About FOIA Tracker

A federal FOIA backlog dashboard. The data substrate behind American Oversight’s thesis that not all federal agencies are equal when it comes to FOIA response times.

What this is

The FY2025 annual release shows 463,541 requests still pending at year-end, +18.7% from the prior year. That is the highest total in 18 years of reports, even though it contains only 117 agency-overall reports.

American Oversight has done the analysis. Their February 2025 article on agency response times walked through the agency-level disparity. Their April 25, 2025 congressional testimony named the structural breakdown. This site makes the federal report data underneath that problem easier to inspect, compare, and download. It is not affiliated with American Oversight.

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 FY2025 (Oct 1, 2007 – Sept 30, 2025), 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 Q3 (Apr 1 – Jun 30, 2026). Authenticated via api.data.gov key.

FOIA.gov also publishes Agency Components and annual XML APIs. The current FOIA Tracker pipeline does not ingest either one; they are not sources for the numbers shown here.

Freshness reality

Most recent annual: FY2025 (Oct 1, 2024 – Sept 30, 2025). The FY2025 bulk ZIP was published by FOIA.gov on June 9, 2026 and was pulled into this database July 16, 2026.
Most recent quarterly: FY2026 Q3 (Apr 1 – Jun 30, 2026); pulled August 19, 2026 from the API.
Annual coverage: 117 agency-overall reports in FY2025, compared with 122 in FY2024. Government-wide totals are not adjusted for missing reports.
Update process: syncs are run manually after a source release is checked. No cron or automated poll is running.

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 18-year annual view uses FY2008 through FY2025bulk annual CSVs. Quarterly “backlog” and annual “pending” are intentionally kept on separate views because FOIA.gov defines them differently.

Homepage annual findings compare FY2024 with FY2025 using agency-overall rows from the same bulk release. Staffing and pending-request changes are shown together as an editorial lead, not as proof that one caused the other.

Agencies that have stopped filing

15 federal agencies that had been reporting quarterly FOIA data last did so between April and December 2025 and have not filed since, through FY2026 Q3 (Apr–Jun 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)
Office of National Drug Control Policy (~23/q)
Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (~11/q)
National Capital Planning Commission (~9/q)

Last filed FY2026 Q1 (October–December 2025)

National Archives and Records Administration (~14,179/q)
Office of Personnel Management (~242/q)
Office of Special Counsel (~61/q)
Institute of Museum and Library Services (~52/q)
United States Access Board (~10/q)
James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation (no FY2024 baseline)

Filing status churns rather than strictly shrinking. Several agencies that had gone dark for one or more quarters have since resumed: the Department of Agriculture, the General Services Administration and the Office of the United States Trade Representative now file steadily again, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence returned with FY2026 Q3 after missing one quarter. Several other agencies that earlier appeared to have stopped filing, including the State Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Inter-American Foundation, Amtrak and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, have since backfilled late reports and now show an unbroken run of filings through FY2026 Q3. In the other direction, 12 agencies that filed FY2026 Q2 have no Q3 report in the current FOIA.gov data — among them the CIA, HUD, the FTC, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Several of those filed their Q2 reports months late, so some are likely late rather than gone; they are not counted in the list above. The National Archives and Records Administration — a top-ten FOIA agency at roughly 14,000 requests received per quarter in FY2024 — remains dark, with FY2026 Q1 its most recent filing.

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 2026 — months past the statutory deadline. The June 9, 2026 bulk publication brought in most of the holdouts, including State, Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Education, and Energy. Six smaller entities — among them the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency — still had no FY2025 annual report as of August 2026.

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. Refreshes are manual, and the latest pull date is shown above and on the data page.
The National Archives’ FY2024 Q2–Q4 quarterly reports on FOIA.gov carry numbers identical to its FY2023 Q2–Q4 filings — an apparent upstream reporting error, verified against the API in August 2026. Treat NARA’s FY2024 quarterly line with caution.
Ten-oldest “days pending” are working days, as agencies report them. Where an agency’s reported days exceed the calendar days since its own received date — a reporting error; OPM’s FY2025 filing contains one — we exclude the row from cross-agency superlatives but still show it on the agency’s own page.
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 process

All syncs are manual. The annual bulk ZIP and quarterly API are checked before an ingest is run.
A newly opened quarter is not treated as current until agency coverage is substantial enough to support comparisons.
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.