FOIA News: Trump critics predict doomsday for transparency

Sunshine Week comes amid darkening clouds for open gov advocates

It's Sunshine Week, but transparency advocates say open government, already in peril, may be reaching a new low under the Trump administration.

By Justin Doubleday, WFED, Mar. 17, 2025

The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) typically marks Sunshine Week, an annual occasion to celebrate open and transparent government, with a public awards ceremony to honor the contributions of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) professionals across government.

This year, however, DoJ OIP appears to have abandoned previous plans to host the annual FOIA awards on March 17. DoJ did not respond to a request for comment.

For open government experts, the cancellation of what was a routine ceremony is just the latest blow in a new assault on government transparency. They point to how the Trump administration has fired FOIA staff, removed public websites and data, terminated 18 inspectors general, and resisted efforts to disclose DOGE records, among other actions.

“I think this is the darkest Sunshine Week within living memory,” Daniel Schuman, chief executive of the American Governance Institute, told me in an interview. “Nothing less than a collapse of open and accountable government is happening all around us.”

Read more here.

[ALB commentary: We’re glad to see our earlier reporting on the growing request backlog and about Sunshine Week echoed here.

Mr. Schuman apparently has a short memory. A mere five years ago in mid-March, the entire country was shut down by COVID-19 and scores of agency FOIA offices were crippled for months—in some cases for all of 2020 and beyond (e.g., the National Archives and Records Administration). Mr. Schuman’s dramatic comment reminds me of a recent observation by Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman about the state of the Democratic Party:  “A sad cavalcade of self owns and unhinged petulance . . . We’re becoming the metaphorical car alarms that nobody pays attention to − and it may not be the winning message.”

Further, Professor Cuillier is off base in claiming that the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy “favors secrecy.” No, OIP is dedicated to faithfully applying the statute, which inconveniently for some open government advocates includes exemptions. The FOIA is not, as many like to say, a “records disclosure statute”; it is a partial disclosure statute. The exemptions are as much a part of FOIA’s purpose as is the general purpose of access.

FOIA News: Top House Democrats are seeking DOGE details under the Freedom of Information Act

Top House Democrats are seeking DOGE details under the Freedom of Information Act

By Lisa Mascaro, Associated Press, Mar. 18, 2025

Top Democrats on the House Judiciary and House Oversight committees have filed a lengthy Freedom of Information Act request questioning whether the Trump administration’s DOGE Service is operating “outside the bounds of federal law,” The Associated Press has learned.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia are seeking detailed information about the authority of the Department of Government Efficiency Service, including billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk and some 40 other people, to carry out firings of federal workers and dismantling of federal agencies.

Read more.

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.