40 Months? The Eternal FOIA Backlog

Wait times for public records have become so long they undercut the accountability FOIA is meant to provide.

One of the key commitments of the Trump administration is to find enormous efficiencies in federal spending by rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and self-dealing. But in order for those changes to be enduring, the feds must also radically improve transparency when it comes to public records requests.

According to new data obtained by Open the Books, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests last year that were labeled “complex” had an average response time of 267 days across 416 agencies. “Simple” requests took an average of 39 days for an initial response, but 31 agencies still took in excess of 100 days on average. At two agencies, that number was more than 800 days. 100 business days is roughly five calendar months. 800 is an astonishing 40 months, or more than 3 years. It’s simply unacceptable.

Download data on FOIA wait times, taken from FOIA.gov, here.

BACKGROUND

Through the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, Americans have the right to access documents created by the government bureaucracy: emails, text messages, meetings, rules, and regulations. If USASpending.gov can show taxpayers how their money was spent, FOIA requests are the key to understanding how the administrative state is spending their time on our dime.

As the size and scope of the administrative state grows, decision-making processes become more opaque even as those decisions impact our lives more fundamentally than ever. So, our ability to check their work has become more critical than ever before.

Although agencies are required by law to respond within 20 days, in practice many require extensions for months or even years, citing big backlogs of records requests.

When FOIA wait times stretch to months and years, it becomes impossible for We the People to hold agencies accountable.

Here are some of the agencies with the highest FOIA wait times for “simple” requests:

CASE STUDY: Administration for Children and Families (Dept. of HHS)

Open the Books has been waiting for records from one of these agencies, the Administration for Children and Families, since May 2023.

As our auditors previously reported, an office within ACF has spent billions on all manner of aid to migrants, including those who crossed illegally, those who enjoyed relaxed entry rules under the Biden administration, and even some children. The spending included anything from help with small business startups to savings for home and auto loans. The majority of the spending was done through third-party nonprofits who took grants from ACF and distributed them as aid.

Biden-era ACF director Robin Dunn-Marcos was also a former employee of one of the biggest migrant-related ACF grantees, the International Rescue Committee. The organization received $235 million in spending in fiscal year 2023 compared to just $22M in 2021. ACF claimed the director must recuse herself from matters related to her former employer; we FOIA’d her emails with employees of IRC to verify that statement.

Dunn-Marcos was fired early in the Trump administration, and as we approach the two-year anniversary of that FOIA, we have no idea how much longer we’ll have to wait for answers.

Case Study: National Institutes of Health and the House of Fauci

The NIH has taken multiple years to respond to two Open the Books FOIAs filed in early 2023. One was for the budget of NIH’s Bioethics Department, which we finally received in June 2025, and another was concerning Dr. Christine Grady’s ethical consultations for the NIH Clinical Center, the agency’s on-site hospital.

Grady is the wife of former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, and the former director of the NIH Bioethics Department. (Grady was removed from her post in April 2025).

The NIH had an average simple request response rate of 130 days in 2024, yet still our auditors wait for answers.

This example highlights why FOIA expediency is crucial for accountability: Grady is married to Dr. Anthony Fauci and they’ve frequently praised one another for their insights, yet they were never required to file a nepotism waiver or detail any conflicts of interest. We were seeking details of Grady’s day-to-day work and the spending she oversaw, as Fauci separately served as the face of the public health community’s Covid response.

While we’ve waited for answers, both have left government, and their household wealth has steadily grown to $12.6M at the last count.

Almost unbelievably, the NIH to this day still blames the COVID pandemic for FOIA processing delays on its FOIA portal.

After Delays Come Blackouts

There are numerous more examples of outstanding FOIA requests in the Open the Books research pipeline. Multiyear waits for important information is not acceptable when unelected federal bureaucrats like Dunn-Marcos and Grady have tremendous impact on public policy.

Extreme waiting times are only one obstacle to transparency in FOIA. The Department of Defense Education Activity, DoD’s school system for the children of service members, boasts a relatively reasonable 14.89 days for simple requests, and 46 days for complex requests. But these numbers are deceptive. While Open the Books has not had to wait as long for responsive records, many of those we do receive have been so redacted they’re functionally unusable.

Case in point: On October 10, 2023, we requested calendar invitations for DoDEA’s DEI Steering Committee, an internal group designed to inject the divisive ideology across the school system’s operations and curricula. That yielded a 22-page document, of which nearly every page was redacted.

Open the Books appealed these redactions in November 2023. In October 2024, we were informed our appeal was successful, and that the DoDEA FOIA office would process our request again. We received the documents again in May 2025. Still, with some exceptions, every page and useful piece of information was redacted.

We were told that the FOIA officers considered the “foreseeable harm standard,” which weighs “whether the DoD Component reasonably foresees that disclosing it, given its age, content, and character, would harm an interest protected by an applicable exemption.” Why they believe disclosing information related to the DEI Committee could be harmful is an open question.

SIDENOTE: Perhaps it’s related to efforts to suppress similar information in the face of heated criticism and questioning in Congressional hearings, much of it prompted by our previous findings. We’ve detailed the years-long accountability effort here.

Transparency is Accountability

Open the Books files over 50,000 public access requests a year at all levels of government, and while these examples stand out as particularly egregious, they’re part of a repeated pattern at the federal level.

In some cases, lawyers have to get involved. Open the Books partnered with Judicial Watch to sue the National Institutes of Health over redactions to its data on royalties from pharmaceutical companies paid out to agency scientists. The litigation has since forced NIH to produce thousands of pages of documents, which we’ve used to delivered blockbuster reports on the connections between federal scientists and the private sector.

Three years later, litigation is still ongoing.

But public trust in government transparency was again shattered last year when emails from David Morens, an advisor to Dr. Fauci, showed he had been evading FOIA requests as a matter of institutional practice. One email stated he learned “from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts.” He added, “plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

How can oversight of federal agencies be effectively undertaken with these slow processes, possibly overseen by malevolent, partisan employees? What good is FOIA if those tasked with fulfilling its purpose are opposed to the concept?

Recommendations

The DOGE team could start by updating the FOIA legacy software, which is slow and out of date. For example, some FOIA offices are not able to batch automate redactions, meaning a staffer must redact repetitive information over and over again, over potentially hundreds of pages.

More broadly, routine information like staff lists, payrolls, and royalty data could also be posted automatically, obviating the need for staffers to respond to common requests for large datasets.

While it is important to remove staff undermining the mission, like Morens’ “FOIA lady,” the offices should be appropriately staffed at a high level. Congress can prioritize this by mandating FOIA offices be staffed at least 80% capacity within a given number of days after a new administration arrives. Changes along those lines would remove excuses about understaffing and backlogs.

The federal government could provide free courses on FOIA policies and procedures, so staffers can be chosen not from ranks of ideologically captured university graduates, but through a merit-based examination of the materials.

The new administration has already made government efficiency a priority. To maximize impact, transparency must be prioritized as well, so the public can verify those efficiency gains.