Members of the FOIA Advisory Committee voted to approve seven recommendations at their June 11, 2026, meeting. The seven recommendations came from the three subcommittees: Implementation, Statutory Reform, and Volume and Frequency and are:
- Recommendation No. 2026-05: Federal agencies should align standard staffing levels and technological resources to meet the increasing levels of FOIA requests by analyzing existing backlogs, the volume and complexity of requests, and the workload assigned to employees. Specifically, agencies should consider the total work that includes requests and backlog and the capacity for employees to respond to these requests.
- Recommendation No. 2026-06: To increase collaboration and connection among federal agency FOIA professionals, the Chief FOIA Officers Council’s Committee on Cross-Agency Collaboration and Innovation’s (COCACI) Resources Working Group, assisted by the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) and the Office of Information Policy (OIP), as appropriate, should establish a process for creating and maintaining small, self-governing cohorts of federal FOIA professionals interested in collaboration, support, and sharing of best practices.
- Recommendation No. 2026-07: In an effort to increase the awareness and adoption of FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations, the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy should require status reporting from agencies on implementation of recommendations, either through questions in annual Chief FOIA Officer Reports or through another appropriate publicly available reporting mechanism.
- Recommendation No. 2026-08: To make recommendations more useful to agency FOIA professionals, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) should create a resource for agency use presenting FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations in an easy-to-access manner, enabling FOIA professionals to quickly identify actionable improvements to their FOIA programs.
- Recommendation No. 2026-09: We recommend that Congress create a new “FOIA Court” with specialized jurisdiction over FOIA claims.
- Recommendation No. 2026-10: Congress should amend FOIA’s judicial-review provision in two ways:
1) To reaffirm the statute’s de novo standard; and
2) To specify the remedial authority of the courts, including the power to order an agency to comply with its affirmative-disclosure obligations, provided that a requester has exhausted administrative remedies prior to filing suit.
- Recommendation No. 2026-11: Congress should allocate funding to commission a feasibility study to examine the costs and benefits of improving the FOIA support infrastructure to better serve taxpayers, records requesters and public agencies.
Note: Recommendation 2026-10 was edited during the Advisory Committee meeting to remove the following sentence “To reinforce that, for purposes of FOIA claims, a complainant’s injury-in-fact stems from an agency’s failure to comply with the statute.”
If you wish to submit a written public comment about any of these recommendations, please visit this webpage for a link to the comments form and to read our posting policy.
These seven approved recommendations bring the total to 11 passed by this term of the Committee, which ends its work in July. If you wish to watch the June 11, 2026, Committee meeting, you may do so on the National Archives YouTube channel.
The final meeting of the 2024-2026 FOIA Advisory Committee will be on Thursday, July 16, at 10:00 a.m. ET during which the Committee will present its final report which will be sent to the Acting Archivist of the United States. Registration is available at: www.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_DVjl0DkwT96otgBjXQ9VTQ#/registration
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