Monthly roundup: August 2025

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 September.

We posted and summarized 28 opinions in August. Highlights include two reversals by neighboring appellate courts. In State of Georgia v. Dep’t of Justice (D.C. Cir. Aug. 12, 2025), the D.C. Circuit held that agency communications with outside parties can still fall within Exemption 5 when they consist of attorney work product shared under a common-interest agreement that requires confidentiality. The court explained that while the “consultant corollary” cases help show why “intra-agency” should be read broadly, they do not control in this different setting. It further held that, except for two early emails sent before the common-interest agreement was finalized, the records were properly protected as attorney work product and DOJ had not waived that protection.

Two days later, the Fourth Circuit reversed a district court’s decision that plaintiff had not constructively exhausted its administrative remedies, that the agency’s partial litigation production mooted the claims, and that and separate administrative appeal was required to challenge withheld records. See Louise Trauma Ctr. v. USCIS (4th Cir, Aug. 14, 2025). The appellate decision was largely expected, as the district court ignored well-settled principles on all scores.

Top news

• On August 14, 2025, the Department of Energy issued a notice in the Federal Register requiring requesters who submitted FOIA requests before October 1, 2024 to confirm their interest—as well as the control number assigned to the request—by September 15, 2025, or face administrative closure. DOE cited a tripling of FOIA requests over four years (from 1,300 to over 4,000 annually) and blamed “vexatious requesters and automated bots” for clogging the system.

• On August 22, 2025, DOJ’s Office of Information Policy issued guidance on backlog reduction plans. Three days later, OIP announced new training dates for fiscal year 2026.

Sept. calendar

Sept. 11: Federal FOIA Advisory Committee meeting.

Sept. 16-18: Graduate School USA, Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts Course.

Sept. 22-24: Management Concepts, The Privacy Act and The Freedom of Information Act Training.

Sept. 30: Last day of fiscal year 2025

Court opinion issued Aug. 29, 2025

New Civil Liberties All. v. SEC (D.D.C.) -- concluding that: (1) the SEC demonstrated that it performed an adequate search for records concerning a “control deficiency”; (2) the agency properly withheld its communications with outside investigators under the attorney-work product privilege, noting that the consultant corollary applied to the group’s work and that anticipated litigation motivated the creation of the disputed records; and (3) the agency properly invoked Exemption 6 to withhold employee and contractor names and contact details.

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 Aug. 28, 2025

Schubert v. BOP (D.D.C.) -- ruling that pro se inmate failed to exhaust his administrative remedies for one request concerning an alleged BOP employee, and BOP properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of personnel records about another alleged employee under Exemption 6.

MSW Media, Inc. v. U.S. DOGE Serv. (D.D.C.) -- granting plaintiffs’ motion to preserve records in FOIA action because: (1) plaintiffs raised serious legal questions about whether Elon Musk was acting as a de facto USDS employee; (2) there was a risk of irreparable harm due to potential deletion of records, especially messages sent via Signal; (3) the burden on USDS to preserve records was minimal; and (4) preserving the records served the public interest in government transparency.

Informed Consent Action Network v. FDA (D.D.C.) -- granting an initial six-month stay instead of the requested 18 months after finding the agency showed exceptional circumstances due to court-ordered production of millions of COVID-19 vaccine records and demonstrated due diligence in processing FOIA requests; limiting the stay to avoid rendering disclosures stale or irrelevant.

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

Jobs, jobs, jobs: Pardon the interruption

• Gov’t Info. Specialist, U.S. Int’l Trade Comm’n, GS 12-13, Wash, D.C., closes 9/8/25 or first 75 applications (public).

• Gov’t Info. Specialist, U.S. Int’l Trade Comm’n, GS 12-13, Wash, D.C., closes 9/8/25 or first 75 applications (non-public).

• Att’y-Adviser, DOJ/Pardon Att’y, GS 13-15, Wash., D.C., closes 9/10/25 (public).

