Federal FOIA requests have nearly doubled in five years, reaching 1.5 million in 2024 according to a Justice Department report. The number of FOIA officers handling them has not moved. That gap explains most of what requesters now see: months of silence, partial releases, and sometimes years of waiting.
“We’re at the tipping point,” David Cuillier told the Columbia Journalism Review. He directs the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. “Every year it gets harder to get the government to give information, and it’s only going to get worse.”
Who is filing
CJR’s Tow Center says part of the flood is automated. Its investigation found that Metric Media, a right-wing network running more than a thousand news sites filled with auto-generated articles, has filed thousands of records requests aimed at voter rolls, school curricula and transgender inmates. New Mexico reprimanded the group in 2023 for selling voter data obtained through FOIA. Co-founder Brian Timpone has said the group only wants to keep government accountable, and disputed Tow’s count by saying it had sent “far more”. The Heritage Foundation filed thousands of requests in 2024, some arriving several times a minute.
The law itself dates to 1966, when Representative John E. Moss pushed it through. It covers everything from emails between officials to whole datasets, and news organisations of every size depend on it.
Inside the offices
The machinery is old. Recordkeeping systems are outdated or need specialist knowledge, records sit in paper files, scans and PDFs across several locations, and many requests need searches across departments. Redaction is slow, careful work: Social Security numbers, addresses and classified details have to be found and removed by hand. Small FOIA units, sometimes only a handful of people, also answer public inquiries and other compliance work.
Even “simple” requests can take up to 44 days on average, and many take far longer. The Department of Homeland Security has the largest backlog. Lauren Harper, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the big problems predate the Trump administration, but “I think it’s fair to say that the Trump administration is making it a hell of a lot worse.” She pointed to firings at the National Intelligence Council after records contradicted some of the president’s claims, and to the closing of FOIA offices at the Department of Health and Human Services, which Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described as consolidation into a central office.
What helps, and what does not
Almost 20 percent of agencies now use machine learning or AI on requests, according to a recent federal report. Cuillier said such tools find more records than keyword searches do, and can make a first pass at redaction. Some states let officials ignore “vexatious requesters” for up to a year; Connecticut allows it but rarely applies it. Federal law also requires proactive disclosure, meaning any record requested more than three times should be posted publicly. Harper said that seldom happens.
For journalists, the courts are often the only route. “Litigation is really the dividing line between whether your FOIA is getting processed or not,” Harper said, though few outlets can afford to sue. Other states are moving the opposite way, toward higher fees or longer extensions, with overhauls tracked in New Jersey, Louisiana and Utah.
“FOIA’s systemic problems are interacting with partisan ones,” Harper said. “It’s absurdly bad.”
Sources
- Why Federal Agencies Struggle with FOIA Request Processing Times?
- Too many FOIA requests, too little transparency.
