Federal FOIA Backlog Hits 340K as Trump Slashes Transparency Staff
Government-wide FOIA backlogs surged 28% to 339,671 requests while staff plummeted 14% in fiscal 2025, new Justice Department data reveals—leaving Americans waiting months or years for basic federal records.
The dam is breaking on federal transparency. On May 7, the Department of Justice released its annual FOIA report, and the numbers are staggering. The government-wide backlog of unprocessed Freedom of Information Act requests hit 339,671 by the end of fiscal 2025—up 28% from 267,000 at the end of fiscal 2024. Meanwhile, the federal FOIA workforce shrunk to 4,823 full-time employees, a 14% decline year-over-year.
This isn't a bug in the system. It's the predictable result of deliberate policy. The Trump administration has gutted the government through DOGE-driven layoffs, and FOIA officers are drowning in the wreckage.
The scale of the crisis becomes clear when you look at the raw numbers. Agencies processed a record 1.6 million FOIA requests in 2025—a monumental workload that would strain any bureaucracy. But they received 1.7 million new requests, also a record. The gap between processing capacity and demand has become unbridgeable. Requests are piling up faster than they can be cleared.
Individual agencies are in free-fall. The Defense Department's backlog jumped 42% to more than 30,000 cases. The State Department now sits on 27,619 backlogged requests—a spike of 6,000 since fiscal 2024. The Department of Housing and Urban Development doubled its backlog to 1,092 requests while simultaneously losing 40% of its staff. The Commerce Department added 500+ requests to its backlog. Transportation's backlog climbed from 8,000 to 11,250 requests even as FOIA staff dropped 10%.
These aren't abstract numbers. Each backlogged request represents a journalist trying to investigate corruption, a citizen seeking records about their own government case, an advocacy group demanding transparency about federal spending, a scholar researching policy decisions that affect millions. The people filing these requests are being systematically denied timely access to documents they have a legal right to obtain.
The staffing collapse is the poison at the root. Agencies report that massive workforce reductions under DOGE are the primary driver of the backlog explosion. The Defense Department lost 37% of its FOIA officers. Some agencies shed staff through Trump's Deferred Resignation Program; others simply watched employees quit rather than endure the chaos of the current administration.
Worse, leadership in transparency offices is in flux. Bobak Talebian, who ran the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy and set guidance for how all federal agencies handle FOIA, was fired. The National Archivist, Colleen Shogan, was terminated. The incoming administration systematically removed people whose job was to ensure the government complied with transparency law.
The consequences are immediate and severe. FOIA litigation has exploded. Between Trump's return to office on January 20, 2026, and April, federal courts saw 1,000 FOIA-related lawsuits filed—compared to just 591 during the same 15-month stretch of Biden's presidency. Watchdog groups, journalists, and citizens have no choice but to sue because agencies simply aren't responding to requests within the legally required timeframes.
The Justice Department's own Office of Information Policy—the agency responsible for guiding federal compliance with FOIA—has recommended that agencies turn to artificial intelligence and automation to compensate for staffing losses. But technology is no substitute for actual people doing the work. AI cannot properly redact sensitive information; humans must review every page. AI cannot make nuanced determinations about what exemptions legitimately apply; lawyers must decide. Throwing algorithms at a staffing crisis is like prescribing an antacid for a bleeding ulcer.
Some agencies have taken extraordinary steps that underscore the desperation. The Department of Energy announced in August 2025 that it would automatically close all pending FOIA requests filed before October 2024 unless requesters actively asked for them to remain open. This marked the first time any federal agency attempted such a triage. Others have shifted to negotiating with FOIA requesters to narrow the scope of requests just to keep the machinery from seizing entirely.
There is also evidence of deliberate obstruction. Multiple agencies have changed how they handle communications. The Department of Homeland Security now requires officials to manually screenshot text messages rather than automatically archiving them as the Federal Records Act requires. DOGE staff were ordered to stop using Slack and migrate to Signal, an encrypted app designed for messages that auto-delete—precisely the kind of tool that helps government officials destroy records that should be preserved.
Federal FOIA practitioners say they "feel like they're drowning." Kevin Bell, a former federal regulator who tracks FOIA administration, has heard this directly from agency employees across government. They face impossible choices: process requests slowly and get sued, or deny requests to reduce the workload and face litigation anyway.
What should outrage everyone is the mechanism. This isn't the result of a sudden surge in complexity or unexpected requests. The request volume has been climbing for years, and agencies warned repeatedly that staff would need to grow with it. Instead, the Trump administration chose to slash government employment across the board—including in the offices specifically charged with responding to FOIA requests.
The Public Records Act requires federal agencies to respond to FOIA requests within 20 working days. When they fail to meet that deadline, the request enters backlog purgatory. A quarter-million requests are now stuck in that legal limbo—denied timely response in violation of federal law, with no realistic prospect of resolution anytime soon.
This is a transparency extinction event. A government that won't respond to records requests is a government that believes it doesn't answer to the people. The Trump administration has broken FOIA not by refusing to release documents outright—that would be illegal and litigable—but by starving the system of the people needed to process them. It's systemic obstruction masquerading as budget cuts. When nearly a third of a million FOIA requests are backlogged, when federal FOIA staff plummets while request volume hits records, when agencies fire the leadership meant to enforce transparency law, you're not witnessing agency dysfunction—you're witnessing a deliberate campaign to suffocate public access to government information. If nothing changes, FOIA becomes a dead letter. The right to know becomes the right to wait, and wait, and wait until the documents are destroyed under the Presidential Records Act. That's the gamble this administration is making.
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