frontier Found. & MuckRock News, Detroit Metro Times, Mar 13, 2025

The public’s right to access government information is constantly under siege across the United States, from both sides of the political aisle. In Maryland, where Democrats hold majorities, the attorney general and state legislature are pushing a bill to allow agencies to reject public records requests that they consider “harassing.” At the same time, President Donald Trump’s administration has moved its most aggressive government reform effort — the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — outside the reach of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while also beginning the mass removal of public data sets.

One of the most powerful tools to fight back against bad governance is public ridicule. That’s where we come in: Every year during Sunshine Week (March 16-22) the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MuckRock, and AAN Publishers team up to publish The Foilies. This annual report — now a decade old — names and shames the most repugnant, absurd, and incompetent responses to public records requests under FOIA and state transparency laws.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Politics in the court?

‘Double Standard’: DC Court That Shielded John Kerry’s Staff Changed Its Tune When It Came To DOGE

By Thomas English, Daily Caller News Found., Mar. 13, 2025

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to disclose staff identities Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a liberal watchdog group.

The decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, sharply contrasts a September ruling from the same court denying a nearly identical FOIA request by the conservative group, Power the Future (PTF), which sought staff information related to former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry. The conflicting ruling prompted criticism of an alleged double standard in judicial decisions based on the political affiliations of the requesting organizations.

Read more here.