The Trump administration’s workforce cuts and an ever-increasing number of Freedom of Information Act requests have deepened challenges for already strained federal offices charged with overseeing FOIA processing.
Annual FOIA reports and related chief FOIA officer reports, released by the Justice Department in recent weeks, offer insights into an unprecedented year for federal FOIA offices. While governmentwide FOIA backlogs have been on the rise for years, the workforce reductions in 2025 compounded existing challenges facing FOIA offices, the reports show.
Most FOIA offices are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and other automation technologies to streamline the FOIA process and make up for staffing gaps. But many of those efforts are early in development and have largely failed, so far, to make much of a dent in rising backlogs.
At the Defense Department, the FOIA backlog rose by 42% to more than 30,000 cases across the department by the end of fiscal 2025. A FOIA request is backlogged when an agency fails to respond within the statutory timeframe of 20 working days.
DoD’s chief FOIA officer attributed the increase in backlogs to “loss of staff, increases in the number of incoming requests, to include complexity of those requests, and litigation.”
The loss of staff was the “primary driver of the backlog increases,” DoD added, with the Deferred Resignation Program being the most frequently cited reason for staff losses at component FOIA offices.
DoD reports that across its components, there was a 37% loss or turnover in FOIA officers.
“The problem was particularly acute for some,” the report added, noting that the Defense Information Systems Agency’s FOIA operations were handled by a single individual, while the Defense Technical Information Center’s FOIA staff was “reduced to zero.”
“The department’s plan is to re-evaluate staffing again to determine if we have a sufficient number of staff to process the requests currently received and continue to receive,” the DoD report states. “We will continue to review our process to find ways to improve processing times.”
DoD is also “reviewing technical resources that may assist in improving our processing of FOIA requests,” the report continues. DoD’s chief FOIA office is working with the chief information officer to “understand the present capabilities of agentic, generative and/or predictive artificial intelligence and how we can utilize it to make FOIA processes more efficient.”
Some agencies that receive a heavy volume of FOIA requests have yet to publish their annual statistics or chief FOIA officer reports, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, the Justice Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But agencies that have posted their 2026 reports largely reported similar challenges to DoD. Some of the specific findings include:
- The Commerce Department’s backlog increased by more than 500 requests to 1,968 by the end of fiscal 2025. Commerce’s chief FOIA officer attributed the rise to “an increase in the number and complexity of requests received … a loss of staff and resulting delay in backfilling FOIA professional positions, inefficient search and review processes, and FOIA litigation.”
- The Education Department’s FOIA backlog nearly doubled to 4,570 requests at the end of last year. The agency’s chief FOIA officer reported that Education saw a 15% increase in requests, while the agency’s “staffing level was lower” than previous years. The Trump administration has been attempting to dismantle the Education Department.
- The Energy Department’s FOIA backlog increased by about 600 cases to a total of 2,277. The agency’s chief FOIA officer attributed the backlog to “turnover in staff and overall increase of incoming requests,” including those asking for “any-and-all type communications.” Energy is currently being sued over a plan to cull older FOIA requests from its backlog.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development saw its FOIA backlog double to 1,092 requests last year. HUD’s chief FOIA officer reports that the agency FOIA office lost 40% of its staff, including contractor support, while also navigating an 80% increase in requests since fiscal 2024.
- The State Department’s FOIA backlog spiked by 6,000 cases to a total of 27,619 by the end of fiscal 2026. State’s chief FOIA officer ascribed the increasing backlog to a rising number of requests and a near quadrupling in the number of FOIA lawsuits over the past decade. Meanwhile, last year, “staff attrition and contract downsizing left several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant,” State’s chief FOIA officer added.
- The Transportation Department’s FOIA backlog increased from just over 8,000 requests to 11,250 in the space of a year. DoT’s chief FOIA officer reports that the agency received 11% more FOIA requests in 2025, while it lost 10% of its full-time FOIA staff.
Shifting FOIA responsibilities
Even reductions and changes with non-FOIA staff have impacted the rising backlogs.
