Monthly Roundup: November 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 November.

Court opinions

We posted and summarized 11 opinions in November, the second lowest of the year to date (8 in May). Of note, the Second Circuit reversed the lower court’s ruling in Shapiro v. SSA (Nov. 26) and held that the FOIA’s limitation on fees for untimely agency responses was clearly overridden by the “notwithstanding” text of the Social Security Act’s cost-reimbursement provision, 42 U.S.C § 1306(c) (“Notwithstanding sections 552 and 552a of title 5 or any other provision of law . . . .”).

Top news

• The 43-day government shutdown ended on November 12, 2025.

• In late November, DOJ announced that 37-year-old Sean Glendening had been appointed the new Director of the Office of Information Policy on November 3rd.

• On November 20, 2025, Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) introduced a bill to create a FOIA exemption for information that tribes identify as culturally sensitive.

• The Defense Nuclear Safety Board became the first agency in 2025 to propose amendments to its FOIA regulations, as set forth in a November 24th Federal Register notice.

December calendar

Dec. 2: DOJ/OIP’s Virtual Procedural Requirements and Fees Training.

Dec. 4: FOIA Advisory Committee meeting canceled (and not expected to be re-scheduled).

Dec. 10: DOJ/OIP’s Virtual Exemption 1 and Exemption 7 Training.

Dec. 12: Deadline for agencies to submit FY 2025 Annual FOIA Report to OIP.

Dec. 15: Chief FOIA Officers Council meeting; Immigrant Legal Resource Center FOIA webinar.

Monthly roundup: October 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 November.

Court opinions

We posted and summarized 15 opinions in October—a sharp decline from 29 last month. The most significant ruling was the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Campaign for Accountability v. DOJ (Oct. 17), which held that opinions of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel are not subject to FOIA’s “reading-room” disclosure requirements. The court reasoned that such opinions are neither “final opinions made in the adjudication of cases” nor “statements of policy or interpretations adopted by the agency,” but rather are best understood as confidential legal advice provided to executive branch agencies. A concurring opinion argued that plaintiff-appellee lacked standing because it failed to show that disclosure of the OLC opinions would likely redress any concrete informational injury.

Top news

• A lapse in appropriations on October 1, 2025, effectively suspended many FOIA operations and litigation.

• EPA plans to rescind expedited processing regulation for “environmental justice,” per E&E News.

November calendar (these events may be affected by the partial government shutdown)

Nov. 5: DOJ/OIP Virtual Introduction to the Freedom of Information Act

Nov. 12: DOJ/OIP Virtual Litigation Seminar

Nov. 12: Agency Annual FOIA Reports due to OIP for Review

Monthly Roundup: September 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 October.

Court opinions

We posted and summarized 29 opinions in September. Highlights include N.Y. Times v. DOJ (S.D.N.Y., Sept. 4, 2025), in which the court held DOJ did not “improperly” withhold Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report concerning President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, because an injunction issued by a federal court in Florida prohibits the report’s release. The court rejected plaintiff’s collateral attack on the Florida court’s jurisdiction since its order had at least a colorable basis in protecting co-defendants’ fair trial rights and it was implicitly recognized by the Eleventh Circuit. Notably, on September 30, 2025, the advocacy group American Oversight petitioned the Eleventh Circuit to lift the injunction at issue.

Speaking of American Oversight, it scored a win against HHS in its lawsuit—on remand from the D.C. Circuit—seeking communications between the agency and congressional Republicans concerning healthcare reform legislation. See Am. Oversight, Inc. v. HHS (D.D.C. Sept. 24, 2025). Of note, the court concluded that the disputed communications were agency records, not congressional records, after finding that a generic “Legend” on the records was insufficient to show Congress had clearly manifested intent to control them.

Top news

• On the last day of fiscal year 2025, OIP posted agency reporting deadlines for FY 2026, issued guidance on fiscal year 2026 Chief FOIA Officer reports, and posted a summary and assessment of FY2025 CFO reports. At the stroke of midnight, the government began a partial shutdown from lapses in appropriations.

• USAID issued a global “still interested” notice on September 16, 2025, requiring requesters to confirm their interest in all FOIA requests submitted to the agency before January 20, 2025.

• The FOIA Advisory Committee met on Sep. 11th.

• The Department of Energy was sued on September 3, 2025, over its August 14th still-interested notice.

October calendar

Oct. 7: DOJ/OIP Virtual Annual FOIA Report Refresher and Quarterly Report Training

Oct. 14-16: Graduate USA Freedom of Information and Privacy Act Courses

Oct. 15: DOJ/OIP Virtual Chief FOIA Officer Report Refresher Training

Oct. 16: D.C. Circuit oral argument, Accuracy in Media v. DOD, No. 24-5165.

Oct. 29-31: Management Concepts The Privacy Act and The Freedom of Information Act Training

Oct. 31: FY25 Q4 Data Due

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

Monthly roundup: July 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 August.

