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 June.
Court decisions
We identified and posted eight opinions in May, a rather lethargic total for federal courts. Of note, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held, in a split 2-1 decision, that the State Department failed to show that Exemption 6 protected the names and work email addresses of employees who had worked on President Biden’s emissions reduction target for the Paris Agreement. See Texas Pub. Policy Found. v. U.S. Dep’t of State (5th Cir.). In addition to these eight opinions, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a district court’s order requiring DOGE to respond to discovery requests in a FOIA case.
Top news
Bloomberg uncovered and reported a wild story about two OPEXUS employees who tampered with agency FOIA databases in February 2025.
OGIS issued its annual report to Congress on May 21, 2025.
On May 20, 2025, DOJ released the full audio of Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur following a FOIA litigation battle. All the major headlines, however, went to Axios several days earlier when it published a leaked audio clip.
June events
June 3-5: Graduate School USA, Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts course
June 4: DOJ/OIP Exemption 1 and Exemption 7 Training, 10:00am-12:15pm
June 12: FOIA Advisory Committee meeting, 10:00am-noon
June 12: Digital Gov’t Inst., Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in Records Mgmt., 12:30pm-3:00pm.
June 17: DOJ/OIP Exemption 4 and Exemption 5 Training, 10:00am-12:15pm
June 17: ARC, Navigating Public Record Requests: Minimizing Barriers to Client Records, 1:00pm