About FOIA Tracker

What this is

Federal FOIA backlogs are exploding. DoD’s backlog grew 42% to more than 30,000 pending requests by end of FY2025 (Sept 30, 2025). State Department’s backlog grew from roughly 21,000 to 27,619 in one fiscal year. CDC’s entire FOIA office was eliminated in April 2025. OPM lost all of its FOIA staff.

American Oversight has done the analysis. Their February 2025 article “Not All Federal Agencies Are Equal When It Comes to FOIA Response Times” walked through the agency-level disparity. Their April 25, 2025 congressional testimony named the structural breakdown. Both pieces are static. This site is the live, queryable version.

How federal fiscal years work

Every FY label on this site is the US federal fiscal year, which runs Oct 1 through Sept 30 and is named for the year it ends. FY2024 = Oct 1, 2023 – Sept 30, 2024. FY2026 = Oct 1, 2025 – Sept 30, 2026.

Federal quarters split the year as follows:

• Q1 = Oct 1 – Dec 31 (in the prior calendar year)
• Q2 = Jan 1 – Mar 31
• Q3 = Apr 1 – Jun 30
• Q4 = Jul 1 – Sep 30

Presidential inaugurations always fall in Q2 (Jan 20), so any FY that contains an inauguration is a transition year split between two administrations. The clean fiscal years for each administration in our data window:

• Trump 1: FY2018, FY2019, FY2020 (Oct 1, 2017 – Sept 30, 2020)
• Biden: FY2022, FY2023, FY2024 (Oct 1, 2021 – Sept 30, 2024)
• Trump 2: FY2026 so far (Oct 1, 2025 – present), quarterly only — no annual published yet
• FY2017, FY2021, FY2025 are transition years; we footnote them rather than attributing to one administration.

Data sources

• Annual Report bulk CSVs — FY2008 through FY2024 (Oct 1, 2007 – Sept 30, 2024), downloaded from FOIA.gov. Public domain. Each ZIP contains 32 CSVs covering different report sections. Anonymous, no auth required.
• Quarterly FOIA Report API — api.foia.gov/api/quarterly_foia_report JSON:API endpoint. Most recent in the database: FY2026 Q2 (Jan 1 – Mar 31, 2026). Authenticated via api.data.gov key.
• Agency Components API — api.foia.gov/api/agency_components. Used for canonical agency naming.
• Annual report XML — per-agency, per-year NIEM XML from api.foia.gov/api/annual-report-xml. Reserved for deeper component-level drill-down; the MVP uses bulk CSVs for historical seeding.

Methodology

The quarterly home page ranks agency-overall rows by the most recent published backlog, excluding the FOIA.gov “All agencies” meta-row. Quarter-over-quarter changes compare the same agency against the prior fiscal quarter when both rows exist.

The slope chart uses FY2025 Q1 (Oct 1 – Dec 31, 2024), the last full quarter before the Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration, as the baseline and compares it with the most recent published quarter. Agencies missing either endpoint are treated as reporting gaps, not inferred values.

The 17-year annual view uses FY2008 through FY2024 bulk annual CSVs. Quarterly “backlog” and annual “pending” are intentionally kept on separate views because FOIA.gov defines them differently.

Agencies that have stopped filing

27 federal agencies that had been reporting quarterly FOIA data last did so between April and December 2025 and have not filed since. None of them filed FY2026 Q2 (Jan–Mar 2026). The list, grouped by the last quarter each agency filed, with their FY2024 average requests received per quarter where available:

Last filed FY2025 Q3 (April–June 2025)

• Department of Homeland Security (~225,168/q)
• Office of Management and Budget (~248/q)
• Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (~52/q)
• U.S. Agency for Global Media (~44/q)

Last filed FY2025 Q4 (July–September 2025)

• Department of Veterans Affairs (~23,774/q)
• Small Business Administration (~1,318/q)
• General Services Administration (~387/q)
• National Railroad Passenger Corporation (~187/q)
• Office of the United States Trade Representative (~34/q)
• Office of National Drug Control Policy (~23/q)
• United States Trade and Development Agency (~20/q)
• Millennium Challenge Corporation (~18/q)
• Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (~11/q)
• National Capital Planning Commission (~9/q)
• Office of Science and Technology Policy (~54/q)

Last filed FY2026 Q1 (October–December 2025)

• U.S. Department of State (~5,473/q)
• Department of Agriculture (~4,242/q)
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (~244/q)
• Office of Personnel Management (~242/q)
• Consumer Product Safety Commission (~196/q)
• Council on Environmental Quality (~105/q)
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence (~103/q)
• Office of Special Counsel (~61/q)
• Institute of Museum and Library Services (~52/q)
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (~33/q)
• Inter-American Foundation (~13/q)
• United States Access Board (~10/q)

Outside reporting from NOTUS, Federal News Network, and Poynter has confirmed a broader collapse in agency FOIA program staffing — the entire public-records team at OPM was fired in February 2025; CDC’s FOIA office was eliminated in April 2025; the Department of Education has lost more than half of its full-time FOIA staff; HUD has lost 40% of its FOIA staff; the Defense Technical Information Center’s FOIA staff has been reduced to zero. FY2025 annual FOIA reports, due March 1, 2026, only began appearing in May — the Department of Justice is posting them agency by agency, well past the statutory deadline. As of May 31, 2026, agencies including the State Department, Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Education, and Energy still had not filed.

Caveats

• All numbers are self-reported by agencies; definitions vary across agencies and across years.
• “Backlog” definitions are stretched by some agencies — for example, requests “administratively closed” without disposition.
• Exemption counts are invocations, not unique requests. A single response can invoke multiple exemptions.
• Component naming is inconsistent across years (USCIS vs. “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services”, etc.). We surface agency-overall totals in v1; component drill-down is a v2 feature.
• Agency Overall vs. component double-counting risk. We filter explicitly to “Agency Overall” rows when ranking, and exclude the “All agencies” meta-row.
• Intelligence community agencies report less detail by statute.
• Annual report schema variance across years means some field names move between FOIA.gov source versions. We map those at ingest time.
• DOJ retroactively revises prior years. We re-pull bulk CSVs monthly.
• The FY2016 bulk ZIP ships two CSVs for the headline section — the canonical file and a stray FY2018 file. We prefer the canonical file by name. (See scripts/ingest/bulk-csv.ts.)

Refresh cadence

• Bulk CSVs: monthly cron.
• Quarterly API: weekly cron during a published quarter.
• Annual XML for the current FY: daily poll until 200, then weekly.
• All re-pulls are idempotent — safe to re-run.

Provenance

Built by Trevor Brown. Open source under the MIT license. Not affiliated with American Oversight, the Department of Justice, or any other organization. Source data is public domain (US government works). Attribution is polite, not required.

Bug reports and data caveats welcome. Start at the home page or browse the agency directory.