A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has blocked a Department of Energy policy that threatened to wipe out thousands of pending public records requests unless the people who filed them jumped through a new bureaucratic hoop within 30 days. The policy required anyone who had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request before October 1, 2024, to email a dedicated inbox with their specific control number confirming they still wanted the records, or see their request automatically closed. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled the policy unlawful, siding with the government watchdog group that sued to stop it.
Judge Jackson issued her memorandum opinion on Tuesday in American Oversight v. U.S. Department of Energy, granting summary judgment to American Oversight and vacating the DOE policy under the Administrative Procedure Act, according to Justia Law. The court confirmed American Oversight had legal standing to challenge the rule, dismissed DOE's argument that the lawsuit was moot, and held that the policy directly conflicted with FOIA. As Tampa Free Press reported, the court also ruled that agencies cannot dodge judicial review by temporarily pausing a policy for a single plaintiff while keeping it legally intact for everyone else.
Chioma Chukwu, a leader at American Oversight, said the ruling amounted to a victory for transparency, accountability and the public's right to know. “FOIA exists to ensure public access to the truth rather than give agencies ways to bury it,” Chukwu said, according to the Tampa Free Press report. Chukwu added that the policy could have become a blueprint for agencies to evade FOIA obligations by shifting burdens onto requesters.
Why the Energy Department Wanted a Reset
DOE had defended the policy in an August 2025 Federal Register notice, telling the public that incoming FOIA requests had more than tripled over four years, climbing past 4,000 in fiscal year 2024 with an expected 5,000 in fiscal year 2025. The agency blamed automated bots and what it called vexatious requesters for the processing bottleneck, according to the Federal Register. Under the rule, anyone with a request filed before October 1, 2024 had just 30 days to email [email protected] with their control number or lose their place in line entirely.
That approach broke sharply from existing federal guidance. Department of Justice Office of Information Policy guidance updated in 2021 directs agencies that so-called still-interested inquiries must rest on reasonable grounds and give requesters at least 30 working days to respond, discouraging blanket purges of entire backlogs. American Oversight filed its lawsuit on September 3, 2025, arguing across three counts that DOE acted in excess of its statutory authority, skipped mandatory notice-and-comment procedures, and failed to engage in reasoned decision-making, according to American Oversight. The group alleged the policy simply transferred the burden of the agency's own delay onto the members of the public seeking government records.
Opposition Piled Up Before the Ruling
The pushback wasn't limited to American Oversight. A coalition of open-government organizations led by the Project On Government Oversight submitted formal comments to the Justice Department on September 12, 2025, warning that DOE's policy illegally shifted the burden of government delay onto citizens seeking public records, according to the Project On Government Oversight. The National Security Archive separately reported in March that the policy threatened 93 of its own pending requests, some less than two years old and others pending for more than a decade, illustrating how DOE's own processing delays had built up the very backlog it was trying to erase.
The court's decision rejected government arguments that FOIA permits agencies to impose extra procedural conditions simply because of backlogs or delayed processing, and it ruled that DOE exceeded the authority granted to it by Congress. That finding tracks the statutory language in FOIA itself, which under 5 U.S.C. § 552 requires agencies to determine whether to comply with a request within 20 working days and to make non-exempt records promptly available, with no exemption allowing administrative closure due to backlogs, according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute.
A Backlog That Isn't Going Away
The ruling doesn't erase the underlying strain on DOE's FOIA operation. The agency's own 2026 Chief FOIA Officer Report acknowledged that 20 percent of its FOIA professionals had not received substantive FOIA training, a gap that compounded backlogs alongside heavy reliance on third-party contractors, per the National Security Archive's reporting. That internal strain mirrors a nationwide surge in records requests: Justice Department data published on FOIA.gov in May showed federal agencies received a record 1,707,197 FOIA requests in fiscal year 2025 and processed 1,635,055 of them, leaving a nationwide backlog of 463,541 pending requests, according to MuckRock.
It remains unclear whether DOE will appeal Judge Jackson's ruling to the D.C. Circuit, and the agency has not laid out how it intends to work through its remaining request queue while staying within FOIA's statutory timelines. For now, the requesters who spent the past year facing the threat of losing years-old records requests over a missed email deadline can keep their place in line.
