FOIA News: Beach holiday reading

A new study looks at how AI tools change the way people request public records. The researchers found that while AI helps write requests faster, it also creates major challenges for the agencies processing them. Read the seven-page paper here.

Court opinion issued May 14, 2026

Alper v. DOJ (D.D.C.) -- granting in part and denying in part plaintiff's renewed motion for summary judgment in a case where a death-penalty defense attorney sought FBI records relating to the murder conviction of a death-row inmate; ruling that the public interest in corroborating a death-row inmate's innocence claim outweighed the privacy interests of: (1) FBI agents who authored a 1997 memorandum concluding prosecution of Johnson was "highly unlikely" for lack of evidence; (2) private individuals named in documents related to a witness who pointed to an alternative suspect; and (3) hotel guests whose FBI witness statements corroborated Johnson's innocence where matching names to statements would advance the innocence claim; ordering disclosure of all three categories; and denying reconsideration of the court's prior Exemption 5 ruling protecting five FBI-DOJ attorney-client communications, but ordering the FBI to conduct a more detailed segregability review to determine whether any non-privileged strategic content was disclosable.

Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.

FOIA News: Pay for play

Media law attorney Frank LoMonte recently authored a law journal article suggesting that the government pay news outlets for turning government data into public accountability, the same way we pay solar producers for turning sunlight into electricity.

FOIA News: This and that

• FOIA master Jason Leopold’s playbook: How persistence unlocks public records, Editors & Publishers, 5/14/26

• Trump Admin Has Up to 120,000 Pages of Documents on Ghislaine Maxwell’s Prison Transfer: The bad news: It won’t tell us when our FOIA request for these records will be fulfilled, Mother Jones, 5/13/26.

• To Redact, or not to Redact? A Local LLM Approach to Deliberative Process Privilege Classification, Cornell Univ., 5/11/26.

• Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking, The Intercept, 5/9/2026.

FOIA News: Federal jury convicts Alexandria man on charges relating to the deletion of U.S. Government databases

Federal jury convicts Alexandria man on charges relating to the deletion of U.S. Government databases

U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia

May 7, 2026

A federal jury convicted Sohaib Akhter, 34, of Alexandria, today on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, password trafficking, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person.

According to court records and evidence presented at trial, Sohaib Akhter, and his twin brother and co-defendant, Muneeb Akhter, worked for a Washington, D.C., company that provided software products and services to more than 45 federal government agencies and hosted data for some federal government clients on servers in Ashburn. On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.

Read more here.

FOIA News: Biden objects to release of 2017 audio

Biden seeks to block DOJ release of 2017 audio, court filing says

Heritage Foundation FOIA request could produce transcripts and audio from Biden's 2017 book sessions by Tuesday

By Eric Mack, Fox News, May 10, 2026

President Joe Biden's lawyers are expected to object to the Justice Department's release of redacted written transcripts and audio recordings of Biden's 2017 interactions with his book ghostwriter, according to a new court filing.

"President Biden, through counsel, has advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures," Assistant Attorney General Civil Division Brett Shumate wrote in a filing from a Freedom of Information Act request from the Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell. "The Department does not oppose intervention."

There is a Tuesday deadline for Biden's lawyers to respond to the DOJ's release for a response to Howell's FOIA request, which would come shortly after Tuesday if there was no objection.

Read more here.

FOIA News: More FY 2025 stats

On May 7, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that it had posted agency FOIA data from their annual FOIA reports for fiscal year 2025 (see FOIA Advisor’s earlier post). Below are some of the key metrics available on the DOJ-run website FOIA.gov.

Requests received: 1,707,197, up 13.7% from 1,501,432 in FY 2024

Top 5 recipients (same order as in FY 2024)

1. Dep’t of Homeland Sec.: 1,019,496

2. Dep’t of Justice: 159,743

3. Dep’t of Veterans Affairs: 124,435

4. Dep’t of Def.: 77,423

5. Dep’t of Health & Human Serv.: 55,006

Requests processed: 1,635,055, up 9% from 1,499,265 in FY 2024

Backlogged requests: 339,671, up 28.2% from 264,816 in FY 2024

Notable increases

• Office of Personnel Mgmt.: 698% (207 to 1652)

• Office of Mgmt. & Budget: 150.6% (909 to 2278)

• Dep’t of Veterans Affairs: 130.6% (1539 to 3549)

• Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau: 123.9% (142 to 318)

• U.S. Agency for Int’l Dev.: 88.7% (593 to 1119)

• Dep’t of Education: 85.9% (2458 to 4570)

Appeals received: 32,059, up from 20,115 in FY 2024

Appeals processed: 23,108, up from 18,575 in FY 2024

Backlogged appeals: Total not available

Total costs: $661,394,858, down 8.5% from 723,415,561 in FY 2024

• Processing costs: $610,670,216

• Litigation-related costs: $50,724,642

Total No. of Full Time FOIA Staff: 4823, down 14.3% from 5628

Total amount of fees collected: 2,511,193, up from 2,434,243 in FY 2024

FOIA News: Feds received 1.7 million requests in FY 2025, reports DOJ

Agency Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report Data Published on FOIA.gov

DOJ/OIP, FOIA Post, May 7, 2026

The Office for Information Policy (OIP) is pleased to announce that all agencies subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Justice Department has published all of the data from these reports on FOIA.gov.

Since its initial launch in 2011, FOIA.gov has served as a dashboard of all agencies' Annual FOIA Report data.  Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, the time taken to process them, and much more.  The data from these Annual FOIA Reports is then published on FOIA.gov, allowing the public to easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.  Users can search for individual agency or component data, compare data from several agencies, and gather government-wide data.  The results can be viewed on the page or downloaded as a .csv file.

From the data published on FOIA.gov, we can see that demand for FOIA continued in FY25, surpassing 1.7 million requests received, which is a 13% increase compared to FY24.  The number of FOIA requests received has steadily increased every year since FY20. In the face of this demand, agencies processed a record high of 1.6 million requests, a 9% increase in the number processed compared to FY24.  OIP is compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY25, which will provide a further breakdown of this data.  Agencies have been posting their Chief FOIA Officer Reports, which provide helpful context for the statistics reported in the Annual FOIA Reports and detail agencies’ work in key areas of FOIA administration.  OIP will also provide an assessment of agency FOIA management based on key metrics from both reports.

We encourage everyone to visit FOIA.gov to view each agency's data as well as government-wide FOIA statistics.

Read original post here.

FOIA News: FOIA Advisory Committee meeting

A reminder that the FOIA Advisory Committee for the 2024-2026 term will be meeting virtually on May 7th at 10am. See the meeting materials and the livestream link here.

FOIA News: Settlement reached in border policy FOIA dispute

Feds, Advocates Settle FOIA Suit Over Family Separation Info

By Tom Lotshaw, Law360, May 5, 2026

The American Immigration Council and the U.S. government told a D.C. federal judge they've struck a settlement to end a long-running Freedom of Information Act dispute over records related to family separation policies during the first Trump administration.

In a court filing Tuesday, the American Immigration Council and the government said they reached the formal agreement after informing the court of a settlement in principle in March, and that the matter could be dismissed.

The council filed the suit in June 2018, seeking to compel the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to respond to requests for information about policies enacted to prosecute immigrants and separate families who arrived at the southern border.

Read more here.