FOIA News: USCIS has reduced backlog via bad-faith FOIA denials, claims whistleblower

USCIS’ arbitrarily strict FOIA policy is keeping some migrants from receiving their immigration records, whistleblower alleges

In a protected disclosure to Congress, an agency employee claims that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services since 2024 has been finding ways to reject Freedom of Information Act requests from migrants in order to make it seem like the agency is complying with a court order.

By Sean Michael Newhouse, Gov’t Exec., Dec. 19, 2025

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a Dec. 15 compliance report that it reduced its Freedom of Information Act request backlog for certain immigration records by 99.96% over the course of three months, an impressive feat given recent workforce cuts to agency FOIA teams and a 43-day government shutdown occurred during the period. 

But a whistleblower disclosure sent to the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees on Friday argues that the agency has adopted unnecessarily strict criteria to summarily reject FOIA requests from migrants seeking documents for their immigration proceedings. 

“The circumstances alongside the whistleblower’s disclosures suggest the reported reduction does not reflect timely, good-faith FOIA processing but rather mass closures of requests and other procedural mechanisms that remove requests from the pending inventory without reasonable searches or release of responsive records,” according to the document. 

Read more here.

FOIA News: Federal judge rules judicial agencies not subject to FOIA

Judicial offices don’t have to turn over records to Trump-aligned group, judge rules

Tierney Sneed, CNN, Dec. 18, 2025

A federal judge ruled Thursday that two entities that implement policy and conduct administrative tasks for the judicial branch are not required under a transparency law to turn over their communications to a private legal group aligned with President Donald Trump.

The opinion by Judge Trevor McFadden came in a longshot case brought by America First Legal, which argued the judicial offices were the type of executive branch agencies that are covered under the Freedom of Information Act — the federal public records law.

The entities — which are known as the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office, and are led by judges — had refused to produce correspondences with Democratic lawmakers, prompting the FOIA lawsuit.

America First argued that the Judicial Conference is actually an executive agency that should be “overseen by the president, not the courts,” thus putting it under FOIA, which does not cover the judicial branch. The organization also contended during oral arguments last month that FOIA’s exemptions for the courts applied to judges and the law clerks that work in their chambers, but not the clerks and other officials who manage a courthouse’s administrative functions.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Rest in Peace, Bill Burr, FOIA "Yoda"

In Memoriam: Dr. William Burr, 1949-2025

Nat’l Sec. Archive, Dec. 15, 2025

The National Security Archive mourns the passing of our beloved colleague William Burr, the documentary leader of the nuclear history field, on December 11, 2025.

Tributes to Bill have poured in over the weekend from all over the world, emphasizing his brilliance as a scholar, his generosity as an archivist, his modesty and integrity as a person, his centrality to the whole field of nuclear studies, and the enormous legacies he leaves to the rest of us.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Treasury exploring cloud platform

Treasury Seeks FedRAMP-Authorized Cloud Platform for FOIA & eDiscovery

By Miles Jamison, ExecutiveGov, Dec. 16, 2025

The Department of the Treasury, through the Internal Revenue Service, has initiated market research to explore the availability of a cloud-based platform that can handle Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests and eDiscovery activities.

* * *

According to a sources sought notice published Monday on SAM.gov, Treasury plans to implement a department-wide blanket purchase agreement for a cloud platform capable of streamlining the processing of electronically stored information, or ESI. It seeks to adopt advanced commercial technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics, to enhance transparency, optimize operations and reduce FOIA backlogs across all bureaus.

The platform must be authorized under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program to support the full lifecycle of information requests, from intake and processing to review, redaction, production and archival. It must also comply with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, Section 508 requirements and Treasury cybersecurity directives. Responses are due by Dec. 30.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Chief FOIA Officers Council meeting today

The Chief FOIA Officers (CFO) Council will hold a virtual meeting on Monday, December 15th from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM ET.  The meeting will be livestreamed on the National Archives' YouTube channel.

FOIA News: Group seeks expedited recission of EPA’s FOIA expedition rule

‘Environmental justice’ EPA rule drives unequal FOIA treatment, conservative legal group says

By Kaelen Deese, Wash. Exam’r, Dec. 11, 2025

A prominent conservative legal firm with close ties to the Trump administration took aim on Wednesday at a little-noticed Environmental Protection Agency rule from the Biden administration that it says created an improper, preferential fast-track for certain public records requests under the banner of “environmental justice.”

America First Legal, the firm founded by President Donald Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, filed a major Freedom of Information Act request and a companion petition for rulemaking challenging the EPA’s 2022 decision to let requesters claim a so-called “environmental justice–related need” as a basis for expedited processing. The group says that carveout opened a political pathway to faster access to federal records, contradicting FOIA’s requirement that agencies handle requests in a content-neutral manner.

Read more here.

P.S. In October, FOIA Advisor cited reporting from E&E News that EPA planned to rescind its environmental justice FOIA rule.

FOIA News: This and that

• A federal retiree was forced to file a FOIA request to find out the Thrift Savings Plan’s holdings in its International Stock Index Investment (“I”) Fund, per a guest essay in the the New York Times.

• The FBI has recently posted files about Pete Rose, Wallis Simpson, and Kenneth Starr.

• Government Attic has recently posed files about atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, U.S. Army drug testing programs using humans, and biological warfare.

• Multiple advocacy groups sued the Department of Justice on Dec. 9th for failing to respond to requests for Office Legal Counsel records concerning the U.S. military’s lethal strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

Court opinions issued Dec. 3-4, 2025

Dec. 4, 2025

Informed Consent Action Network v. NIH (D.D.C.) -- denying plaintiff’s motion for attorneys’ fees in connection with requests submitted in 2021 for internal communications about an early COVID-19 antibody study; reasoning that the plaintiff failed to show its lawsuits caused NIH to release the records, as the agency had already begun processing the requests and delays were attributable to pandemic-related backlogs rather than litigation pressure.

Dec. 3, 2025

Musgrave v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- determining that plaintiff’s 2020 request for “[a]ll emails in the FBI email system(s) or personal email folders on personal computers . . . used by the Washington Field Office and San Francisco Field Office mentioning @DevinCow” would require an unreasonably burdensome search and was therefore an improper request; rejecting plaintiff’s post-litigation attempt to narrow the search to “active” email accounts as of 2021.

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

FOIA News: Brothers arrested for tampering with gov't databases, including FOIA info

Virginia brothers arrested for allegedly tampering with government databases

By Sam Sabin, Axios, Dec. 3, 2025

The Justice Department arrested Virginia-based twin brothers who formerly worked at a federal contractor on Wednesday for their alleged roles in deleting government databases.

Why it matters: The arrests are connected to one of the most bizarre insider threat cases the U.S. government has experienced in years.

Driving the news: Federal law enforcement arrested Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, 34, for their alleged roles in compromising or deleting dozens of government databases in February.

• The arrests follow a Bloomberg investigation published in May detailing how the brothers allegedly compromised data across several agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the General Services Administration.

The intrigue: The brothers pled guilty in 2015 to federal charges tied to data breaches at the U.S. State Department and a cosmetics company.

• They both served years-long prison sentences before getting jobs as engineers for Opexus, a federal contractor that helps process U.S. government records.

• Opexus did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more here.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: Defend justice

Att’y-Advisor, Dep’t of Justice/OIP (IR Litigation Staff), GS 13-15, Wash., DC, closes 12/16/25 (public).