The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This will result in the improper closure of likely thousands of FOIA requests if not more; government transparency experts told 404 Media that the move is insane, ludicrous, a Pandoras Box, and an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible.The DOE notice says requesters who submitted a FOIA request to DOE HQ at any time prior to October 1, 2024 (FY25), that is still open and is not under active litigation with DOE (or another Federal agency) shall email StillInterestedFOIA@hq.doe.gov to continue processing of the FOIA request [] If DOE HQ does not receive a response from requesters within the 30-day time-period with a DOE control number, no further action will be taken on the open FOIA request(s), and the file may be administratively closed. A note at the top of the notice says it is scheduled to be formally published in the Federal Register on Thursday.The agency will send out what are known as still interested letters, which federal agencies have used over the years to see if a requester wants to withdraw their request after a certain period of inactivity. These types of letters are controversial and perhaps not legal, and previous administrations have said that they should be used rarely and that requests should only be closed after an agency made multiple attempts to contact a requester over multiple methods of communication. What the DOE is doing now is sending these letters to submitters of all requests prior to October 1, 2024, which is not really that long ago; it also said it will close the requests of people who do not respond in a specific way to a specific email address.FOIA requestsespecially complicated onescan often take months or years to process. I have outstanding FOIA requests with numerous federal agencies that I filed years ago, and am still interested in getting back, and I have gotten useful documents from federal agencies after years of waiting. The notion that large numbers of people who filed FOIA requests as recently as September 2024, which is less than a year ago, are suddenly uninterested in getting the documents they requested is absurd and should be seen as an attack on public transparency, experts told 404 Media. The DOEs own reports show that it often does not respond to FOIA requests within a year, and, of course, a backlog exists in part because agencies are not terribly responsive to FOIA.If a requester proactively reaches out and says I am withdrawing my request, then no problem, they dont have to process it, Adam Marshall, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. The agency cant say weve decided weve gotten a lot of requests and we dont want to do them so were throwing them out.I was pretty shocked when I saw this to be honest, Marshall added. Ive never seen anything like this in 10 years of doing FOIA work, and its egregious for a few reasons. I dont think agencies have the authority to close a FOIA request if they dont get a response to a still interested letter. The statute doesnt provide for that authority, and the amount of time the agency is giving people to respond30 daysit sounds like a long time but if you happen to miss that email or arent digging through your backlogs, its not a lot of time. The notion that FOIA requesters should keep an eye out in the Federal Register for this kind of notice is ludicrous.The DOE notice essentially claims that the agency believes it gets too many FOIA requests and doesnt feel like answering them. DOEs incoming FOIA requests have more than tripled in the past four years, with over 4,000 requests received in FY24, and an expected 5,000 or more requests in FY25. DOE has limited resources to process the burgeoning number of FOIA requests, the notice says. Therefore, DOE is undertaking this endeavor as an attempt to free up government resources to better serve the American people and focus its efforts on more efficiently connecting the citizenry with the work of its government.Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Institute told me in an email that she also has not seen any sort of precedent for this and that it is an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly, and it should be challenged in court. (On that note, I am filing a FOIA request about this proposal.)The use of still interested letters isn't explicitly allowed in the FOIA statute at all, and, as far as I know, there is absolutely zero case law that would support the department sending a mass still interested letter via the federal register, she added. That they are also sending emails is not a saving grace; these types of letters are supposed to be used sparinglynot as a flagrant attempt to reduce their backlog by any means necessary. I also worry it will open a Pandora's Boxif other agencies see this, some are sure to follow.Marshall said that FOIA response times have been getting worse for years across multiple administrations (which has also been my experience). The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have cut a large number of jobs in many agencies across the government, which may have further degraded response times. But until this, there hadnt been major proactive attempts taken by the self-defined most transparent administration in history to destroy FOIA.This is of a different nature than what we have seen so far, this affirmative, large-scale effort to purport to cancel a large number of pending FOIA requests, Marshall said.