Court decisions

We posted and summarized 35 opinions for July, the second highest monthly total of the year. Two decisions from opposite sides of the country are worth revisiting. From the West Coast, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision that Exemption 4 does not protect "EEO-1” reports describing the workforce composition of federal contractors. See Ctr. for Investigative Reporting v. DOL (9th Cir. July 30, 2025). However, the Circuit expressly rejected the district court’s test for determining the “commercial” nature of those reports, which consisted of evaluating whether the reports had “commercial value” and would cause competitive harm if disclosed. Rather, the Circuit held that the “plain meaning” of the term “commercial” in Exemption 4 required information to be “made to be bought and sold or . . . describes an exchange of goods or services for profit,” and that the EEO-1 reports failed to meet that standard.

The second noteworthy opinion issued in July emanates from the humid Mid-Atlantic, namely Gun Owners of Am., Inc. v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (D.D.C. July 23, 2025), in which the court permanently barred plaintiff from using certain exempt information that ATF had inadvertently released during its FOIA litigation production. Although plaintiff did not dispute the agency’s withholdings or its diligence in attempting to claw back the mistakenly released records, plaintiff opposed the government’s proposed relief on principle, arguing that it was precluded by the D.C. Circuit’s recent opinion in Human Rights Defense Center v. U.S. Park Police (D.C. Cir. Jan. 24, 2025 (vacating district court’s clawback order after determining that “neither FOIA nor any inherent judicial authority” allows an agency to seek a court order to limit the effects of an erroneous Exemption 6 disclosure). The district court notably ruled that HRDC was inapplicable to the case at hand based on differing facts, and that the U.S. Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit precedents authorized the court to exercise “equitable authority” to bar plaintiff’s use of information protected under Exemption 3 and 7(E). Further, the court held that its relief did not violate plaintiff’s First Amendment rights, an issue the D.C. Circuit declined to adjudicate in the HRDC case.

Top news

• On July 9, 2025, DOJ’s Office of Information Policy issued guidance on the disclosure-related impact of President Trump’s Executive Order No. 1303, “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”

• The Office of Government Information Services held its annual open meeting on July 23rd.

August events

Aug. 12-14: Graduate School USA training, Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts.

Monthly roundup: June 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 July.

Court decisions

We identified and posted 16 opinions in June—twice as many as in May. Two cases are worth revisiting. In FOIAConsciousness.com v. NARA (N.D. Cal., June 30, 2025), which involved a request for a copy of the Zapruder film, the court blessed NARA’s three-part access scheme: (1) providing viewing access in Maryland and allowing copies to be made for requester’s own use; (2) allowing requester to hire an individual to visit Maryland to make self-serve copies; and (3) allowing requesters to order copies through selected vendors, but requiring permission from any copyright holders that may exist. The court reasoned that vendor-facilitated copies were not “readily reproducible” in the absence of a copyright holder’s permission. The second notable case is S. Envtl. Law Ctr. v. Tenn. Valley Auth. (E.D. Tenn.), which curiously relied on a non-FOIA case in deciding that plaintiff lacked standing to pursue a FOIA claim on the grounds that it failed to present sufficient evidence of its purported informational injury.

Although excluded from our opinions list, we note that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a two-page order on June 6th that limited discovery in a FOIA case against DOGE.

Top news

• Amtrak became the first agency to propose amendments to their FOIA regulations since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025.

• The federal FOIA Advisory Committee met on June 12, 2025, and it is now less than one year away from completing its term on June 11, 2026.

• Bill Moyers, an influential journalist and early FOIA supporter, died at age 91.

July events

July 4: FOIA signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, effective one year later.

July 10: DOJ/OIP. Privacy Consideration Training.

July 15: DOJ/OIP. Continuing Freedom of Information Act Education Training.

July 23: OGIS annual public meeting

July 25: Agency FY25 Q3 Data Due.

July 28-30: Management Concepts, The Privacy Act and The Freedom of Information Act Training.

July 30: Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Navigating FOIA and Records Requests.

Monthly roundup: May 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 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

Monthly roundup: April 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 May.

Court decisions

We identified and posted 15 decisions in the month of April, a sharp drop-off from the 41 decisions we summarized in March. Of note, if anything, was Am. Oversight v. DOJ (D.D.C.), in which the court held that DOJ properly withheld Volume Two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 2025 investigatory report because a federal district court in Florida had barred DOJ from disclosing it. Plaintiff principally attacked the Florida court’s decision as invalid, but the D.C. court remarked that “FOIA litigation is not a way to challenge that decision. The statute provides remedies for when agencies improperly hold records, not when they comply with allegedly mistaken court orders.”

Although excluded from our list of opinions, the court in Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington v. U.S. DOGE Service, No. 25-0511 (D.D.C.) ordered the government to start processing DOGE records even though the issue of whether DOGE is subject to FOIA has not been settled on the merits. In a separate order, the same court also permitted plaintiff to conducted limited discovery.

Top News

• FOIA staff at CDC, FDA, and NIH were fired in the beginning of April, reportedly as part of the Department’s plan to centralize all FOIA operations.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee held a FOIA hearing on April 8, 2025.

• The D.C. Circuit heard argument in the last FOIA case of its term on April 11, 2025.

