FOIA cost $661 million in 2025 and returned $2.5 million

The Freedom of Information Act exists on a simple promise: ask the government for a record, and within twenty working days it has to answer.▸ That promise is now routinely broken. The Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, in its 2025 Annual FOIA Report Summary — the government's own annual accounting of how the law is administered — put the FY2025 backlog of unanswered requests at a record 339,671, up 27% in a single year. The office also reported the machine's price tag: $661,394,858.43 spent government-wide on FOIA in FY2025, against $2,511,193.04 collected back in fees — 0.38 cents recovered per dollar spent.

A request counts as "backlogged" once an agency has held it past the statutory deadline — twenty working days, or thirty if the agency invokes "unusual circumstances."▸ Demand has been climbing for years: agencies received a record 1,707,197 requests in FY2025, a 13.7% jump over FY2024, and processed a record 1,635,055 of them — more than ever before. Processing more requests than ever and still falling further behind is not a contradiction; it is what happens when demand outpaces capacity for five straight years running.

The backlog more than tripled between FY2015 and FY2025, and the two worst years on record are the two most recent: FY2024 (267,056) and FY2025 (339,671).▸ Administrative appeals — a requester's recourse when an agency denies a request — tell the same story at smaller scale but a sharper angle: the appeals backlog hit 11,652 at the end of FY2025, up 116.5% (6,270 more appeals) from 5,382 the year before, even as agencies processed 24.4% more appeals than in FY2024. Volume did not just outrun capacity; it outran capacity that was itself shrinking.

One department accounts for half of it.▸ Of the FY2025 backlog, the report's own breakdown attributes 50% to the Department of Homeland Security alone — roughly 170,000 of the 339,671 backlogged requests, more than every other federal agency combined.

Backlogs grow for one of two reasons: more requests, or fewer people to answer them.▸ FY2025 delivered both at once. Government-wide, 4,823.17 full-time-equivalent FOIA staff administered the law in FY2025 — down from 5,628.46 the year before, a drop of 14.3% in twelve months, and the lowest staffing level since FY2018. Twenty agencies specifically cited loss of staff as a contributing factor to their backlog in their own Chief FOIA Officer reports.

Staffing had grown almost every year since FY2015, peaking at 5,628 in FY2024.▸ The FY2025 drop erased four years of gains in one, landing back below FY2018 levels — while the requests those staff have to answer kept setting records.

None of this is cheap to run, understaffed or not.▸ The government spent an estimated $661.4 million government-wide on FOIA-related activities in FY2025: 92.33% ($610.7 million) on the administrative work of processing requests and appeals, and 7.67% ($50.7 million) on litigation when requesters sue over denials or delays.

Set against that $661.4 million, agencies collected $2,511,193.04 in FOIA fees for the year — the search and duplication charges FOIA law allows agencies to bill some requesters.▸ That is roughly 0.38 cents recovered for every dollar spent, or, worked the other way, about $405 in government cost for each of the 1,635,055 requests processed in FY2025. FOIA fees were never designed to fund the law — Congress waives them by default for journalists and non-commercial requesters — but the gap is a useful measure of what transparency actually costs versus what anyone pays for it: essentially nothing.

All figures are for federal fiscal year 2025 (October 2024–September 2025) as reported by agencies to the Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy and compiled in its 2025 Annual FOIA Report Summary, published July 2, 2026. "Full-time FOIA staff" includes both dedicated FOIA professionals and the pro-rated time of employees who work on FOIA as part of broader duties. Figures cover the executive branch agencies subject to FOIA reporting requirements and do not include Congress, the federal courts, or state and local government records requests, which fall under separate laws.