Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Federal Workshop on Negotiating With Requesters Did Not Invite Any Requesters

Justice Department FOIA staff spent two hours in August trading techniques for narrowing the public’s records requests. The public was not on the guest list, and under federal law, declining to narrow can be used against you.

On July 15, the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy posted a notice inviting federal employees to a training session. The subject was requester negotiations. Panelists from several agencies would describe how their negotiation efforts had cut processing times and strengthened their FOIA programs. The session ran on WebEx on August 11, ten to noon. One line near the bottom settled who could listen: registration was for federal employees, and the event was described as open to agency FOIA professionals.

Full disclosure: I file public records requests for a living. Granite State Report has active RSA 91-A disputes with several New Hampshire police departments and with the state Department of Safety, and alongside this article GSR is filing records requests with the Justice Department and the Department of Safety on the subjects covered here. I have skin in this.

The July 15 announcement as it appeared on the Office of Information Policy’s website. Screenshot: Granite State Report, via justice.gov.

So the federal government convened a two-hour seminar on how to negotiate with the public, and the public could not get in the room.

The tempting read is that an agency was scheming to get around a statute. That read is wrong, and it lets the real problem off the hook. Negotiation is written into the Freedom of Information Act. Agencies are required to offer it. The trouble is narrower and worse: Congress attached consequences to only one side of the table, the Justice Department trains only one side of the table, and the last time a records requester sat on one of these panels was nine years ago.

What the law requires

A federal agency has twenty business days to make a determination on a request. If it declares unusual circumstances, it can buy ten more by written notice. If it still cannot finish, the statute obligates it to come back to you and offer a choice: cut the request down so it fits the clock, or agree to a different timetable. Read that far and it looks like a courtesy provision, an agency checking in.

Now read the last sentence of the same clause. A requester’s refusal to reasonably modify the request or agree to an alternative schedule “shall be considered as a factor in determining whether exceptional circumstances exist”. Exceptional circumstances is the finding that lets a federal judge keep your case on the docket and hand the agency more time to finish. Say no to the narrowing offer and you have donated an argument to the other side.

The fee provision cuts deeper. Under the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016, an agency that blows its deadline generally forfeits the right to charge you search fees. There is a carve-out. If the agency declared unusual circumstances and more than 5,000 pages are needed, it can bill you anyway, provided it sent timely notice and discussed with you how to narrow the request. Or made at least three good-faith attempts to discuss it. You never have to pick up the phone. Three unanswered emails are enough to put the meter back on.

None of that is a scandal. It is what Congress wrote, and the logic behind it is sound enough. A requester who demands everything and then refuses to talk really can jam an office. Narrowing often is the fastest road to the documents, and anybody who files these knows a tight request beats a sprawling one. The question was never whether narrowing helps. The question is who gets to define reasonable, and in what room that definition gets built.

Nine years since a requester was in the room

OIP launched the Best Practices Workshop Series in 2014 under the second Open Government National Action Plan. At the start it ran both ways. The October 2014 session took up best practices from the requester’s perspective, with Amy Bennett of OpenTheGovernment.org, Josh Gerstein of Politico, and Elizabeth Hempowicz of the Project On Government Oversight on the panel, and OIP said members of the public could attend. April 2016 ran the same topic with Tom Sussman of the American Bar Association and Sean Moulton of POGO. In June 2017, OIP announced a workshop on agencies and requesters working together, said that one would be open to the public, and put Moulton on the panel.

June 15, 2017 was the last one. Walk the rosters since and every seat belongs to a federal employee: backlogs in 2018, administrative appeals in 2019, technology in 2020, two pandemic sessions in 2021, resource-sharing in 2023, backlog reduction plans in 2024. Now negotiations in 2026, agency panelists, federal registration.

Here is the part that stings. The published takeaways from that June 2017 session, still sitting on OIP’s website, include a bullet telling agencies to “Seek input from requester community” and to reach out to civil society organizations periodically. OIP wrote the advice down, posted it for every agency in the government to read, and then quit taking it.