FOIA News: Save the date for Sunshine Fest 2026

The second annual Sunshine Fest has been scheduled for March 16-17, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Proposals for panel sessions and speaker suggestions can be submitted through September 22, 2025.

Court opinion issued Aug. 27, 2025

James Madison Proj. v. CIA (D.D.C.) -- ruling that: (1) the CIA properly invoked Exemptions 1 and 3 to withhold both its 2022 assessments of so-called “Havana syndrome” and an unknown number of undescribed records responsive to plaintiff’s request for “intelligence information relied upon” and “findings made” in connection with those assessments; and (2) the CIA was not required to perform a search for quantitative or qualitative information before issuing a “no number, no list” response, because “nothing the agency uncovered could be released,” and thus there was “no utility in CIA’s conducting a further search.”

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

FOIA News: More DOGE fun

FOIA Results Wanted Before Ruling In DOGE Disclosure Suit

By Jared Foretek, Law360, Aug. 26, 2025

A D.C. federal judge said he wants to see how the Trump administration responds to Freedom of Information Act requests submitted in February before deciding on the government's motion to dismiss an environmental group's suit claiming that DOGE teams working in federal agencies have violated transparency laws.

At a status conference Tuesday morning, an attorney for the federal government said some of the agencies that received FOIA requests regarding the activities of the advisory organization known as the Department of Government Efficiency should be formally responding next month. But, he said, the court shouldn't need to wait for the agencies to reply to review its dismissal motion, arguing that the Center for Biological Diversity, the plaintiff, had brought a deficient complaint in the hopes of strengthening it with FOIA responses and discovery later.

 "The proper process here is not to file a deficient complaint and then … seek discovery to fill deficiencies in the complaint," Samuel Holt, the U.S. Department of Justice attorney, said Tuesday.

 But U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss said that it would save the court time if he took on any FOIA disputes before assessing the government's grounds for dismissal. If a dismissal ruling came first, he said, the court might grant it, only to have the plaintiffs bring an amended complaint using what they got from the FOIA requests.

Read more here (accessible with free trial subscription).

Court opinion issued Aug. 26, 2025

Burleigh v. Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n (D.D.C.) — denying plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction; concluding plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate irreparable harm by explaining how the requested records were “‘time-sensitive and highly probative, or even essential to the integrity, of an imminent event, after which event the utility of the records would be lessened or lost’”; noting the requesters’ “complaints . . . [about needing] due expedition have largely been addressed by the grant of expedited consideration they have already received”; nevertheless opining that “plaintiffs’ consternation with the course of events since the lawsuit was filed is not wholly misplaced” since the agency has not been willing to provide a timeline for the completion of production and gave plaintiffs’ an “initial production” of “only 35 pages.”

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

Court opinion issued Aug. 22, 2025

Bolin v. NARA (D. Nev.) -- dismissing as moot plaintiff’s FOIA claim that NARA violated the statute’s reading room provision by failing by failing to digitize and publish JFK assassination records, because Executive Order 14,176 mandated full release and digitization of the JFK Collection.

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

Court opinion issued Aug. 21, 2025

Duda v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- in case concerning audio recordings related to FBI’s investigations of Emmett Till’s murder, ruling with respect to one recording that: (1) in camera review was needed to determine whether a source received an express or implied assurance of confidentiality, as the FBI claimed, because the court received a competing declaration from a former agency who originally obtained the recording; (2) FBI improperly relied on Exemptions 6 and 7(C) to withhold identifying details of third parties mentioned on the recording, noting that the agency had no basis to use the “100-year rule” to determine whether any person was still alive; further finding that there was a profound public interest in understanding the government’s handling of “one of the most consequential acts of racial violence in American history”; and (3) rejecting as “inconceivable” the FBI’s conclusory segregability claim that only one minute of the 100-minute recording could be released, emphasizing that targeted redactions or voice modulation could protect third party identities.

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