Your FOIA Request Is Not Being Ignored. The FOIA Office Is Empty.

You filed a request. The clock says ten working days. Nothing came. You have spent your whole political life being told this is because the government hides things, and so you filed a complaint against the secrecy, and the secrecy took no notice, because the secrecy is not what answered your letter or failed to.

The part that should ruin that story forever: none of what follows is a leak. Every number in this post comes out of a government PDF, filed on a government website, by the government about itself. The agencies filed their own cheating in triplicate. They just never expected anyone to read all of it, and almost nobody has. I read the PDFs. It takes an afternoon, and what is in there is wilder than any conspiracy about it.

The four numbers that should have been the whole news cycle#

Federal agencies received 1.7 million FOIA requests in fiscal year 2025. A record. Over the same year, full-time FOIA staff across all 15 Cabinet-level departments and 10 independent agencies fell 16 percent, and backlogs across those same agencies rose 27 percent. Those are not my figures and they are not anybody's estimate. They are one sentence from the Office of Government Information Services' 2026 annual report for FY2025: "Between FY 2024 and FY 2025, the number of full-time FOIA staff at all 15 Cabinet-level departments and 10 independent agencies decreased 16 percent, while backlogs across those agencies increased by 27 percent."

And on top of that, the New York Times reported on 29 July 2026 that agencies had accumulated a backlog of overdue requests of "nearly 340,000 as of Sep. 30, 2025."

Record demand, 16 percent fewer people to answer, 27 percent more debt. 340,000 people standing in a line that is not moving. This is not a secrecy story. This is an abattoir, and the animal on the table is your right to know, and the knife is a budget line item.

The sentence the entire establishment should have to repeat#

The Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee is the government's own advisory body on FOIA. Its final report, published 16 July 2026, opens its term this way: "The Committee convened its term at a challenging time for FOIA. The 'perfect storm' of a record-high number of FOIA requests, 1.7 million received government-wide in FY 2025 alone, and greatly diminished staffing resources to respond to the surging demand."

And then it reaches into the case law and pulls out the most quietly annihilating citation in the entire corpus. A 1994 law review article, stating that compliance with federal FOIA's statutory requirement of a response within 10 working days "has become the exception." Not "is strained." Not "under pressure." Has become the exception. The statutory promise is now the deviation. The sentence is currently buried in a 60-page PDF that roughly nobody will read without someone holding the flashlight. That is my flashlight. This post is the beam.

Education lost a majority of its own transparency office in a single year. That is not a staffing adjustment. That is a limb.

Here is the part nobody has consolidated, which is why I built it myself. Every agency files an annual Chief FOIA Officer report to the Department of Justice and OGIS. Every one of them numbers its own casualties. Read them together and a pattern emerges that no aggregate can hide:

The two small sentences that are more honest than every aggregate#

The aggregates are dramatic. The small sentences are damning, because nobody writing a press release would have put them in a report at all.

Treasury's Chief FOIA Officer Report notes, in the flat procedural language of an annual filing, that the Department reduced its overall FOIA backlog by 10 requests. Ten. Not ten thousand. Ten. That is not a rounding error; it is the actual year-over-year delta, reported deadpan by a department of the United States government, and it is the single most honest sentence in the entire FOIA corpus. Thousands of requests processed, and the national debt to the public moved by a double digit.

The SEC's report records that its backlog increased, that 50.1 percent of FY2025 requests were simple-track, and that the answer to the question "did your backlog decrease?" is simply "No." One word. A regulator that polices disclosure statements at Fortune 500 firms filed the word No about its own performance and did not elaborate. There is something almost admirable about it, in the way a confession is almost admirable.

And State's quarterly report for Q1 FY2026 holds a backlog of 26,966 requests against 6,581 received, and includes one request closed after 1,256 days. Four years. Somebody asked the Department of State a question in one presidential term and got the answer in the next.

Justice, in detail, because the numbers have a purpose#

The Department of Justice is the most revealing case in the whole set. It received 159,743 FOIA requests in FY2025, an increase of 27,216 over the prior year. Of those, 102,922, which is 64.43 percent of everything DOJ received, went to one place: the Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration court records. And Justice processes FOIA through thirty-two separate departmental offices, each servicing its own components' records, without consolidation.

The agency with the biggest caseload in the country grew it 20 percent in a year, while cutting nothing about its structure and losing, like everyone else, staff. That is what a system that cannot fail visibly looks like: the demand concentrates, the machinery stays intact, the people leave.

Why staffing, not secrecy, and why I refuse the conspiracy here#

Now the part where I lose everyone who came for a villain, and I am going to say it anyway because this is where the piece could go wrong if I let it: this is not a story about an administration hiding things. The documented mechanism is a capacity reduction that landed on a records-processing function, and processing work is precisely the kind of work that gets classified as non-essential during any drawdown, hiring freeze, or shutdown. The Advisory Committee report lists them directly: "hiring freezes, staffing reductions and eliminations, government shutdowns." A continuing resolution lapsed 31 January 2026 and a partial shutdown hit some agencies during the Committee's term.

The defensible framing is uglier than the conspiracy version. Transparency was not targeted. It was made collateral damage by a cost-cutting logic that could not distinguish record-keeping from record-deleting. The FOIA office is the smallest possible unit of the state whose entire function is producing evidence about the state, and it is the first thing cut, the way tendons are the first thing cut, because nobody in the org chart is watching them bleed. You do not need a conspiracy when the paperwork screams this loud on its own. An unanswered request is, from the outside, identical to a denial, and the requester cannot tell the difference, and that is the entire scandal.

