These days, the life cycle of a Freedom of Information Act request goes something like this: submit the request, wait and watch the 20-business-day deadline for an agency to respond pass. Wait some more, and more, and then some more.

Sometimes, a FOIA officer sends a clarifying question. Either nothing more comes of it, or the released records are rife with redactions. Attempts to appeal result in more delays, leaving one more option: to sue.

Legally public information from the government is becoming harder to access. The Department of Energy reported 2,277 backlogged FOIA requests — or requests that are still open past the legally required response time — at the end of fiscal year 2025; by comparison, the agency reported 1,629 backlogged requests at the end of fiscal year 2024.

The Department of Defense reported a 20% increase in pending requests and a 42% increase in backlogged requests between the end of fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The State Department’s backlog, meanwhile, grew from more than 21,000 requests at the end of fiscal year 2024 to more than 27,000 requests at the end of fiscal year 2025.

A dozen experts, ranging from former federal employees who worked in FOIA offices to lawyers that litigate FOIA cases, told NOTUS that the Trump administration is categorically worse at complying with the transparency law.

They attributed it to political pressure from the White House and the administration’s decision to slash the federal workforce — including many of the staff that handled information requests.

“While no executive branch handles its responsibilities under FOIA well, they are much more profoundly problematic than they were under the previous administration,” Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told NOTUS. “I would give the Biden administration a D on FOIA compliance. I would obviously give this administration, like, an F-triple-minus.”

Every step of the FOIA process now is like a “tooth-pulling exercise,” he added.

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When Hartl and his team at the Center for Biological Diversity filed a FOIA request for calendar information regarding a Trump political appointee to the Office of Management and Budget, the agency said it would take three to five years to complete the request.

“The only reason that something like that would take so long is a very conscious decision to slow-walk what they thought might be sensitive,” Hartl told NOTUS.

Incidents of political pressure impacting the FOIA process and the staff behind it have been well documented.

A whistleblower revealed last year that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ FOIA office was increasingly rejecting or throwing out people’s requests for information about the status of their own immigration proceedings.

At least three employees in Customs and Border Protection’s FOIA office, including the director, were fired after one objected to an effort to mislabel completed assessments as draft documents — a move that would have allowed the federal government to claim an exemption and avoid releasing the records, Wired reported last month.

Two employees in the FOIA office for the director of national intelligence were fired for releasing a declassified memo showing widespread consensus in the intelligence community that the Trump administration’s claims about gang activity in Venezuela were incorrect.

“It is impossible to look at that as anything other than inappropriate retaliation for a lawful FOIA release,” Lauren Harper, who chairs the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which had requested the memo, told NOTUS.

An ODNI official said in a statement to NOTUS that the agency cannot answer questions about personnel decisions, and added that “the proper agency procedure usually followed to release FOIAs was not followed” with the Venezuela memo.

“There was no ‘political pressure’ involved,” the official said.

Every administration ensures there’s political approval for FOIA processing, “but this level of retaliation against employees, the culture of fear within agencies … is unique and it has real impacts on FOIA,” said Ginger Quintero-McCall, who co-founded the public-interest law firm Free Information Group and worked in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s FOIA office until last year.

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The Trump administration targeted high-level information officers from the get-go. Trump fired Bobak Talebian, who ran the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy, two months into taking office. Talebian led the team that developed guidance for every other federal agency on complying with FOIA.

Colleen Shogan, who served as the archivist of the United States, was fired in February 2025. Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the acting archivist, but Rubio has since departed the role to comply with federal vacancy rules.

A White House spokesperson directed NOTUS to individual agencies in response to a request for comment.

At the staff level, agencies have seen deep cuts to their FOIA staff as part of DOGE-driven workforce reductions. The Trump administration has used that lack of staff to justify its delays.

“When we file a lawsuit, the Department of Justice is coming back saying, you know, ‘Sorry, there’s a lot of turnover currently among the agency, and I’m not going to be able to get you answers right away,’” Scott Amey at the Project for Government Oversight said of some of the FOIA cases his organization has filed.

The Washington Post reported last month that in at least 26 cases, court filings by agencies have drawn a direct line between the reductions in force last year, as well as other staffing cuts by the administration, and diminished FOIA-response abilities.

