FOIA in the DOGE Era: How Professionals Can Adapt and Respond

The size and complexity of FOIA requests continue to surge. Combine that with recent staffing cuts and the push to streamline operations led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and you can start to see why FOIA teams are on edge.

“They’re incredibly detail-oriented, conscientious people who believe in government transparency and want to do a good job,” OPEXUS + Casepoint CEO Howard Langsam said. “They have been saying for years that they are under-resourced. So as a group they are very nervous going forward about their ability to meet the requirements of FOIA.”

Langsam is in close contact with the community — spanning FOIA officers and staff, as well as government officials and oversight bodies. I sat down with him to hear his insights and tips for approaching key FOIA issues.

Understanding the Current FOIA Climate

There’s a general distrust for the government that extends to FOIA. One belief is that the FOIA community is stonewalling the public, given the requests that are backlogged and/or delayed.

“But if you dig in with the personnel who are actually managing the day-to-day, they would tell you two things,” Langsam said.

1. “They Don’t Have Enough People to Keep Up with the Volume”

According to the 2024 Annual FOIA Report Summary, the total number of FOIA requests received reached 1.5 million in fiscal year 2024 (FY 2024), a 25.15% increase from FY 2023. Plus, 43% of agencies received more than double the requests in FY 2024 than they received in FY 2023.

The backlog is massive and growing. At the end of FY 2024, the total number of backlogged requests was 267,056, which is a 33% increase from those at the end of FY 2023.

Recent staffing attrition and cuts only exacerbate FOIA professionals’ workloads.

2. “They Don’t Have Access to the Records”

“So they spend a lot of their time trying to figure out, ‘How do I interact with the record custodians across the enterprise to get the records they need to process and redact, do their job, and release those records?’” Langsam said.

Consider someone who requests technical specifications from an agency. If you make a FOIA request and the FOIA officer goes directly to the scientist to get those records, the officer has to rely on the scientist to do the redaction first. But that scientist may be too busy or not understand how or what to redact.

“What they’re doing is not being responsive to the FOIA community,” Langsam said. “And so, getting access to those records is a really hard thing.”

The data backs up this problem. FOIA professionals spend an inordinate amount of time simply waiting for record custodians to provide data to them.

At many agencies, the delay from record custodians on its own exceeds the 20-day rule, which requires agencies to respond to FOIA requests within 20 business days. The request for document completion time often takes months, and in some cases, years.

What Solves These Problems?

“The integration of eDiscovery technology with FOIA offers connectors into all of these records, so the FOIA officer doesn’t have to rely on the rest of the agency,” Langsam said.

“That would be the biggest possible thing that they could do. Just get FOIA personnel direct access to the agency records, which today they don’t have. They rely on program managers and the IT department to run queries on their behalf — a whole bunch of disparate systems, and in some cases, paper.”

By giving FOIA personnel access to the records from the start, they can sidestep and eliminate the bottleneck that undermines the most routine and sophisticated requests alike. With eDiscovery technology, built-in connectors pull documents automatically from hundreds of sources, including SharePoint, Google Drive, and Box.

There’s so much more that the technology can offer. The power of eDiscovery for FOIA spans industry-leading, military-grade security and the ability to quickly and efficiency work with data, which can help FOIA professionals handle the size and complexity of requests.

“There’s automatic redactions, search power, and speed,” Langsam said. “All of that comes into play by bringing eDiscovery technology to FOIA processes.”

How Can FOIA Professionals Move Forward?

“In addition to thinking about what the public wants, think about what the administration is after, too,” Langsam said. “They want a group of people inside the agencies that support current policies, and figuring out how to do that is crucial.”

He went on to underscore the change in approach required under a new administration.

“The new administration cares about access to information, not just for the public, but for them,” Langsam said. “So it’s a mindset shift to think, ‘I need to realign my priorities to emphasize the critical role of data in driving government efficiency.’”

“Sometimes the real issue is access to information through technology, which works very differently than manual processes. And I’m on record saying the FOIA community is a conscientious group of people just trying to give the public better access to information. No one here is stonewalling; they’re trying to do their jobs and it’s very difficult, given the lack of reliable access to records inside agencies.”

To see how OPEXUS + Casepoint can help your FOIA teams be more efficient, see a demo of our integration today.