Trump’s FOIA transparency record reached a historic low in fiscal year 2025, with the federal government granting fewer than half of all requests (the worst approval rate since 2010) even as the volume of those requests climbed to an all-time high of 1,707,197, a 13.7% increase on the prior year, according to the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy.
The administration has presented itself as a champion of openness, gesturing at declassifications on the Kennedy assassination, UFOs, and Jeffrey Epstein. But those headline-grabbing releases have done little to address the quieter erosion of the everyday mechanisms that allow Americans, journalists, and lawyers to scrutinise government activity.
Trump’s FOIA Transparency Record in Numbers
Agencies processed a record 1,635,055 requests in FY 2025, yet the grant rate remained the lowest recorded since 2010. The strain on the system is visible in the appeals data: agencies received 32,059 administrative FOIA appeals during the year, a 59.38% surge over FY 2024, reflecting widespread dissatisfaction with initial decisions.
The administration can point to some counter-metrics. Agencies proactively disclosed 115% more records than in FY 2024, and 91% of requests for expedited processing were decided within 10 calendar days, per the same Office of Information Policy summary. Those figures suggest selective acceleration rather than systemic openness: volume is up, but the proportion of requests actually granted is at a generation-low.
The legal architecture underpinning access rights has been under direct assault. The Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 and substantially strengthened after Watergate by amendments in 1974 and 1976, was most recently updated by the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, which passed unanimously in both chambers before being signed into law on 30 June 2016. That statute codified a presumption of disclosure, imposed a 25-year sunset on the deliberative process privilege under Exemption 5, and created a new Chief FOIA Officer Council within the executive branch. The Trump administration’s conduct sits in direct tension with each of those reforms.
In April 2026, the Department of Justice released a memo arguing that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 is unconstitutional on the grounds that it infringes executive branch powers. The White House simultaneously issued rules making it easier for staff to delete communications. A joint lawsuit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the American Historical Association produced an injunction from Judge John D. Bates cancelling those rules, but the underlying litigation continues.
Signal Chats, Shell Games, and the Paper Trail
The administration’s approach to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) illustrated the same two-track strategy. Elon Musk had promised on the campaign trail that all government data should be ‘default public.’ In practice, the White House argued that DOGE fell under the Presidential Records Act and was therefore exempt from FOIA until after the administration left office, precisely the statute the Justice Department was simultaneously arguing should be struck down.
CREW filed a FOIA request on 24 January 2025 seeking, among other things, communications involving DOGE administrator Amy Gleason, then went to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia within weeks. In case number 1:2025cv00511, Judge Christopher R. Cooper issued a memorandum opinion on 10 March 2025, ordering the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. DOGE Service to begin producing documents on a rolling basis and to preserve all potentially responsive records, while declining to set a fixed production deadline.
DOGE then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. On 6 June 2025, the Court granted DOGE’s application for a stay, with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor dissenting, according to SCOTUSblog. The effect was to pause the disclosure obligations pending further proceedings. As CREW argued before the Court, pausing production while the underlying dispute runs its course means records may be altered or lost before any requester can inspect them.
The encrypted messaging episode underscored that risk. When then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group discussing planned strikes on Houthi forces in Yemen, Judge James Boasberg ordered preservation of the chat. He later concluded, however, that the court could provide no redress for messages already deleted before his order. Trump’s own lawyers, arguing against the Presidential Records Act, effectively invited a world in which that outcome becomes the norm: a president who designates records ‘personal’ at the moment of departure leaves no archive for courts, journalists, or historians to inspect.
The Supreme Court’s stay in the DOGE case is the next procedural flashpoint. If the Court ultimately rules that DOGE’s records are shielded until the administration ends, it will establish a template for insulating any advisory body from contemporaneous FOIA scrutiny, a precedent that would survive well beyond this administration’s tenure.
