Informed Consent Action Network v. Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention (D.D.C.) — denying each party’s motion for summary judgment; concluding the government had not established whether its “contract employee” functioned “just as an employee would” in a “disinterested” way; concluding further that the agency had failed to adequately demonstrate the applicability of the deliberative-process privilege and justify its segregation of factual and deliberative material; rejecting the requester’s argument that, under the foreseeable-harm standard, the potential for “public confusion” is not a recognized interest protected by the deliberative-process privilege, but also determining the government had failed to offer anything but a “boilerplate” “rationale” here for the link “between the specified harm—public confusion—and the nature of the withheld documents”; directing the parties to refile their motions, thus providing the agency “a second bite at the apple.”
Am. Oversight, Inc. v. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs. (D.D.C.) — on remand from the D.C. Circuit, 101 F.4th 909, denying the intervening U.S. House Committee on Ways & Means’s motion for summary judgment and granting the requester’s cross-motion; concluding, under the D.C. Circuit’s so-called “modified control test,” that “five sets of email communications and attachments” comprising communications between agencies and Congress about “healthcare reform legislation,” which cannot be exempt under Exemption 5, qualify as “agency records” and are not under Congress’s legal “control”; rejecting Congress’s argument that the mere affixing of an email “Legend” asserting control is adequate because it is only a “generally applicable disclaimer” without the required “specificity” to treat the records at issue as congressional in nature, and no other evidence exists to demonstrate any effort to “set parameters [reflecting Congress’s retention of control] for the information exchanged with the Agency”; noting also that the agencies conceded they had used the records “as they saw fit” for their own decision-making processes,” a fact Congress did not deny but attempted to argue should not be considered as part of the Court’s control analysis.
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.