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Department of Justice misleads Americans about the true causes and costs of FOIA delays during Sunshine Week

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For the first time in over a decade, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) celebrated Sunshine Week with a blog post, instead of a public event. In past years, a high-ranking DOJ official — often the DOJ Chief FOIA Officer – would make a speech, followed by the Director of the Office of Information Policy (OIP).

The OIP director would make a presentation about the state of FOIA compliance across the executive branch, backed by data they’d collected from the annual reports agencies were required to submit.

And then the OIP Director would give out awards to the FOIA professionals across the executive branch, offering important public recognition for their service. (I know, because I have attended most of these events since 2016 at “Main Justice” in downtown DC.)

In 2026, there was no public ceremony or speeches, nor has OIP published and socialized open data that shows the state of agency compliance with the statutory obligation to respond to FOIA requests within 20 days that Congress has repeatedly mandated. 

Instead, OIP published a short statement by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Chief FOIA Officer of the  Department of Justice, atop a short blog post about Sunshine Week by Office of Information Policy Director Sean Glendening. 

To be clear, we vigorously agree with AAG Woodward that “our FOIA professionals are the unsung heroes of democracy” and welcome the Department honoring their service. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice also made several false assertions in his short statement to the American people that require correction.

1) This is not “the most transparent Department of Justice in our nation’s history,” by any objective measure. Any subjective assessment that ignores the contempt the USAG has shown towards Congress and the free press or the stonewalling around the Epstein Files isn’t honest.

2) Prior administrations made real progress in “improving FOIA processes and prioritizing citizens’ access to information about their government” by proactively disclosing data online. This administration has not. 

They’ve gutted FOIA offices, taken down public data and fired statistical officials, and stonewalled requestors, the direct result of which is more litigation and wasted taxpayer funds. It is downright Orwellian to state the inverse is true on a Department of Justice website during Sunshine Week. Doing so may even run afoul of the Information Quality Act, which requires officials to ensure “the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal agencies.”

3) The “ever-increasing burden” placed on FOIA professionals is the result of multiple administrations failing to invest far more in the FOIA, from modernization, increasing state capacity, carving out dedicated, secure alternatives for first-party records access to veterans and people seeking immigration records, to proactively disclosing records corporations are buying under the FOIA and other frequently requested records.

The need for systemic investment in improving the systemic problems that have made FOIA broken for people unwilling or unable to file lawsuits for access to information has been abundantly clear for decades. The American people can see this truth for themselves in the breadth and depth of recommendations made by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee, or experience it by making a FOIA request through FOIA.gov.

As Nate Jones reported for the Washington Post, instead of “improving FOIA processes” as DOJ falsely claimed, this administration cut FOIA staff. That predictably has negatively affected the capacity of agencies to respond to requestors quickly – much less provide records responsive under the FOIA in a timely manner.

In his first public post about FOIA, the new OIP director did not recognize any of those facts, nor offer any thanks to the FOIA staff dismissed and honor their service — including his predecessor.

Instead, he and the AAG chose to try to create an “alternative fact” during a national celebration of public access to information. 

Namely, they’re advancing a narrative in which “a small group of frequent requesters accounts for an increasing volume of both total and complex FOIA requests” – without showing any data to back up this claim. In this alternative narrative, this “forces agencies to divert a disproportionate share of limited resources away from the timely processing of simpler requests submitted by individual members of the public.”

Got it? Increased secrecy, censorship of open data, legacy systems, diminished state capacity, lax Congressional oversight, malign negligence by OMB, firing the AOTUS, and serial underfunding for decades aren’t at fault for the increasingly poor performance by FOIA offices. Instead, it’s a “small group of requestors” that’s “forcing” agencies to divert “limited resources.” That’s transparently misleading.

As it does every year, OIP quoted James Madison, who famously stated “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”  

That’s more true than ever in 2026. 

Thank you to the dedicated FOIA professionals and everyone else in and outside of government who continues to arm the American with the self-knowledge required for self-governance – including about the true state of the administration of the Freedom of Information Act and public access to the public records we all pay for with our taxpayer dollars. 

Building a revolution in relevance in an age of information abundance

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Revolutions rooms“We’ve had a decade’s worth of news in less than two months,” Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for Politico. In the Saturday edition of Politico’s Playbook, Allen looked back at the Arab Spring and Japanese ongoing challenges:

It was Feb. 11 – seven weeks ago — that Mubarak fled the Arab spring, a rolling reordering of Middle East power that could wind up affecting global security as profoundly as 9/11.

It was March 11 – 15 days ago – that we woke to the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which will have ripple effects on the fragile global economy for months to come.

And, oh, we’re in three hot conflicts at once, for the first time since World War II.”

Related, in the NEW YORK TIMES: “Inundated With News, Many Find It Difficult to Keep Up on Libya”

“People interviewed across four states said that at a time when the world seems to stagger from one breathtaking news event to another — rolling turmoil across the Middle East, economic troubles at home, disaster upon disaster in Japan — the airstrikes on military targets in Libya can feel like one crisis too many.”

Through it all, I’ve been following Andy Carvin (@acarvin), whose Twitter feed has been a groundbreaking curation of the virtual community and conversation about the Middle East, including images, video, breaking news and unverified reports.

To wax metaphorical, his account has become a stream of crisis data drawn from from the data exhaust created by the fog of war across the Middle East, dutifully curated by a veteran digital journalist for up to 17 hours a day.

Carvin has linked to reports, to video and images from the front lines that are amongst the most graphic images of war I have ever seen. While such imagery is categorically horrific to view, they can help to bear witness to what is happening on the ground in countries where state media would never broadcast their like.

The vast majority of the United States, however, is not tracking what’s happening on the ground in the region so closely. NEW YORK TIMES:  

“A survey by the Pew Research Center — conducted partly before and partly after the bombing raids on Libya began on March 19 — found that only 5 percent of respondents were following the events ‘very closely.’ Fifty-seven percent said they were closely following the news about Japan.”

Understanding the immensity of the challenges that face Japan, Egypt and Libya is pushing everyone’s capacity to stay informed with day to day updates, much less the larger questions of what the larger implications of these events all are for citizens, industry or government. In the context of the raw information available to the news consumer in 2011, that reality is both exciting and alarming. The tools for newsgathering and dissemination are more powerful and democratized than ever before. The open question now is how technologists and journalists will work together to improve them to provide that context that everyone needs.

Finally, an editor’s note: My deepest thanks to all of the brave and committed journalists working long hours, traveling far from their families and risking their lives under hostile regimes for the reporting that helps us make it so.