The General Services Administration, for instance, saw a 43% increase in FOIA requests last year. The majority of those were received by GSA’s central administrative office, which lost 30% of its staff to attrition, deferred resignation and retirements last year, GSA’s chief FOIA officer wrote in explaining why the agency’s FOIA request backlog increased.
The Merit Systems Protection Board’s request backlog increased last year as the MSPB navigated a “significant loss of staff,” the agency’s chief FOIA officer wrote.
“While many of the departed employees did not work directly with the FOIA department, the loss and resulting shift in responsibilities did impact the FOIA department,” the officer added, pointing to the departure of MSPB’s human resources director and a subsequent delay in the FOIA office receiving HR-related records.
The MPSB’s director of information services also served as the agency’s FOIA public liaison. When that person left their job, “the responsibilities of the permanent FOIA analyst increased, necessitating times when focus was directed away from processing requests in favor of administering the overall program,” the chief FOIA officer reported.
At NASA, a relatively small FOIA office was hit hard when it lost two personnel and a detailee position. The space agency said the staffing departures were the “primary factor” in its increased FOIA backlog.
“This reduction, combined with significant agency-wide staffing shortages resulting from the departures, has created substantial resource challenges for meeting current and anticipated FOIA demands,” NASA’s chief FOIA officer wrote.
Now, NASA is evaluating how to address personnel gaps, including by redistributing FOIA responsibilities across remaining staff, exploring “technology solutions to improve processing efficiency,” and working with other NASA programs to improve document search and review.
“The agency recognizes that adequate staffing is essential to maintaining timely and effective FOIA responses and will continue to monitor resource needs as circumstances evolve,” the NASA report adds.
Tech is ‘certainly the future’
Even before the Trump administration’s workforce cuts, FOIA offices reported facing short-staffing and resource challenges. And in recent years, many have begun exploring how newer software, automation and even AI could streamline FOIA.
At DoD, component FOIA offices have now started to shift from “basic tools to sophisticated solutions,” according to the department’s 2026 report.
“A prominent theme is the exploration and implementation of AI and automation to tackle time-consuming tasks,” it adds.
The Defense Information Systems Agency, for instance, has deployed an automated bot “specifically designed to redact financial information.” Meanwhile, the Defense Logistics Agency is updating a robotic process automation bot “to address increased demand,” while other defense components are exploring how generative AI can be integrated into the records search process.
“Several components are undertaking major overhauls of their foundational case management systems,” DoD added in its latest report.
The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP), which oversees FOIA compliance across government, has also emphasized the role of technology in improving FOIA administration. OIP’s annual FOIA awards include a category on “exceptional advancements in IT” to improve FOIA administration.
“Technology is certainly the future for us,” Sean Glendening, director of OIP, said during a March 18 webinar hosted by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. “FOIA is kind of the ultimate big data problem to solve, which is what AI is great at. Where we see better technology and AI being used is all along the life cycle of the request.”
Many FOIA offices now report using AI and related technologies to help with different parts of the FOIA process.
The Interior Department’s FOIA office began using a natural language processing tool to identify similar requests, as well as automation to streamline communications around eDiscovery searches, Interior’s chief FOIA officer reported this year.
Interior is also using a “document review platform” to complete tasks like redaction.
“As DOI has recently been rolling out these tools, we do not yet know how much time and financial resources will be saved, but the early signs of increased productivity are promising,” Interior’s chief FOIA officer added.
The Chief FOIA Officer’s Council will host a virtual FOIA technology “showcase” this May. It will give vendors a chance to demonstrate FOIA-related technologies, including artificial intelligence, to interested agencies.
“I think in the next few years, you are going to see every agency actively using AI in some aspects,” Glendening said. “Some will use it more, some will use it less, but I think it will be across the board.”
However, he added that the there needs to be a “human element” to using AI for FOIA.
“The AI that we would be using at this point is suggestive to a human,” Glendening said. “If it’s something that requires more human analysis, the AI can flag that for a human reviewer to go through and do that more detailed analysis, where you may want an attorney doing that, versus AI.”
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