• On April 29, 2025, DOJ/OIP released a summary of agency annual reports for FY 2024. See our commentary here.

May Events

May 6: DOJ/OIP Procedural Requirements, and Fee and Fee Waivers Training

May 14: DOJ/OIP Litigation Training

May 21: DOJ/OIP Administrative Appeals, FOIA Compliance, and Customer Service Training

Monthly Roundup: March 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 April.

Court decisions

We identified and posted 41 decisions in the month of March, our highest monthly count in four years (43 in March 2021). Two notable decisions issued last month emanated from one case, Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Wash. v. U.S. DOGE Serv., No. 25-cv-511 (D.D.C.), in which the parties dispute whether FOIA applies to the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (USDS or DOGE). On March 10th, the court granted in part and denied in part plaintiff’s request for expedited processing and concluded from the preliminary record (mostly news sources) that DOGE exercised substantial independent authority from the President and therefore “likely” was an agency subject to FOIA. The government quickly moved for reconsideration, but the court denied the motion on March 19th, in large part because the government’s “arguments could all have been raised during the last round of briefing” and “none of them provides a basis for reconsideration.” The court acknowledged, however, that “it would be preferable . . . to review the question of whether [DOGE] is subject to the FOIA on the merits based on a more complete record,” and invited the requester to file a motion for limited discovery. On the same date, the government moved for summary judgment. See the case docket to follow subsequent proceedings.

In a less publicized but nonetheless interesting) decision, the court in Heritage Found. v. DOJ (D.D.C.) considered the meaning of a “request” for the purpose of determining whether plaintiff had exhausted its administrative remedies. Although the FBI administratively divided plaintiff’s single request for three items into three separate requests, the court held that Heritage’s overall submission constituted its FOIA request and therefore Heritage was not required to administratively appeal the FBI’s timely-issued denials for two items (and the separate denial of a fee waiver) because the FBI had failed to timely respond to the third item.

Top News

• After a nearly two-week delay in publishing data from annual agency FOIA reports, DOJ/OIP reported on March 14th that nearly 1.5 million requests had been received across the government in fiscal year 2024, up 25 percent from fiscal year 2023. DHS alone received more than 900,000 requests.

• Sunshine Week (March 16-22) included a privately organized Sunshine Fest that generated a slew of research ideas, as well as a panel discussion hosted by the National Archives. The Department of Justice’s annual event was either canceled or not public; DOJ was silent on the matter.

• DOJ/OIP issued its annual Litigation and Compliance Report on or about March 10th. Of note, requesters filed 889 FOIA lawsuits in calendar year 2024—the highest number of suits DOJ has ever reported.

• DOJ/OIP’s director, Bobak Talebian, was fired on March 8th, along with several other heads of DOJ components.

• The federal FOIA Advisory Committee for the 2024-2026 term met on March 6.

April Events

Apr. 8: Introduction to the FOIA Training,10:00am to 1:30pm EST.

Apr. 8: U.S. Senate Judiciary FOIA hearing, 10:15am EST.

Apr. 11: D.C. Circuit argument in Campaign for Accountability v. DOJ, No. 24-5163, 9:30am EST.

Apr. 16: Processing a FOIA Request from Start to Finish Training, 10:00am to 12:00pm EST.

Apr. 25: Deadline for agencies to report FY25 Q2 data.

Monthly Roundup: Feb. 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 March.

Court decisions

We identified and posted 24 decisions in the month of February. Of note, the D.C. Circuit concluded in McWatters v. ATF that the government properly relied on Exemption 7(C) to withhold portions of an audio recording capturing the sounds of a nightclub fire in which 100 people died. In reaching its decision, the court credited ATF’s explanation that disclosure of the recording could harm the privacy interests of the living members of the deceased and rejected plaintiff’s main argument that no sounds could be traced to any identifiable person. And in Energy & Policy Inst. v. Tenn. Valley Auth. (E.D. Tenn.), the district court found that plaintiff was ineligible for attorney’s fees and costs even though the agency withdrew its Exemption 4 withholdings after litigation started. In so ruling, the court accepted the government’s argument that a business submitter, not the agency, changed its position on the confidential nature of the withheld records.

Top news

• FOIA personnel did not escape the layoffs initiated in February by the Department of Government Efficiency.

• Speaking of DOGE, the DOJ noted in litigation that DOGE’s records are not subject to FOIA.

• Earlier in the month, a Senate Democrat introduced a bill that would extend FOIA to DOGE.

• Many agencies posted their FY 2024 annual reports in February, with notable exceptions including DHS, DOJ, NARA, Veteran Affairs, Energy, and Treasury.

March calendar

Mar. 1: Deadline for agencies to post FY 2024 annual reports

Mar. 6: FOIA Advisory Committee meeting.

Mar. 16: Sunshine Week begins

Mar. 17: DOJ Sunshine Week event; agencies must post Chief FOIA Officer Reports on their websites.

Mar. 19: NARA Sunshine Week event.

Mar. 20: Sunshine Fest conference, Washington DC.

Mar. 22: Sunshine Fest 2025, Chicago, IL. Last day of Sunshine Week.