What the public gets instead

Requesters are not locked out entirely. OIP promises that a summary of each workshop goes up on its Best Practices Workshop Series page. For a closed meeting, that page is the only window in.

I opened it on August 31, twenty days after the session. The most recent workshop listed is July 31, 2024. The page’s own footer says it was last updated June 17, 2025. Nothing from 2025 or 2026 appears anywhere on it. To be fair to OIP, its own history sets the pace: the 2024 recap went up roughly six weeks after that workshop. Lateness is not the charge. The charge is that a set of bullet points, posted whenever it is posted, is the entire public record of a closed meeting about the public’s rights, and that those bullet points are what stands in for a seat at the table.

The numbers behind the pitch

OIP has a strong case that its people are underwater, and it published the figures itself. In fiscal 2025 the executive branch took in 1,707,197 FOIA requests, up 13.7 percent in a single year, and processed a record 1,635,055 of them. Doing it cost an estimated $661 million and occupied 4,823 full-time employees. Roughly seventy-two thousand more requests came in the door than went out of it.

That is a genuine operational crisis and narrowing helps it. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But volume is an argument for public negotiation standards, not against them. When the commodity being rationed is access to the government’s own records, the rationing rules belong in daylight. Right now agencies get a moderator, a panel, and slides. Requesters get a phone call from somebody who attended.

New Hampshire wrote it differently

New Hampshire has a narrowing provision of its own, and the drafting is worth reading side by side with the federal text.

May suggest. No clause converting your refusal into a factor against you. No fee that reattaches because you let three emails sit. In New Hampshire, turning down a narrowing suggestion costs you nothing the statute recognizes. On this one point the Granite State drafted better law than Congress did.

The state’s failure is somewhere else, and it is bigger. RSA 91-A gives an agency five business days to produce the record, deny it in writing, or hand over a written statement of the time reasonably necessary plus an itemized cost estimate. A denial has to name the specific exemption and explain briefly how it applies to the record withheld. Those are real duties in plain language. What New Hampshire no longer has is anyone to enforce them short of a lawsuit. The right-to-know ombudsman’s chair has been empty since Thomas Kehr resigned in July 2025, after lawmakers cut the job to a part-time stipend, and the Secretary of State’s website still carries a standing notice that the office can take no action on any filing until a new ombudsman exists. A federal requester at least has OGIS mediation written into the same statute that created the problem. A Granite Stater has superior court.

Which means New Hampshire has no negotiation procedure worth the name. What it has is whatever a department decides to tell you on day five, with no referee on the field. I have filed enough of these to know the sound of it: an estimate with no completion date, an exemption asserted with no explanation, a per-page copying fee quoted for a file that already exists as a PDF. When the only alternative to accepting a department’s terms is a filing fee and a year of your life, the word negotiation is doing work it has not earned.

Open the door

The federal fix is cheap, obvious, and already precedented by the office that would have to make it. Open the next workshop to the public. Put a requester on the panel, the way OIP did three times between 2014 and 2017. Post the August 11 summary with the panelists named and the techniques described in enough detail that the people on the receiving end can recognize them when they hear them.

An agency that teaches only its own side how to negotiate is not running a training program. It is running a playbook. Publish it, or open the door.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against a primary source, and the time-sensitive claims were re-verified on August 31, 2026; see the fact-check table. Three limits are worth naming. First, the OIP blog page carrying the July 15 notice would not load in full for this newsroom; the screenshot above shows the announcement as it appeared on justice.gov, and the notice’s registration terms are sourced to FOIA Advisor’s verbatim reproduction. Second, OIP was not asked for comment before publication; this piece rests on the statute and on OIP’s own published pages, all linked above, and if OIP responds to the questions it raises, the response will be appended here in full. Third, no source beyond the published record was interviewed for this piece. Alongside this article, Granite State Report is filing records requests with the Justice Department and the New Hampshire Department of Safety seeking the August 11 workshop materials and the agencies’ scope-negotiation policies; what comes back will be reported. Nothing in this article is legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.