Some of the most severe FOIA staffing cuts have been at the Department of Education, which reported losing more than half of its full-time FOIA staff between fiscal years 2024 and 2025. But the issue is widespread.

Ann Brown, the open government coordinator at the Center for Biological Diversity, told NOTUS the organization learned through court filings that the Bureau of Land Management’s Arizona division only has one person handling all FOIA requests.

Raul Pinto, the deputy legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council, said his organization learned through court records that the FOIA office at the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which conducts removal proceedings and adjudicates immigration case appeals, was down to just two employees at one point.

“It really is a good microcosm of how this administration has deprioritized transparency,” Pinto said.

To address a backlog in cases, the Energy Department announced in August that it would automatically close all pending FOIA requests filed before October 2024 unless the people who filed those requests emailed the agency and said they wanted to keep the requests open. It was the first time an agency announced that type of policy.

Kevin Bell, a partner at the Free Information Group, who formerly worked at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said FOIA employees across the federal government have told him they “feel like they’re drowning” because of increasing requests and falling staff numbers.

It’s a far cry from a decade ago, when agencies touted their high processing rates, dwindling backlog numbers and efforts to hire more staff to speed up responses.

In other parts of the federal government, watchdogs have noted that the administration is appointing people who were previously involved in efforts to flood the federal government with “vexatious” records requests to now lead the same offices they once targeted.

Among those appointees is Roman Jankowski, who has served as the chief FOIA officer of the Department of Homeland Security since the first day of Trump’s term. Before taking that role, Jankowski was part of a group of Heritage Foundation employees who submitted thousands of FOIA requests to federal agencies in an effort to root out Biden-era government employees who discussed climate change, diversity, sexual orientation and gender.

FOIA experts said that effort “purposely” overwhelmed the government’s FOIA infrastructure.

“It basically is putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” Quintero-McCall said.

“We hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process,” a spokesperson for DHS said in response to a question from NOTUS about whether the department considered Jankowski’s history when hiring him.

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Agencies were required by law to report how many FOIA requests they received in fiscal year 2025 and how they handled those requests by March 1. Several still haven’t published annual reports as of late April.

Among them are the Department of Homeland Security, one of the agencies most affected by reductions in force and political-review processes according to multiple sources that NOTUS spoke to, and the Office of Management and Budget. OMB did not respond to NOTUS’ requests for the reports or to questions about why they are delayed.

A spokesperson for DHS said in a statement to NOTUS that “the delay in the annual DHS FOIA report is thanks to the TWO Democrat shutdowns.”

Some agencies published the annual reports after the deadline, but they are not accessible through the Office of Information Policy’s site, the main database for information about FOIA compliance. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, published its report on March 27 in its agency FOIA library, and the Justice Department published its report on April 22 on a subpage of its website.

There are few ways to enforce the government’s compliance and transparency. Many open-government advocates want Congress to create long-term, sustainable change. But there’s little appetite among lawmakers to take up FOIA reforms, like those to tighten exemptions and prevent over-redacting.

“Every time this comes up for a vote, Congress has a very important hearing, and in that hearing, they bring in the head of OMB, the head of OIP, the head of some other agency, and say, ‘How are y’all doing?’ And they say, ‘Great!’ And they go, ‘Meeting adjourned,’” said Kel McClanahan, the executive director of the law firm National Security Counselors.

Instead, journalists and groups are left to sue. (NOTUS has sued the federal government for withholding USAID records.) A review of federal court dockets showed that parties have filed more than 1,000 FOIA-related lawsuits between Jan. 20, 2026 — the first day of Trump’s second term — and this week. Comparatively, the same federal court dockets show just 591 FOIA-related lawsuits filed in the same 15-month time period during former President Joe Biden’s time in office. The actual number of lawsuits under both administrations is almost certainly higher.

Some of the groups and requestors that have sued over slow or incomplete records releases have seen success.

But even more cases are still making their way through the courts. NOTUS reviewed a handful of FOIA-related lawsuits and found that increasingly, open-government groups and other advocacy organizations have sued the federal government simply for failing to acknowledge receipt of a request in the legally required timeframe, rather than denying records or releasing improper records.

FOIA lawyers say there’s no other choice.

“The only realistic way to get records, especially if they’re sensitive, is through litigation. That makes FOIA, in its current iteration, inherently antidemocratic,” Harper, with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said.