# Freedom of Information Act **The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)**, 5 U.S.C. § 552, is the general federal disclosure statute: any person may request records of a federal agency, and the agency must produce them unless one of nine listed exemptions applies. The presumption runs toward disclosure, and the requester need state no reason. It is the working instrument of the litigation-driven watchdogs the vault tracks — [[American Oversight]], [[CREW]], [[Judicial Watch]], the [[ACLU]]. ## Legislative history | Year | Change | |---|---| | 1966 | Signed by [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] July 4, 1966, after Rep. John Moss's twelve-year campaign | | 1974 | Post-[[Watergate Scandal]] amendments adding judicial review of secrecy claims; [[Gerald Ford]] vetoed them October 17 (aides [[Donald Rumsfeld]] and [[Dick Cheney]] had objected), Congress overrode November 21 | | 1996 | E-FOIA: electronic records covered; deadline raised to 20 business days | | 2007 | OPEN Government Act creates the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) at the [[National Archives]] | | 2016 | FOIA Improvement Act ([[Barack Obama]], June 30): "foreseeable harm" standard; deliberative-process privilege ends at 25 years | ## The exemptions The nine exemptions cover classified defense and foreign-policy material; internal personnel rules; matters exempted by another statute; trade secrets; inter- and intra-agency deliberative communications; personal privacy; law-enforcement records; bank-examination records; and geological data on wells. Since 2016 an agency may withhold under an exemption only if it reasonably foresees harm to the interest that exemption protects. **Exemption 3** matters most for the statistical system: it withholds records that another statute specifically exempts. [[Baldrige v. Shapiro]] held that §§ 8(b) and 9(a) of [[Title 13]] qualify, which is why census data sits outside FOIA entirely and why no amount of public interest opens it. The [[Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act]] extends similar protection to the other statistical agencies. FOIA allows fee waivers for public-interest requests; the [[Age Search Service]] is a deliberate contrast, since 13 U.S.C. § 8(a) authorizes no waiver. **Glomar responses.** An agency may refuse to confirm or deny that responsive records exist at all. The practice takes its name from *Phillippi v. CIA* (D.C. Cir. 1976), a journalist's request about the [[CIA]]'s Hughes Glomar Explorer submarine-salvage project; the court required the agency to justify the non-answer on the public record as fully as it could. ## Capacity under strain, 2025–26 - **Backlog.** Agencies ended FY2025 with 339,671 backlogged requests, up 27% from 267,056 a year earlier, while receiving a record 1.7 million requests (DOJ Office of Information Policy; OGIS). - **Staff.** Full-time FOIA staffing fell roughly 14–16% in FY2025: 14% government-wide by DOJ's count, 16% across the 25 largest agencies by OGIS's. The [[Department of Education]] lost more than half of its FOIA staff. - **Litigation.** A March 2026 Boston Globe review found at least 13 agencies citing workforce cuts as the reason for delay in 26 FOIA lawsuits. NOTUS counted more than 1,000 FOIA suits filed in the administration's first 15 months, against 591 in the same window under Biden (one source). - **DOGE.** In CREW's suit arguing that [[DOGE]] is an agency subject to FOIA, the district court allowed discovery into DOGE's structure. On June 6, 2025 the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] narrowed that order as not appropriately tailored; Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have denied the government's application. CREW reports that the D.C. Circuit rejected a further DOGE bid to block discovery in December 2025 (one source). The pattern: FOIA runs only as fast as agency staff can process, so a [[Reduction in Force]] in a FOIA office becomes delay without any change to the statute, and disclosure shifts toward requesters who can afford to sue — as in the [[ACLU]] suit over an [[Office of Legal Counsel]] opinion (see [[Adam Schiff]]). ## See Also - [[Federal Records Act]] · [[Presidential Records Act]] · [[National Archives]] · [[Inspector General]] · [[Census Data Access Crosswalk]] · [[Executive Privilege]] · [[Government Accountability Office]]