Still Being Processed: 1.5 Million Requests and Counting

The government has a legal obligation to answer your questions. It would just like you to stop asking them so often.

Federal agencies received a record 1.5 million FOIA requests in fiscal 2024 — and backlogged 267,056 of them, a 33 percent increase in a single year. Only 12 percent of requests were fully granted, an all-time low. The law demands a response within 20 working days. The reality is measured in months, and occasionally in presidential terms.

Consider the deadline. Twenty working days is roughly one month. The government's interpretation of "roughly one month" appears to be "eventually." There is a special kind of confidence in writing a deadline into federal law and then treating it as a suggestion box — the confidence of an institution that knows it will never be fired, never be audited, and never have to explain itself to anyone holding a stopwatch.

This is the rare government program that fails at its own mission statement. The Freedom of Information Act is, by name, a law about giving you information. In practice it has become a law about eventually, possibly, acknowledging that you asked. The freedom, it turns out, is the freedom to wait — and 267,056 people are currently exercising it.

The backlog number deserves a moment of appreciation: 267,056 requests, each one a citizen asking the government to show its work, each one filed in a room where the paperwork appears to be eating itself. A 33 percent jump in a single year suggests the government is generating opacity faster than citizens can file to clear it.

And the 12 percent grant rate — an all-time low — is the statistic doing the real satirical work. Not denied, mind you. Just not granted. Your request wasn't refused; it was outlived. Somewhere a file clerk is reading your 2022 request and thinking, "good question, shame about the timing." File early. File often. Bring a book.

See the original post on Instagram. More from this story is filed in the Evidence Locker.