## Facts

- The U.S. Department of State used a longstanding FOIA search policy setting a “date-of-request cut-off,” generally declining to search for records created after the date of the requester’s letter.
- The Department’s FOIA acknowledgment letters informed requesters that the cut-off date was the date of the request letter and that later-originating documents would not be retrieved.
- During FOIA processing, the Department determined which offices, posts, or records systems were likely to have responsive records and then “tasked” those components to search.
- Public Citizen submitted FOIA requests for various State Department records, and the Department applied the date-of-request cut-off to limit the search.
- Public Citizen challenged the policy’s legality under the APA (for lack of notice-and-comment rulemaking) and its reasonableness under FOIA, and also disputed certain withholdings under FOIA Exemption 1.

## Issues

1. Whether the date-of-request cut-off policy was a procedural rule exempt from APA notice-and-comment requirements or a substantive rule requiring notice and comment.
2. Whether the date-of-request cut-off was a reasonable temporal limitation on a FOIA search, both generally and as applied to Public Citizen’s requests.
3. Whether the Department properly withheld information under FOIA Exemption 1 (national security).

## Decision

- The court affirmed summary judgment for the Department on the APA claim, holding the cut-off policy was a rule of agency organization, procedure, or practice exempt from notice-and-comment.
- The court reversed the district court’s approval of the cut-off policy under FOIA, holding the date-of-request cut-off was unreasonable both facially and as applied.
- The court affirmed the Department’s Exemption 1 withholdings, concluding the agency’s declarations sufficiently supported national security classification and Public Citizen showed no bad faith.
- The case was remanded for further proceedings consistent with the ruling that the Department must use a more reasonable temporal cut-off.

## Legal Principles

- APA notice-and-comment is not required for agency rules governing internal processing that do not change substantive standards; such rules may qualify as “rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice.”
- FOIA requires agencies to conduct searches “reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents”; an agency may use a temporal cut-off, but the chosen cut-off must be reasonable.
- General claims of administrative burden are insufficient to justify a restrictive FOIA search limitation without concrete, detailed substantiation, particularly where the limitation forces requesters to file duplicative requests to obtain later-created responsive records.
- Courts may uphold a more tailored, administrable alternative cut-off (e.g., tied to an internal processing milestone such as the date components are identified and tasked) when it better aligns with FOIA’s reasonable-search obligation.
- In national security FOIA disputes under Exemption 1, courts generally defer to sufficiently specific, nonconclusory agency declarations absent evidence of bad faith or improper classification.

## Conclusion

The D.C. Circuit held the State Department’s date-of-request cut-off was an APA-exempt procedural rule but an unreasonable FOIA search limitation, requiring a more reasonable temporal cut-off on remand while sustaining the Department’s national security withholdings under Exemption 1.


Public Citizen v. Dep’t of State, 276 F.3d 634 (D.C. Cir. 2002)