Note: This article originally appeared July 9, 2026 on Poynter.org and is reprinted with permission.
By: Justin Doud
Karen Harper, a senior politics reporter at The Dallas Morning News with over 30 years of experience, submitted a public records request to the Department of Justice. Months later, she still hadn’t received a response.
Jason Leopold has such a storied history using the Freedom of Information Act that federal agencies once dubbed him a “FOIA terrorist.” Now Bloomberg’s leading public records expert, Leopold submits at least one request a day, and sometimes 30 when a story calls for it.
“There’s always been an average of at least a three-month (waiting period),” Leopold said. “It’s gotten way worse.”
Public records are the backbone of American journalism. From the Pentagon Papers to campaign finance reports to investigations exposing corruption at home and abroad, some of the country’s most consequential reporting has relied on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
But journalists and transparency advocates say the system is buckling. As wait times stretch from months into years and FOIA offices struggle with staffing shortages and growing backlogs, records that belong to the public are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.
Once submitted, requests are added to an already mountainous backlog. An analysis of publicly listed wait times for FOIA requests found that the average “complex request” takes 257 days to process, meaning most information requests take more than two-thirds of a year.
That assessment comes from 328 of the federal government’s 410 individual FOIA offices. Of those, 82 do not list the average wait for a “complex request.” Requests are split into two categories — simple requests, which are defined as “targeted” and narrowed; and complex requests, which are broader and “require additional steps to process.”
Some agencies take far longer. The longest listed average wait stands at 1,941 days — over five years — belonging to the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. However, experts reiterated that those estimates are just averages.
The National Security Archive still has Department of Defense requests pending more than 15 years after they were first filed, all listed simply as “in progress.”
“Now, with even a simple request to the FBI, you won’t see records for a minimum of six months, and they do it by page count. … You will wait years for those records,” Leopold said.
It’s not uncommon for requesters to wait more than a decade.
“The only way to get any information faster is to sue, and you have to have the resources to sue,” said Wendy Valdes, the FOIA coordinator for the National Security Archive, which monitors government secrecy and submits a large number of requests across the federal government. “I get a lot of journalists asking, ‘How can I get this faster?’ And I was like, unless you’re willing to sue, I just don’t know these days.”
For journalists on deadline, those delays can make important records effectively useless.
“It does exactly what the people delaying the information want it to do, which is it makes our job harder, if not, in some cases, impossible,” Harper said of the delays.
The federal government’s National FOIA Portal, which serves as a gateway to the federal government’s 410 individual FOIA offices, did not respond to questions about public records access.
Underfunding — and the ensuing staffing shortages in FOIA offices and archival centers — is a major reason for the backlog, Valdes said.
The National Archives and Records Administration manages the federal government’s records, from State Department files to presidential libraries. According to one estimate, clearing the backlog at just two presidential libraries would take more than 600 years. There are currently 16 libraries.
Adjusted for inflation, NARA’s budget in 2020 was only 7% higher than it was in 1990. Doubling the agency’s budget would cost about 0.002% of the federal budget.
“NARA is completely and utterly overwhelmed,” Valdes said. “They cannot keep up with everything that comes to them.”
Advocates say the staffing picture has become even more difficult under the Trump administration.
“(2025), as far as it relates to FOIA, has been a terrible (year),” Leopold said. “FOIA offices have been decimated. FOIA staff have been fired as part of the purge of government workers. There have been incredibly lengthy delays in terms of getting documents, the level of secrecy has increased.”
Leopold pointed to one example of that increased secrecy: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence removed most of the documents from its online FOIA Reading Room, making many previously released national security records far harder for the public to find.
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