Following a major federal court ruling striking down the Department of Energy’s (DOE) unlawful attempt to purge pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, American Oversight sent a letter to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) demanding that the agency abandon its similar effort to close outstanding public records requests and comply with its obligations under federal law.
Earlier this month, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in our favor and vacated DOE’s blanket “still interested” policy, which threatened to close pending FOIA requests unless requesters affirmatively confirmed within 30 days that they still wanted the records. The court held that DOE had exceeded its legal authority by imposing a requirement Congress did not authorize and made clear that FOIA places the obligation to promptly process requests on federal agencies, not on members of the public waiting for the government to respond.
Last September, USAID issued an almost identical policy. The agency placed a notice in the Federal Register stating that requesters with pending FOIA requests submitted before January 20, 2025, need to affirmatively confirm their continued interest or their requests would be administratively closed. At the time, we warned USAID that the policy violated FOIA and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and demanded that the agency rescind it. It remains unclear what action, if any, USAID took in response or whether requests were administratively closed under the policy.
Now, with a federal court having rejected DOE’s materially similar policy, we are again putting USAID on notice that it cannot use a “still interested” requirement to eliminate its FOIA backlog or shift the consequences of agency delay onto requesters.
“The court could not have been clearer: Federal agencies cannot make their FOIA backlogs disappear by putting the burden on requesters to fight back,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “USAID was warned last year that its attempt to purge pending requests was unlawful. Now a federal court has rejected the same basic maneuver at another agency. USAID should immediately abandon this policy and process the requests the public lawfully submitted. Government delay is the government’s problem to fix, not an excuse to deny the public access to records.”
Our letter calls on USAID to immediately rescind its September 2025 Federal Register Notice and take appropriate steps to restore any requests that were improperly closed.
In granting summary judgment for us, the court held that DOE’s attempt to impose a “still interested” requirement conflicted with FOIA’s mandate that agencies make non-exempt federal records “promptly available” and vacated the policy under the APA.
The court also rejected DOE’s attempt to avoid judicial review after the agency agreed to continue processing our requests once litigation began. The ruling recognized that requesters suffer concrete harm when agencies force them to expend additional time and resources merely to preserve requests the government was already legally obligated to process.
USAID and DOE are part of a broader pattern of federal agencies erecting new barriers to public access to government records. We have challenged Trump administration efforts to impose identification requirements, restrict fee waivers and expedited processing, and create new mechanisms for clearing FOIA backlogs by closing requests rather than fulfilling them.