The control case: the United Kingdom is the same kind of law moving the other way#

This is the comparison that turns a complaint into an argument. The UK runs the Freedom of Information Act 2000, with a statutory duty, a 20-working-day clock, and published quarterly statistics. In January to March 2026 it received 20,592 requests across monitored bodies, a decrease of 2,343, down 10 percent, the lowest first-quarter volume since 2023. It answered 89 percent of them in time, up from 76 percent a year earlier.

Same class of law. Opposite direction of travel. Volume fell, timeliness rose sharply. In the same years, American volume hit a record while American staffing fell, and the American backlog grew.

The honest limit, stated before a critic finds it for me. The UK numbers are central government only. Its statute has a different exemption structure in places. And a request answered on time can still be substantially redacted; timeliness is not adequacy, and I am claiming throughput, not quality. Even the UK's own volume pressure is mostly an artifact: the Ministry of Defence has been transferring about 9.7 million historic service personnel records to The National Archives since February 2021, and releasing 8.5 million of them raised requests to TNA by 321 percent in 2025 versus 2022. The UK's own backlog pressure is an archive-transfer artifact, not an adversarial-request problem.

What the comparison establishes, narrowly and defensibly: the direction of travel is not determined by the statute. Two comparable regimes diverged in the same period, and the variable that moved was staffing. In one country it was protected. In the other it was cut. That is a choice, not a law of nature, and the numbers from both governments say so.

Publish or construct: the trade data gap the shutdown produced#

One small, sharp application of the same logic. Section 605 of title 19 directs agencies to publish trade data. During the 2025 shutdown, the quarterly publication lapsed. What agencies are now being asked to do is not report the data but reconstruct it after the fact. Three words change what a statistic is: publish or construct. A statistic that is published is a record. A statistic that is constructed after a shutdown is a story told by the only survivor.

What OGIS did with less, which is the proof this was fixable#

The OGIS FY2025 report is largely a chronicle of an agency doing its job with less of everything. It published an Ombuds Observer on how estimated completion dates are a symptom of the larger delay problem. It stood up a dedicated intelligence-community FOIA channel, covering the 18 intelligence organisations across government. It reviewed 10 agency FOIA regulations and ran 166 compliance communications. It fielded a Records Management Self-Assessment that 99 percent of agencies answered, with findings on AI in FOIA processing, records retention, and training.

Every one of those is a process fix that costs staff time. Which is exactly the resource that disappeared. A backlog does not resolve itself. It takes people to pull the boxes, and the fix and the funding cut are the same decision being made once, badly.

Congress, the 1966 exemption, and the irony nobody wants#

FOIA was enacted in 1966. It applies to the executive branch. Legislative and judicial branch records are outside it. The Congressional Research Service does not answer FOIA requests. Supreme Court records do not fall under FOIA. Members of Congress and their offices operate under weaker rules.

And in July 2026, the government's own Advisory Committee formally asked Congress to fix this. Recommendation 2026-04: "Congress should create new, FOIA-like disclosure laws to ensure public access to records controlled by legislative and judicial branch agencies." Congress has not.

Sit with that for a second. The body that wrote the transparency statute exempted itself when it wrote it, sixty years ago, and has now been formally asked in writing by a committee it chartered to extend the statute to itself. It has declined. The institution that writes transparency law and amends it is the one institution the transparency law does not touch.

Where this could be wrong#

Fair challenges, granted and redirected. You are blaming the government for its own understaffing, that is just politics: the argument is not about intent, it is that a transparency regime without a staffing floor can be decommissioned by accident, and the UK comparison is what makes that an argument instead of an accusation, because the same class of law performs better elsewhere. A backlog is not repression, nothing was hidden: true, and this piece is about the measurable and under-discussed half of the transparency problem, not the dramatic half, and about the fact that a requester cannot tell the difference from the outside. The UK comparison is apples to oranges: partly true, conceded here before a critic can raise it, different statute, different exemptions, central government only, and on-time is not complete. The comparison establishes one narrow thing, that the direction of travel is not set by the statute itself. Timeliness went up because volume went down: correct, and it is the strongest version of the objection, which is why the sharper point is that US volume rose to a record while staff fell, so the US is absorbing the opposite trade and doing worse, and State's 26,966 backlog against 6,581 quarterly receipts is the case where volume is not the explanation. The staff cuts were just attrition: they were 16 percent aggregate and 54 percent at one department, self-reported to OGIS and DOJ, alongside documented hiring freezes. Those are not attrition numbers; those are evacuation numbers.

The closing problem is ironic, and I built it into the piece itself#

The transparency crisis that is real and measurable is not concealment. It is understaffing. The fix is a budget line and a statutory amendment, both cheap, both available, neither enacted. Every number in this piece sits in a document any reader can pull, which is the point that contains all the others: checking any of it requires a functioning records system, and the reader who wants to verify Treasury's ten requests or Education's 54 percent or the 340,000 overdue will need the machinery that is being emptied to fetch the proof of its own emptying.

I went looking for what happened to Recommendation 2026-04, and this time there is something. Two bills were introduced on 20 July 2026, both titled the Judicial FOIA Expansion Act: S.5033 from Senator Schiff, and H.R.9778, which amends 5 U.S.C. 552 to bring the federal courts inside the disclosure regime. They were referred to committee. Neither has passed. Nothing has been voted on, no hearing has been held, and no court has been brought in.

So the answer to "did anybody do anything" is yes, symbolically, and no, substantively. The branch that wrote the statutory deadline in 1966 has now introduced bills to extend the same deadline to the courts, and has not passed them. A bill introduced and referred is the records equivalent of a request filed and not answered. It is in the system. Nobody is working it.

That is the last line of the record as I write this: a transparency regime, formally asked by its own government to expand, with the expansion sitting in a committee queue. Which is exactly what an overdue request sounds like.